Psychic Liberation presents “Friendly CSA Compilations Parts 1 & 2”. A compilation in two parts consisting of artists orbiting the PL canon from around the world in an effort to raise funds for Roots Unbound Friendly CSA.

Roots Unbound (RU) is an abolitionist grassroots organization based in Brooklyn offering nature-based programming centered around food justice, therapeutic horticulture and ecological disinvestment to people in the NYC area with a focus on supporting and uplifting people impacted by the carceral system.

Friendly CSA is a cooperative, agricultural initiative that was mobilized to respond to the food apartheid within New York jails and prisons. Roots Unbound sends care packages of harvested produce that are
chosen by incarcerated folks via a newsletter sent out every month, by growing and collaborating with local New York City land stewards. This CSA is provided at no cost to the recipients, funds raised for this CSA will be used towards packaging, postage, printed materials for newsletters, and a P.O. box.

To find out more information and donate further :
rootsunbound.org

opencollective.com/rootsunbound/donate

releases May 7, 2021

Mastering : Glyn Maier
Image :Nick Klein
Layout : RJM Vanderheyden

Friendly CSA Compilation Part 2

BUY/DONATE

ISABELLA - 98

Holding the tension of opposites is a theme running throughout the work of Angelo Harmsworth, and the six pieces comprising Vent are certainly no exception. Inspired by the different and oftentimes clashing forces comprising our weather systems, the New Mexico-born but now Berlin-based musician and producer envisioned his “compositions as micro-ecologies,” wherein “powerful waves push off one another.” The patterns emerging from this captivating music represent some of Harmsworth’s most complex to date. Swells of foreboding frequencies and jarring maximalist textures may bear down on listeners, yet an undercurrent of bliss–so deeply submerged it borders on the subliminal–manages to infuse even the most tumultuous moments of Vent with a calming groundedness.


And also like the climate, especially in the age of the Anthropocene, this cassette unfolds in ways that are profoundly unpredictable. An artist known for his ability to span the divides separating underground noise, sound design, ambient and industrial, Harmsworth ensures that each successive piece makes a radical break from what preceded it. This quality becomes particularly apparent when contrasting sides. The nearly harsh-noise, distortion-charged moments punctuating Side A are nowhere to be found on Side B, which reveals moments of vast, spectral beauty that reflect his roots in the desert landscapes of the American Southwest.


Of course, this kind of sonic breadth only comes with experience, of which Harmsworth has plenty. Steadily recording and releasing experimental music since the early 2010s, he has worked with some of the sub-underground’s stand-out imprints, including Angoisse, Bathetic Records, Total Black, and Opal Tapes. Placed in the context of his impressive catalog, Vent can be seen as both a continuation of what came before and a bold new development.



Angelo Harmsworth is a musician & sound artist whose works tends to fluctuate between austerity and decadence. Currently based in Germany, he has been published by a network of experimental labels in addition to his own imprint, Lime Lodge.

releases July 26, 2022

Recorded by Angelo Harmsworth
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Artwork by Angelo Harmsworth
Design by RJM Vanderheyden
Text by Justin Farrar

VENT

ENXPL15- ANGELO HARMSWORTH - A1. AEROSOL

You couldn’t be blamed for expecting the first music release by Cem Dukkha to be a raw rave soundtrack for orgiastic dancefloors. After all, the co-founder of Herrensauna—a stalwart reprieve from Berlin’s normified dance scene—has carved unique apertures for the global, queer electronic underground. But Music for Spaces is far from the club-ready productions that he and his party spins for freaks looking for catharsis. These are delicate, vertiginous works of sound art that wilt when touched.

Far from tunes or tracks, the three pieces on Music for Spaces are more like sculptures, set in sparse fields of slow-growth eeriness. Indiscernible sonic creatures scurry past. The works were conceived for various performances and exhibitions by Cem’s partner Mauro Ventura; to create them, Cem relished the squeezing of simple sounds into a palette of textures and the occasional motif: Manipulated guitar, scant pianos, field recordings, and rococo orchestral arrangements converge into environments that literally evolve with every listen.

Though Cem loves the craft that has catapulted him through the international underground, he worries that DJing is sometimes more akin to the service industry than the arts. “This is a new way of expressing myself that isn’t through DJing,” Cem says. “Making music is much more vulnerable and personal.” Born to Turkish parents in Vienna, Austria, Cem (pronounced like “gem”) grew up playing in punk and black metal bands. When the pandemic hit, Cem found himself wanting to integrate all the tools he’d acquired along his musical journey, while shedding the DJ’s function as a clock for good times.

The effects of Music for Spaces on the listener range from disaffected ennui to ecstatic contemplation, but there is a mix of human and nonhuman on this CD that blurs such distinctions. Shimmers, gurgles, other-dimensional buzzings—this music is bizarre and untranslatable to any dancefloor we can currently imagine. But perhaps it’s time we do.

