Haron - Wandelaar

Format: LP / digital
Catalogue: QUEESTE002

http://bit.ly/queeste002

A1 Lotuseter
A2 Maangerij
A3 Caverne
A4 Selenieten
B1 Foschia
B2 Sepia
B3 Music for Elbows

Queeste emerges with the nocturnal sounds of Haron's Wandelaar, an album exploring his long-term interest in music's talent for inducing and affecting dreams, successfully turning listening into an act of transport, leaving you in the midst of falling asleep, at a junction of dislocation, hazily arriving in a liminal world. In Wandelaar we hear Haron's playful reaction against the confines of dance music, gathering energy from his estrangement from the scene and using it as a means to reorder and interrogate sound. 

The modest piano takes centre stage, allowing each solo note to becoming fertile and full, suspended and considered, guided by the principles of minimal composers such as John Cage and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Haron delicately translates sparse chords into a cinematic narrative of ascension, conjuring up a 'moony landscape,' grey and desolate from afar, intricately detailed on approach.

Haron’s Wandelaar is available 6 July 2018 on LP and digital platforms. The vinyl release includes an art print by Fallon Does, who is also responsible for the graphic design of Wandelaar. All tracks written and produced by Haron Aumaj, mastered by Wouter for Brandenburg Mastering. Words by Jo Kali.

Worldwide distribution via Clone Distribution.

Wandelaar

Availabe now!

Haron - A3 Caverne

Haron - Wandelaar

Format: LP / digital
Catalogue: QUEESTE002

http://bit.ly/queeste002

A1 Lotuseter
A2 Maangerij
A3 Caverne
A4 Selenieten
B1 Foschia
B2 Sepia
B3 Music for Elbows

Queeste emerges with the nocturnal sounds of Haron's Wandelaar, an album exploring his long-term interest in music's talent for inducing and affecting dreams, successfully turning listening into an act of transport, leaving you in the midst of falling asleep, at a junction of dislocation, hazily arriving in a liminal world. In Wandelaar we hear Haron's playful reaction against the confines of dance music, gathering energy from his estrangement from the scene and using it as a means to reorder and interrogate sound.

The modest piano takes centre stage, allowing each solo note to becoming fertile and full, suspended and considered, guided by the principles of minimal composers such as John Cage and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Haron delicately translates sparse chords into a cinematic narrative of ascension, conjuring up a 'moony landscape,' grey and desolate from afar, intricately detailed on approach.

Haron’s Wandelaar is available 6 July 2018 on LP and digital platforms. The vinyl release includes an art print by Fallon Does, who is also responsible for the graphic design of Wandelaar. All tracks written and produced by Haron Aumaj, mastered by Wouter for Brandenburg Mastering. Words by Jo Kali.

Worldwide distribution via Clone Distribution.

Available now!

Haron - B2 Sepia

Haron - Wandelaar

Format: LP / digital
Catalogue: QUEESTE002

bit.ly/queeste002

A1 Lotuseter
A2 Maangerij
A3 Caverne
A4 Selenieten
B1 Foschia
B2 Sepia
B3 Music for Elbows

Queeste emerges with the nocturnal sounds of Haron's Wandelaar, an album exploring his long-term interest in music's talent for inducing and affecting dreams, successfully turning listening into an act of transport, leaving you in the midst of falling asleep, at a junction of dislocation, hazily arriving in a liminal world. In Wandelaar we hear Haron's playful reaction against the confines of dance music, gathering energy from his estrangement from the scene and using it as a means to reorder and interrogate sound.

The modest piano takes centre stage, allowing each solo note to becoming fertile and full, suspended and considered, guided by the principles of minimal composers such as John Cage and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Haron delicately translates sparse chords into a cinematic narrative of ascension, conjuring up a 'moony landscape,' grey and desolate from afar, intricately detailed on approach.

Haron’s Wandelaar is available 6 July 2018 on LP and digital platforms. The vinyl release includes an art print by Fallon Does, who is also responsible for the graphic design of Wandelaar. All tracks written and produced by Haron Aumaj, mastered by Wouter for Brandenburg Mastering. Words by Jo Kali.

Worldwide distribution via Clone Distribution.

Haron - A1 Lotuseter

Haron - A4 Selenieten

Haron - B1 Foschia

Haron -  A2 Maangerij

Haron - B3 Music for Elbows

DJ Lostboi & Torus - The Flash

https://sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/the-flash
Available 24 January 2020 on LP and digital platforms. 

Following 2019’s hibernation, Queeste reappears with the mnestic soundscapes of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ split album The Flash. Across eight gossamer evocations—four from each artist—the duo reflect on individual journeys from airport to sea during the blissful embers of fading summer. Their gaze expands and contracts naturally with passing locations but lingers on the titular flash, what the two artists describe as “the rare sight of the sun giving off a bright green lightburst into the horizon.”

Made up of sounds sourced and appropriated from these commutes—pop music heard on the radio, jumbled street recordings, and everyday technological objects—The Flash evokes the melancholic pull of such recollections without ever succumbing to nostalgia. The moments eked from these samples stretch into quiet eternity—still and suspended—while retaining their quotidian, terrestrial qualities.