MUSIC FOR SPACES

PURCHA$E

PLIB030 - CEM - 1. FORMA WAITING ROOM (SNIPPET)

Guixine, pronounced gwisin, is a Korean folkloric ghost that haunts the living world out of spite. On the debut album by Guixine for Psychic Liberation, Woodland Fantasies, Guixine haunts through fifteen tracks of pressurized techno with deceptively complex minimalist gestures. Woodland Fantasies is rooted in a scene of narrative dichotomy for Guixine, wherein the forest exists as a “resting place for aspirations” while also the setting for an eroto-charged male getaway. Throbbing psychedelia pulsates through the album, soundtracking Guixine’s hedonistically inclined character, K. K embarks on layers of sexual viscerality in the tactile and relational, transcending the material sexual escapades of the group sex meet-ups in the forest environment towards a chemically vesseled psycho-spiritual realm. Negotiating K’s anti-climactic post sex purge with nymphs and forest characters, the emptying out of K elicits a portal of stripping away the inner burdens. K’s catharsis is only an entry point to their fevered experience, as K holds clutches a gay pornography magazine in the back of a van they enter  deeper and more difficult to ascertain “void”. We, the listeners, are left on a cliffhanger around K’s fate.
On Woodland Fantasies, Guixine gives you a long-form meditation on pointed rhythm efficacy through pressurized clicks and boiling bass curves. Composed entirely using the FM 8 VST, the longform release feels something like a peak Raster-Noton album, or Sigha’s “Purification Loops” through a Mika Vainio lens. Recorded during what the anonymously guarded Guixine recalls as their “worst depression of January 2022”, the album accentuates a winter isolationist sonic makeup, yet cleverly mixed for a louder and more sociable potential. Guixine’s anecdotal woodland fantasy sets a tone for a headier listener's evening nature stroll towards a night of unprecedented indulgences and potential. Full pressure and full volume applied, the walk towards the titillating unknown is enveloped by Guixine’s psycho-psychedelic-eroto journey.

Woodland Fantasies

PURCHASE

GUIXINE - Nobody can see us here (PLIB031)

Eleftheria is the Berlin based DJ that has been participating in a majority of the PL nights between various venues. Her selections are very contemporaneous, both functional and challenging, ultimately very refreshing for the ears. Eleftheria is building a fantastic momentum around her DJ practice, and PL is excited to chronicle another chapter in her path. 

https://soundcloud.com/eleftheria000

PL MIX - ELEFTHERIA

PL comrade @gialligari is the latest in the PL mix series. A wild ride from one of our favorite international selectors.

Daria Sokolova/ gialligari emerged in Kyiv underground scene initially associated with her varied-style selections of dark and experimental music on 20ft radio. Influenced by artists like Coil, Cabaret Voltaire, and Skinny Puppy her rhythmic concepts cycle through a diversity of genres from noisy industrial and techno to breakcore and gabber. Broken beats and enhanced emotional crossroads wrapped in invisible melodicism are some things to look forward to in her rule-denying sets.

https://soundcloud.com/gialligari

PL MIX - GIALLIGARI

With 𝑽𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒄𝒕, exael’s offering to the ENXPL series, the artist furthers their exploration of what they refer to as “the jester’s gaze”, wherein a variable array of emotions of the fool are less than obvious to decode. In this emotively charged interzonal reflection point, exael probes these psychedelic anxieties through eight varying tracks of accomplished electronic music production. Excavating the root role of the jester and it’s cosmic objecthood, exael takes on a synchronous identity; human and computer, jester and virus, superimposed. Far from a glistening ambient escapism, or sentimental shoegaze meditations, or obligatory club tropes, exael has created a sonic terrain unique to their own narrative and positionality as an artist. Side A of 𝑽𝒂𝒏𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝑨𝒄𝒕 showcases exael’s comfort in fast tempo constructions, while the B side offers slower tempoed ventures with guest vocal duties by writer Zoe Darsee moving between trip-hop and industrial affectations.

exael is an alias of Naemi, an artist residing in Berlin. Their work under this moniker aims to upend elements of divergent sonic aesthetics and musical styles, reassembling them with the intent to create diffuse, mulitfunctional contexts. Utilizing exael as an avatar, Naemi attempts to access a collective subconscious via their own, externally processing the sounds and images that permeate contemporary life. Thus, highlighting the ways in which people merge and re-combine with culture on a molecular level as a result of this near-constant immersion. They present stimulating, lysergic sounds in an organic and explorative manner instead of the sometimes exhausting vibe of highly-calculated, experimental club music. 
credits
releases August 27, 2023

All production exael
Audio finalized by Glyn Maier
Design by RJM Vanderheyden

VANISHING ACT

ENXPL18 - EXAEL - B1 Desire Is A Glitch (with Zoe Darsee)

The manifold artistic roles of Lisbon Portugal-based usof - producer, DJ, label-runner, visual artist - matches his multifaceted audio output. usof has been at the forefront of the accelerating expansion of "ambient" into an increasingly liminal space, twisting and morphing the genre origins of meditative and background music into unsettling, fantastically detailed compositions. ENXPL is proud to present 𝑾𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝑾𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑵𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒓, usof's latest album, which draws from 20th century composition, dub soundsystems, 1990s club/rave culture, cinematic sound design, post-cybernetic dreams, and the hauntological ache underlying much of 21st century discourse.

Between the exacting technicality and heady conceptual underpinnings of 𝑾𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝑾𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑵𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒓, usof also makes room for playfulness and humor. On 𝘉𝘳𝘢𝘵, electronic gurgles and croaks converse above synth pads which would not be out of place on cassettes with titles like "Dolphin Magic" or "The Fairy Ring" that litter dusty corners of thrift stores. The dub bass theatrics on the title track are inflated to an absurd degree. These excursions from more formal and contemplative ambiances demonstrate usof's fully-realized world building skills. While 𝑾𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒀𝒐𝒖 𝑾𝒆𝒓𝒆 𝑵𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒓 may seem brief at approximately 30 minutes, its breadth and depth invite many listenings.

"listening to yourself between kid and future point ideas,
that evolution that obsessive always me

lmaooo looking back on the passing of time, family, friends,
when it was already sometimes good but somehow

when you, us, them, we, where, were, you when we bridged

feeling already like you might be making what I’m thinking" - Seán Being

WISH YOU WERE NICER

ENXPL19 - USOF - B2. Goodbye Forever

Jiyoung Wi is a multi-faceted artist from Seoul, Korea currently residing in The Hague, Netherlands. Jiyoung’s work can be situated within fictional literature, improvised music, field recording, and is interested in juxtaposing or disjointing these fields of practice through her sonic and literary methodologies. Jiyoung’s debut album 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔, is a concise body of work that punctuates a beginning point to her work within the 12” LP format. The recording serves as one of the two releases concluding the three year sonic endeavor that is the ENXPL (Enmossed X Psychic Liberation) series. Having previously released recordings on compilations for labels like Mirae Arts, Eastern Nurseries, and Psychic Liberation, here Jiyoung hones a cinematic-like structure that exemplifies the biome within her craft. While presently Jiyoung is performing the systematic dismantling of a violin in her live improvisations paired with approachable boutique synthesizers, 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔 is a pairing of the inimitable Korg MS-20 and field recordings staged or captured by Jiyoung in Seoul and Busan, South Korea.

With three scenes per side, Jiyoung walks us through different geographical and spatial intimacies. Public spaces and intimate conversations are obscured and reconstructed.
Glass elevators, an unknown hotel lobby piano recital, office toilet rants, window side night bus travels, and multiple languages interplay with staged and unstaged conversations to transmogrify themselves into a world of Jiyoung’s view. Money, sex, relationships, and cultural parameters are at once idiosyncratic as well as disorientingly familiar to the listener.

As an extension of the series coined by Jiyoung as “Sound Fiction”, the album feels crisp, pressurized, and at times funny, at other times melancholic. As language, space, and viewing perspective shift, Jiyoung’s succinct album invites the listener to an aural world uniquely of her own viewpoint. While collecting source material relying on the outside world (conversations, elders, the closing track featuring Sungeun Lee), we have a listening experience that deeply illustrates Jiyoung’s perspective. The disjointed experience of someone maneuvering internationally to further develop a practice is encapsulated brilliantly here by Jiyoung with 𝑨𝒄𝒄𝒆𝒑𝒕 𝑨𝒍𝒍 𝑪𝒐𝒐𝒌𝒊𝒆𝒔. Alongside Makoto Oshiro’s 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒆𝒅, it is a perfect bookend to the ENXPL series.

Jiyoung Wi is a writer and musician based in Seoul and The Hague. She writes fiction in-between institutional and non-institutional contexts, and works with sounds in-between clubs and art museums. Her methodology involves building and breaking sonic narratives by arranging and re-contextualizing disparate sound sources ranging from field recordings to fragmented anonymous dialogue. She approaches sound and text as invisible experiences and phenomena, and is interested in the narrative symptoms that emerge when both are juxtaposed on the same axis. In a series entitled ‘Sound Fiction,’ she explores these symptoms operating within and without the art space. She has been co-organizing an experimental/leftfield listening event ‘Sorrow Club Seoul’ since 2019.

ACCEPT ALL COOKIES

ENXPL22 - JIYOUNG WI - A3. SWIPE LEFT

New York City based multifaceted musician and artist Drumloop releases “Limiting Mindset” on 12” LP on Psychic Liberation on May 1st, 2024.

Emerging from the freezing sea, a winged automata ascends over  Mount Erebus and the ice shelves below. Like an arrow aimed at the heavens she flies towards the atmosphere, caught by gravity's kiss. Held, inches from the interstellar sublime, aching for release. Negotiations with divine emissaries. She's accepted into the twinkling astral entropy of soundless void. Breathless in the endless womb of stars. Phantom echoes of the language of unknown metals. Internal depths exposed, exalted and reabsorbed. Returned, whole and warm. Softly descending. Imbued with ultraviolet, embraced by blue depths, returned to the liquid core. Succor for the oceans of grief.

“Limiting Mindset” is sublime. Closer to a sacrament than an album. A divine transmission intercepted by Antarctic listening stations. I am reminded of the depths plumbed by Porter Ricks, of the tundra cool of Thomas Köner’s solo works, the tapestry of Tim Hecker’s emotional fractals and Autechre at their most interstellar. One could draw these comparisons, but Drumloop clearly inhabits her own unique space. A piercing emotional resonance permeates the entire proceeding. It’s like listening to a conversation between fathomless and private internal spaces with the endless astral entropy that surrounds all things. Each song stands beautifully on its own, while remaining integral to the whole. Transmutation as song. You will not leave unmoved.
-F

Daffy Scanlan is an artist and musician based in New York City. Her work compounds the corresponding passageways between memory, time, and space. Under the moniker Drumloop, she collages language with piano and digital synthesis, creating sonic representations of emotive internal universes.