DJ Lostboi successfully refines the warped atmospherics heard on his previous edits of pop, rap, and emo. First track ‘Open World’ welcomes listeners with lapping waves and plaintive wavering tones—like a glittering video game environment—until real life interrupts on ‘Ordinary People’ as an automated answer phone message: an unknown voice lets out a weary sigh. Its foggy pianos and soft vocals offer melody and buoyancy where ‘LB 100’ circles on moody, dream-like pads. We follow the artist’s oceanic voyage to its culminating trance-like shimmers which dissolve into cool water: reflective, endless, yet ultimately hopeful.

Netherlands-based Torus foregoes the dancefloor dynamics of 2016’s Engine Malfunction for a series of calmer, cloudless drifts. On ‘Enter The Sun’—a sparse, yearning composition—washes of noise and clipped auto-tuned vocals pulse over a haunting refrain until ‘Pier’ arrives with whirring engines, sweet birdsong, and decaying synths. The album’s lightest piece comes with the skipping ‘Radiate 540’—euphoric dance minus the kick—which rises from a muffled human interaction until slow motion cinematics signal the trip’s end: ‘Arrival’ collapses into the sea elegantly mirroring DJ Lostboi’s final track.

Despite its hushed ambience, The Flash is an album committed to forward momentum. Each composition reveals a discrete chapter of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ journey building to a moment of bittersweet ascension. The results of such heartfelt wandering recall the spatial dynamics of The KLF’s zoned post-rave landscapes but these works flicker with thoroughly modern paraphernalia and emotions.

The Flash

DJ Lostboi - Ordinary People

DJ Lostboi & Torus - The Flash

sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/the-flash
Available 24 January 2020 on LP and digital platforms.

Following 2019’s hibernation, Queeste reappears with the mnestic soundscapes of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ split album The Flash. Across eight gossamer evocations—four from each artist—the duo reflect on individual journeys from airport to sea during the blissful embers of fading summer. Their gaze expands and contracts naturally with passing locations but lingers on the titular flash, what the two artists describe as “the rare sight of the sun giving off a bright green lightburst into the horizon.”

Made up of sounds sourced and appropriated from these commutes—pop music heard on the radio, jumbled street recordings, and everyday technological objects—The Flash evokes the melancholic pull of such recollections without ever succumbing to nostalgia. The moments eked from these samples stretch into quiet eternity—still and suspended—while retaining their quotidian, terrestrial qualities.

DJ Lostboi successfully refines the warped atmospherics heard on his previous edits of pop, rap, and emo. First track ‘Open World’ welcomes listeners with lapping waves and plaintive wavering tones—like a glittering video game environment—until real life interrupts on ‘Ordinary People’ as an automated answer phone message: an unknown voice lets out a weary sigh. Its foggy pianos and soft vocals offer melody and buoyancy where ‘LB 100’ circles on moody, dream-like pads. We follow the artist’s oceanic voyage to its culminating trance-like shimmers which dissolve into cool water: reflective, endless, yet ultimately hopeful.

Netherlands-based Torus foregoes the dancefloor dynamics of 2016’s Engine Malfunction for a series of calmer, cloudless drifts. On ‘Enter The Sun’—a sparse, yearning composition—washes of noise and clipped auto-tuned vocals pulse over a haunting refrain until ‘Pier’ arrives with whirring engines, sweet birdsong, and decaying synths. The album’s lightest piece comes with the skipping ‘Radiate 540’—euphoric dance minus the kick—which rises from a muffled human interaction until slow motion cinematics signal the trip’s end: ‘Arrival’ collapses into the sea elegantly mirroring DJ Lostboi’s final track.

Despite its hushed ambience, The Flash is an album committed to forward momentum. Each composition reveals a discrete chapter of DJ Lostboi and Torus’ journey building to a moment of bittersweet ascension. The results of such heartfelt wandering recall the spatial dynamics of The KLF’s zoned post-rave landscapes but these works flicker with thoroughly modern paraphernalia and emotions.

Torus - Radiate 540

Torus - Enter The Sun

DJ Lostboi - Open World

DJ Lostboi - LB 100

Torus - Arrival

Torus - Pier

DJ Lostboi - Don’t Worry (Child Mix)

Dreamcycles - Future Lights and Archetypes

https://sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/future-lights-and-archetypes
Available 1 May 2020 exclusively on Bandcamp. Available 29 May 2020 on all digital platforms.

Dreamcycles, the moniker of Irish-Canadian artist Jennifer Moore, emerges from the ashen present to deliver her conceptual debut mini-album Future Lights and Archetypes. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, Moore transforms ethereal bedroom pop and monolithic electronics into uncanny soundscapes to explore what she describes as the “landscape of a future global economy.”