LIMITING MINDSET

PURCHASE COPY

DRUMLOOP - A2. FORCEFIELD (PLIB040)

BERLIN BASED, PL CO-CONSPIRATOR SAETA IN WITH NEW MIX. DEEP AND ECLECTIC, NOT THE TOURISTS OR AMATEURS. ULTIMATE LOVE TO SAETA.

Tracklist:
Laetitia Sonami – Pie Jesu - Sounds From Empty Spaces No. 3
Triana – Todo es de color 
Team Rockit – Bombardier
Carl Gari, Abdullah Miniawy – Haj حاج
Lugh – Ironity Chastity Obedience 
Olan Monk – Na Madrai go Leir
Forest Swords – Panic
Sote – Holy Error
Agrupación Musical Ntro. Padre Jesús de la Redención de Córdoba – La Saeta (Angelo Harmsworth and Saeta Edit)
Lole y Manuel – Dime 
Rabih Beaini – Song of Extreme Happiness
Sote – Flux of Sorrow
Jessika Khazrik – Ra2i7a رائحة لا تذهب
Hajj – Reverse Catharsis
John Object – EU Youth + Kiss (Angelo Harmsworth Remix)
Arca – Sentient Savior
Brian Eno – The Big Ship

PL MIX : SAETA – PRESAGIO, QUEJÍO, GLORIA

Friday, June 28, 2024
09:00 PM (03:00 PM New York)
Diego Behncke
Psychic Liberation Show hosted by Nick Klein
46 Canal Street
New York
The Psychic Liberation show aims to document and recount information through conversations with artists working within sub, and sometimes countercultural, connective musical or otherwise creative communities. This is a template worth reflection as we enter a further atomizing digital age wherein the role of in-person connectivity is actively subverted and co-opted by convenient social interfaces. This program aims to create a model by which inspiration and information can be pulled from and applied to aiding burgeoning communities regardless of form, content, or make-up.
Diego Behncke is an artist based in Berlin. His work is realized through the frameworks of synthesis, fictional systems, abstraction, and the limits of comprehension as relational structures. Taking form through obfuscation operations involving different materials, his works appear as an abuse of residual conceptual and technical byproducts, a foregrounding of epistemic faults, and a strategic misdirection of ambiguity. For several years he's been releasing sound works, running his label Prensa Manual, and participating in diverse exhibitions.

PSYCHIC LIBERATION SHOW ON MONTEZ PRESS RADIO JUNE 2024 w/ DIEGO BEHNCKE

Monday, September 23, 2024
07:00 PM (01:00 PM New York)

Psychic Liberation Show hosted by Nick Klein
Itsï Ramirez
46 Canal Street
New York

Itsï Ramirez is a Chicago based composer. Her 2024 album debut, New Animals, was released on No Rent Records. Stepping out of the naturalized preoccupation with sound as sound, she takes on the project of recovering a new music that has been forgotten.

PSYCHIC LIBERATION SHOW ON MONTEZ PRESS RADIO SEPTEMBER 2024 w/ ITSI RAMIREZ

Scant presents Vitiate for Psychic Liberation. After nearly two decades of singular output in solo, collaborative, and curatorial capacities throughout the United States Scant arrives with his most pointed recorded material to date. As a stalwart of the 2000’s noise culture architecture along the eastern United States, Scant’s artistry has pressurized listening environments from gutters to theaters. As Scant, Matthew Boettke has stretched temporal capacities and initiated enveloping sonic experiences where volume is a physical meditative body. With Vitiate, through three recorded passages Scant trades the caustic frontal walls of aural stasis of his previous output for masterfully surgical digital synthesis of an utmost minimalist caliber. Of the process around cultivation of the recording, Boettke notes:

“VITIATE was recorded throughout the final days inside Apartment 202*. A reflection on cherished moments that soured, this is an attempt to immortalize and eradicate a core identity. Comfort betrays exclusively, familiarity breeds only weakness. What we are compelled to reach towards forever pushes back.”

Where so much of the contemporary discussion around Ambient music takes on an ecclesiastical bend, or a modal vocabulary that turns towards the hopeful, Vitiate operates in the dirge and dramatics of the deflated. Vitiate wraps you inside of it’s subtle modulations and tonal turns, but inside that reverberant embrace one sits dissociative and hollowed. This is not an album for the positive moment of Reverie, but for a reflection on inevitable stasis.

Scant is the alias of experimental musician Matt Boettke based out of New York City. He is a founding member of Thousands of Dead Gods, a record label in Brooklyn which previously operated a cassette focused record store from 2017-2022. Through his work as Scant he has produced over 30 limited edition tapes and CDs for American underground labels such as Chondritic Sound and Monorail Trespassing, while self-releasing through the Dead Gods imprint. Apart from solo recordings he has contributed to extensive collaborations with Justin Lakes (Shredded Nerve/Dead Gods), Stefan Aune (New Forces), Rodger Stella, and Nick Klein amongst others. As a curator, Boettke has been instrumental to the organization of several DIY experimental music festivals including Avant Fairfax and RVA Noise Fest in Virginia, and Summer Scum in New York.

* Infamous Brooklyn warehouse building having hosted the living quarters of some of New York City’s most notable underground musicians and non-musicians.

Vitiate

ALBUM PURCHA$E

PLIB067 - SCANT - VITIATE -  I

Hugo Esquinca offers his debut album format release, DOCUMENTO_UNO, for Psychic Liberation stating:

“DOCUMENTO_UNO [2014-2024] is a -mis-selection of bastardized personal archival material containing actions, installations, induced DSP corruption, after-hours field recordings and direct documentation of audio equipment degradation. With the intention to dispose rather than preserve, all files utilized for the production of this CD have been permanently deleted after usage.”

Copious libations and long, long walks around metropolitan sprawl are part of the process material that cultivate the contained audio within DOCUMENTO_UNO. Esquinca posits a formal conundrum, skewing the perceptual intake of the organic and inorganic aurality in a collaged twenty-nine minutes and thirty-nine seconds of Esquinca’s auto-documentarian efforts. Something about weighted city environments, places like Mexico City or Berlin or Glasgow, and how they interrelate with weather extremities, finances, alcohol, and one's personhood are embedded in DOCUMENTO_UNO. At the end of the day, you are not at home.

Esquinca is known for large scale audio works that take on the extremity of amplification to incite situations and circumstances that become ruminations on what is impenetrable or absent* yet consequently disruptive**. For DOCUMENTO_UNO a similar through line to materiality and ephemeral outcome is observed. The pushing of a recording device to its furthest capabilities and the harmonic damages that follow through as a result. The unwavering compositional directive to keep finding the threshold of the audio space, first in capturing from life and then later from processing and arranging. This is Esquincas first album effort.

The truth is that Esquinca is exhausted by Sound and its orbiting cultural sphere. His multifaceted work as an artist, researcher, and writer continually exhibits a perspective in extremity that manifests a perspective a politer audience recoils in facing. Esquinca though is no brute, nor looking for cheap tactics to elicit canonized pearl-clutching responses to the vulgarity of our times. DOCUMENTO_UNO complexly collages confrontation in formal, mechanistic, or actionable methods to unsettle your stereo and effectively not save your world.

In many ways, this release is a family affair for Esquinca. DOCUMENTO_UNO is the result of many nights of long talks and beverage consumption with friend and collaborator Nick Klein. Additionally, a selection of the original source material has been remixed by Russell Haswell, a longtime collaborator and friend of Esquinca.


* See works done at EMPAC in Troy, New York, where an entire auditorium's multi-channel sound system was played at maximum volume after hours with no one allowed in the building, leaving only the vibratory sensation of the architecture to speak to the idea of absence for the viewer.
** See Esquincas latest work, as part of a festival dedicated to Alvin Lucier, where the artist reinterprets Luciers “Sound On Paper”. Here Esquinca trades paper for architectural glass, focusing thousands of watts of amplification onto the glass to more caustically illustrate Luciers paper observations. 
credits
releases November 30, 2024

Edition of 100 Compact Discs
Each copy has been individually numbered, stamped, marked and wrapped in 50 liter garbage bags.

Recorded and arranged by Hugo Esquinca
Mastered by Russell Haswell
Designed and assembled by Hugo Esquinca
Product Photography by Gustavo Saiegh
Artist Photography by Dominique Saiegh

DOCUMENTO_UNO

PLIB066 - HUGO ESQUINCA - DOCUMENTO_UNO (EXCERPT)

https://soundcloud.com/takacox

Dear friend of the label, Takako, presents her latest mix in anticipation of the PL Night at Saüle .

PL MIX - TAKAKO

IRL ambient dj set at xo noir in montreal quebec, nov 2024



PL MIX : IRL - XO NOIR NOV 2024

PLIB-031 KEVIN DRUMM & JOACHIM NORDWALL -  OLD PAIN
RELEASES FEBRUARY 1, 2025

Kevin Drumm & Joachim Nordwall have, respectively, spent collective decades carving out new pathways in the realms of electroacoustic, drone, ambient, noise, and improvised experimental music. Their variably multiplied ripple effect across the sonorous waters of disruptive sound cultures are indellibly marked by the touch of these two artists. Neither being strangers to intensive collaborations, the two stalwarts of meditative sonic practice convene to offer Psychic Liberation the eight song album Old Pain. At just under an hour, the pair shine in a complementary fashion across perfectly constructed chapters pulling from their signature tool kits of atmospheric field recordings, tape loops, and pensive oscillations. Cautiously sharing space, the album is at times as brooding as it is transcendent. 

Old Pain is an album nearly two decades in the making. Beginning in 2006, Drumm and Nordwall endeavored to record together in Chicago, a session ultimately abandoned purportedly due to the influence of “Listening to Finnish Black Metal and drinking good brews”. In 2007, Drumm released the cassette Purge on Nordwalls iconic label IDEAL Recordings. Later ,in 2013, Purge was reissued on CD for IDEAL and a subsequent performance together in New York City found the two still in each other's orbit. Later, Kevin would make an appearance in collaboration with Nordwall on his Communication Is The Key Album for Entr’acte in 2019. Whereas previous in-person sessions faltered, Old Pain was the result of the two artists working in their respective winter-heavy geographies of Chicago and Gothenburg, trading files until completion.

Today, Drumm and Nordwall are totems of an era of true advancement in tonal despair. Drumm’s output has been that of mythology, creating some of the most singular works in the canon of experimental music. Nordwall, an equally notable peer as maker, has maintained the global standards and operations of challenging art through his IDEAL Recordings project while performing in solo and collaborative contexts globally. Between the two, it would be a near impossible task to find an iteration of any peer or generation following not touched by the massive cultural imprint they’ve cemented. Finally, with Old Pain, we have a document of two masters of their form able to stretch their legs and pronounce a cohesive gesture of sonic material that will stand to long linger below the surface of comfort.


PLIB-031 KEVIN DRUMM & JOACHIM NORDWALL - 2

The audio play “Perfect Pattern” by Danish artist Nic Krog weaves a narrative about the dynamics of home life, queer relationships, hygiene practices, routine, ritual, and control. The initial spatial audio work was conceived as the final project of Nic Krog’s Master’s degree for the Sound Studies and Sonic Arts program at Berlin’s Universität der Künste. The distributed version of “Perfect Pattern” is a stereo reformatting of the audio play for compact disc, set for release March 2025 on Nick Klein’s Psychic Liberation imprint. “Perfect Pattern” is the first release under Nic Krog’s own name, after changing from their former artist moniker Misantrop with releases and features on Opal, Foul-Up and Lime Lodge.

Their artistic trajectory is characterized through a diaristic approach, recounting mental processes and psychological baggage from growing up as a queer outlier in a smalltown of Denmark. The work traces the metamorphosis of the colloquial introvert to their negotiation of place in the hedonistic capital of Berlin, Germany. Krog further expands:

"As evidenced on my debut album “Reproaching the Absurd” (Opal, 2021), depression was an enduring battle spanning many years which impeded my overall well-being and stifled my creative output. Around the time of creating the album, however, I gradually overcame depression and simultaneously began casting aside my fear of exposing my vulnerability. My new audio play, “Perfect Pattern”, is my first foray into an overt narrative style, presenting a raw portrayal of a different kind of emotional and psychological self-awareness."

“Perfect Pattern” both extends and diverges from Nic Krog’s distinct and volatile blend of bass-heavy club music juxtaposed with subversive sound art and spoken word, cementing Krog’s fabulous misfitism. Twentieth century experimental compositional music (in particular Edgar Varèse's “Ionisation”), 90s queer house music, and most significantly the storytelling of soap operas and Jean-Luc Godard's “Le Mépris” are the formal canon that reinforces the architecture of “Perfect Pattern”. Further, the collaborative efforts of Dennis Cooper and Peter Rehberg for Gisèle Vienne are a mapping for the rhizome of ideas Krog manifests.

Here Krog steps out from behind the veil of the moniker of Misantrop, while not fully departing sonically or thematically, but blending the old and new, the bored and the blue, with meticulous harmony and routine. 
credits
releases March 15, 2025

Written, composed, performed, programmed and produced by Nicolai Vesterkær Krog, except Part 9 which rewrites a scene from “Le Mépris” by Jean-Luc Godard (based on the book “Il disprezzo” by Alberto Moravia).
“Pattern Theme for Edgard Varése” is an homage to “Ionisation” by Edgard Varése.
Mixed by Mike Davis at Wolfshark Mastering.
Mastered by Glyn Maier.
Photographs by Nicolai Vesterkær Krog.
Design by Dominique Saiegh.
license


Perfect Pattern

PLIB033 - NIC KROG - PERFECT PATTERN PARTS 12-13-14

PAIN LIBERATION SHOW #11 ON RINSE FRANCE W/ TURTLE BUGG & CARLOS SOUFFRONT

die Reihe is the moniker of NYC based composer and sound engineer Jack Callahan. Taken from the journal edited by Herbert Eimert and Karlheinz Stockhausen, die Reihe makes work that often examines and abstracts a single musical element, from the functioning of a vocoder to the harmony of house music. With this project he has toured the both the U.S. and Europe multiple times, been invited to numerous festivals and has released music with labels such as anòmia, Ascetic House, NNA Tapes, and Salon. In 2013 he founded Bánh Mì Verlag, an imprint dedicated to contemporary experimental music and culture. 
tour dates:

w/Jeff Witscher

Nov 2nd: Santa Cruz @ Wind River
Nov 3rd: SF @ Pro Arts Gallery
Nov 4th: LA @ Los Angeles Contemporary Archive
Nov 6th: Vancouver @ Deep Blue
Nov 7th: Seattle @ Gallery 1413 Nov 9th: Portland @ S1

Die Reihe 106 Kerri Chandler Chords (Outside The Club Mix) Excerpt-OUT NOVEMBER 1st

One of many offerings in the canon of efforts by way of the prodigenous DJ Speedsick. Hours alone, obsessively sharpening an aesthetic breeds moments of vulnerability and pure power. Here we see the Wisconsin based artist link Jandek with thrift store home stereo equipment, beats from London being forced from county fair speakers like aurual sausage. Speedsick is documented at a prescient moment in his career, where the young maker stumbles into a new scenario. Somewhat familiarly he stares into the void, and the void stares back. How bright can a candle burn?


Physical copies available via Psychic Liberation and Fantastique LLC

Order here :
https://primitivelanguages.bandcamp.com/album/blood-mixed-with-shit-mixed-with-blood

DJ SPEEDSICK - KNIVES OUT [PLIB04]

Digital hosting of the PL 7" lathe release that never surfaced outside of the Angels in America fan-club. Features a wonderful cover of the Coil class , "Cold Cell".

Mastered by Jack Callahan.

A. Duck Ernst

B. Cold Cell

Exercising abstention and reduction, the musical duo of Jin Mustafa and Robin Smeds Mattila – Karabasan Drane – finds collaborative purpose in aesthetic refinement. Their debut album Crystalline State (EN X PL, 2020) purposefully conceives a sharp and distinct sonic world, a collage of shaded dreams and imaginations in xeroxed high-contrast.

With little or no haste, the music of Karabasan Drane maintains an eerie urgency. The reason might be found innately: it was all written for upcoming live performances. What began in rehearsed live compositions for sparse electronics has now come together on record, documenting material for live performances of the past half-decade. Notable occurrences include Norbergfestival in Sweden and Herrensauna in Berlin.

Jin Mustafa is a DJ, electronic musician and visual artist based in Stockholm. Her work is of shifting media, often taking form in moving images, sculptures and sound. She is interested in notions of liminality and technology, and the relationships of personal and collective memory.

Robin Smeds Mattila is an electronic musician and graphic artist based in Stockholm. Under the guise of Human Rays, his musical works carry remnants of techno culture and ambient memorabilia, clothed in coarse patches of textural noise and drone.

"Crystalline State" marks a new path of collaboration between Glyn Maier and Nick Klein. Having previously released collaborative recorded Klein/Lack efforts , they now focus both of their label practices to produce the tape series "EN X PL". 
credits
releases June 1, 2020

All music Karabasan Drane
Mastered by Nathan Taylor

psychicliberation.net

ENXPL01 - KARABASAN DRANE - A3. CHARMER

Saint Abdullah // “In God’s Image” // 2xCD on Psychic Liberation // 
Release date: August 21, 2020

Saint Abdullah, composed of Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi, have fine-tuned their vision of conceptual, blown-out dub and free jazz with “In God’s Image,” an ambitious twenty-song double CD on Psychic Liberation. The opus by the two Iranians living in New York, is full of mourning and rage, but these affects only scratch the surface of the work’s emotional and formal heterogeneity. 

Like the image gracing its cover—a tiny, dusty peykan, its roof fitted with an image of Ruhollah Khomeini and cone speakers—Saint Abdullah uses DIY minimalism to deliver maximal messaging. On “Problem,” distorted percussion, Shia oration, and a sample of the late Nipsy Hussle meld into a cathartic club burner, while the rhythms and lifted string arpeggiations on “Potion for sorrow” induce hazy cinematics, the duo’s attempt at Persian stoner boom bap. 

Elsewhere are instances of improvised jamming, melancholic twinkling, and pensive restraint. The powerfully eclectic statement by Saint Abdullah includes appearances by saxophonist Travis Laplante, who blows a spiralling noir line over feedbacking cacophony. On another track, Moor Mother delivers a poetic lashing on Western imperialists who rain missiles on hospitals, grieves the bodies piling up as capital gets sucked from the Earth. 

The sample work on “In God’s Image” draws heavily from Iranian documentaries, and includes the brothers’ field recordings from Tehran and New York. Heretical combinations collide senses of antiquity and contemporaneity, resisting the many orientalist reads on Iranian culture and politics. In this struggle, Saint Abdullah conveys many emotional registers, from exhausted depression to righteous indignation. 

Among many things, the image of Khomeini on the cover, which often scandalizes American audiences, represents the overthrow of a 2,500-year-long monarchy. All forms of dehumanization receive the sonic snakebite of Saint Abdullah, and “In God’s Image” resuscitates the revolutionary potential of music that pulls from the traditions of oppressed peoples in both the East and West. 

Psychic Liberation, in operation since 2018, is an experimental music label started in Brooklyn, New York, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. The label is distributed in North America by Fantastique, and in EU/UK by Boomkat.
Mastered by Glyn Maier
Layout by Sara Abruña 
credits
releases August 21, 2020

psychicliberation.net

Audio by Saint Abdullah
Mastered by Glyn Maier
Layout by Sara Abruña

PLIB007 - SAINT ABDULLAH - A8. Problem

Saint Abdullah // “In God’s Image” // 2xCD on Psychic Liberation // 
Release date: August 21, 2020

Saint Abdullah, composed of Tehran-born brothers Mohammad and Mehdi, have fine-tuned their vision of conceptual, blown-out dub and free jazz with “In God’s Image,” an ambitious twenty-song double CD on Psychic Liberation. The opus by the two Iranians living in New York, is full of mourning and rage, but these affects only scratch the surface of the work’s emotional and formal heterogeneity. 

Like the image gracing its cover—a tiny, dusty peykan, its roof fitted with an image of Ruhollah Khomeini and cone speakers—Saint Abdullah uses DIY minimalism to deliver maximal messaging. On “Problem,” distorted percussion, Shia oration, and a sample of the late Nipsy Hussle meld into a cathartic club burner, while the rhythms and lifted string arpeggiations on “Potion for sorrow” induce hazy cinematics, the duo’s attempt at Persian stoner boom bap. 

Elsewhere are instances of improvised jamming, melancholic twinkling, and pensive restraint. The powerfully eclectic statement by Saint Abdullah includes appearances by saxophonist Travis Laplante, who blows a spiralling noir line over feedbacking cacophony. On another track, Moor Mother delivers a poetic lashing on Western imperialists who rain missiles on hospitals, grieves the bodies piling up as capital gets sucked from the Earth. 

The sample work on “In God’s Image” draws heavily from Iranian documentaries, and includes the brothers’ field recordings from Tehran and New York. Heretical combinations collide senses of antiquity and contemporaneity, resisting the many orientalist reads on Iranian culture and politics. In this struggle, Saint Abdullah conveys many emotional registers, from exhausted depression to righteous indignation. 

Among many things, the image of Khomeini on the cover, which often scandalizes American audiences, represents the overthrow of a 2,500-year-long monarchy. All forms of dehumanization receive the sonic snakebite of Saint Abdullah, and “In God’s Image” resuscitates the revolutionary potential of music that pulls from the traditions of oppressed peoples in both the East and West. 

Psychic Liberation, in operation since 2018, is an experimental music label started in Brooklyn, New York, currently based in The Hague, Netherlands. The label is distributed in North America by Fantastique, and in EU/UK by Boomkat.
Mastered by Glyn Maier
Layout by Sara Abruña 
credits
releases August 21, 2020

www.psychicliberation.net

Audio by Saint Abdullah
Mastered by Glyn Maier
Layout by Sara Abruña

PLIB007 - SAINT ABDULLAH - A7. Abadan Don [S. ENGLISH EDIT]

PLIB007 - SAINT ABDULLAH - A5. Of Us (CIENFUEGOS EDIT)

"Intimate Ghosting", a compilation album featuring nine musicians from Japan and South Korea, is being newly introduced to the roster of the Netherlands/US-based record label Psychic Liberation. Under the curation of novelist and musician Jiyoung Wi, the album contains the works of Arexibo (KR), Arles (KR), bela (KR), Jiyoung Wi (KR), Joyul (KR), Kazumichi Komatsu (JP), Kenji (JP), Ultrafog (JP), and Yeong Die (KR). ‘Intimate Ghosting’ is a lucid invitation to the effervescente sonic field progressing throughout the experimental, left-field, ambient music communities of said regions. The album artwork is from Moon Bae, an artist working in the US and South Korea.

Curation : Jiyoung Wi
Mastered : Elizabeth Davis
Design : Moon Bae

Distributed in the United States by Fantastique LLC

INTIMATE GHOSTING

A2. ARLES - PALUSTRIS

Intimate Ghosting

A1. AREXIBO - SMALL LOVE

Originally composed for livestreaming events during the ongoing lockdown of 2020, Felisha Ledesma presents two extended pieces as a debut album, “Sweet Hour”. Ledesma’s first full length release arrives after much experience in creating collaborative works with artists such as Isabella and Angelo Harmsworth, site-specific installations, and high-profile festival performances.

Both pieces were realized using a new software synthesizer, called “AMQR”, which Ledesma built for personal use in collaboration with Ess Mattisson. Contrary to many digitally-based compositions, a distinctly warm and organic palette pervades these recordings. An almost playful leisurely pace is employed, engaging the listener to listen deeper; the pieces gracefully evolve with special attention to subtle shifts in stereo field and sonic coloration.

The time-of-day titles illustrate the two distinct moods conveyed: "7:00 AM" integrates field recordings and a hardware modular synthesizer, taking the listener through a psycho-acoustic journey exploring various nooks and crannies of subdued auditory rivulets: perhaps a hidden woodland brook, a sunny glen, a crunchy gravel walkway. "2:00 AM" harkens to the memories of nightclubs, opening with a synthesized arpeggio which could lead into a dancefloor-ready stomper. But instead, Ledesma steps back, allowing the arpeggio to develop into an encompassing ASMR-like timbral massage. The two compositions are united in a slightly melancholic grasping for connection; are they unfolding or are they unraveling? Ledesma does not answer the question outright, but instead finds joy in superposition and sublimation - while creating a space for the listener to inhabit, to live in, and to re-connect. 
credits
releases January 29, 2021

Sweet Hour

ENXPL04 - FELISHA LEDESMA - 2 AM (SIDE B)

Label ran by @nick-klein
contact: psychicliberation@gmail.com

For the physical and digital purchasing of PSYCHIC LIBERATION/PRIMITIVE LANGUAGES :

www.psychicliberation.bandcamp.com

PL/PSYCHIC LIBERATION/PAIN LIBERATION

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