Moore’s imagination conjures a new order of global governance which uses data to assess the competencies, characteristics, and productivity capacity of its citizens. Predictive analytics are used to shuttle humans around the globe in a tightly choreographed dance of space, labour and capital. Spanning a perspective both personal and systemic, the Dublin-based producer guides the listener through her sober invention, anchoring its alienating events around simple longings for home.

Across six tracks, present-day sonics are repurposed to create warped atmospherics. “If I wanted to see the world, I’d have to imagine it,” says a disembodied voice on opening track ‘Memory (Temporary Access)’. Pitter-patter footsteps, playing children, and whirring device noises swirl around the words: harsh, familiar, and ultimately unsettling. ‘Fonn Abhaile’ follows—its vaporous synths matched by breathy vocals—but ‘Abrasive Routes’ reveals the haunting potential of Moore’s psychoacoustic constructions. News report snippets detailing the Dublin financial district jostle with screeching high-definition cars. “It’s become the most extraordinary contrast to everything else here,” recites a roving correspondent, cataloguing inequalities suffused into the electronic artist’s home.

As the mini-album progresses, the emotional intensity rises. ‘Memory Laneways’ pairs an elegiac refrain with industrial kicks before ‘Playing with the Concrete’ offers a moment of brightness. “You look good when you’re smiling,” sings Moore over a distant sinogrime melody, followed by her closing, and most affecting track, ‘Final Goodbye.’ Meditations on belonging are swept along by circular, trance-like synths whose closing destination is bittersweet: euphoria tempered by the artist’s sombre backdrop.

Moore describes Future Lights and Archetypes as a “post-extraction artefact.” Through its diary entries, radio clippings, and fragmented songs, the mini-album resembles an object hewn from a fully-realised world, like an Ursula K. Le Guin novel refracted through machine learning. Keen listeners might also detect a flicker of Grouper’s place-based musings or even the crumbling electronics of Actress. But this release melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Future Lights & Archetypes

Dreamcycles - Memory Laneways

Dreamcycles - Future Lights and Archetypes

sitequeeste.bandcamp.com/album/future…d-archetypes
Available 1 May 2020 exclusively on Bandcamp. Available 29 May 2020 on all digital platforms.

Dreamcycles, the moniker of Irish-Canadian artist Jennifer Moore, emerges from the ashen present to deliver her conceptual debut mini-album Future Lights and Archetypes. Operating at the node between technological reality and speculative fiction, Moore transforms ethereal bedroom pop and monolithic electronics into uncanny soundscapes to explore what she describes as the “landscape of a future global economy.”

Moore’s imagination conjures a new order of global governance which uses data to assess the competencies, characteristics, and productivity capacity of its citizens. Predictive analytics are used to shuttle humans around the globe in a tightly choreographed dance of space, labour and capital. Spanning a perspective both personal and systemic, the Dublin-based producer guides the listener through her sober invention, anchoring its alienating events around simple longings for home.

Across six tracks, present-day sonics are repurposed to create warped atmospherics. “If I wanted to see the world, I’d have to imagine it,” says a disembodied voice on opening track ‘Memory (Temporary Access)’. Pitter-patter footsteps, playing children, and whirring device noises swirl around the words: harsh, familiar, and ultimately unsettling. ‘Fonn Abhaile’ follows—its vaporous synths matched by breathy vocals—but ‘Abrasive Routes’ reveals the haunting potential of Moore’s psychoacoustic constructions. News report snippets detailing the Dublin financial district jostle with screeching high-definition cars. “It’s become the most extraordinary contrast to everything else here,” recites a roving correspondent, cataloguing inequalities suffused into the electronic artist’s home.

As the mini-album progresses, the emotional intensity rises. ‘Memory Laneways’ pairs an elegiac refrain with industrial kicks before ‘Playing with the Concrete’ offers a moment of brightness. “You look good when you’re smiling,” sings Moore over a distant sinogrime melody, followed by her closing, and most affecting track, ‘Final Goodbye.’ Meditations on belonging are swept along by circular, trance-like synths whose closing destination is bittersweet: euphoria tempered by the artist’s sombre backdrop.

Moore describes Future Lights and Archetypes as a “post-extraction artefact.” Through its diary entries, radio clippings, and fragmented songs, the mini-album resembles an object hewn from a fully-realised world, like an Ursula K. Le Guin novel refracted through machine learning. Keen listeners might also detect a flicker of Grouper’s place-based musings or even the crumbling electronics of Actress. But this release melds intimacy with pulsating stimuli, Moore’s gaze oriented firmly towards the human cost of an omniscient technological future.

Dreamcycles - Playing with the Concrete

Dreamcycles - Final Goodbye

Dreamcycles - Abrasive Routes

Dreamcycles - Fonn Abhaile

Dreamcycles - Memory (Temporary Access)

Haron – Taxa (QUEESTE005)
https://smarturl.it/queeste005

01 Drosera
02 Benthos
03 Pantala
04 Pincertail

Haron’s Taxa EP dips into a world of fizzing electronics and draws from it four potent club mutations. 

Having explored spacious ambient on 2018’s well-received Wandelaar, the Dutch producer turns his attention towards full-body rhythms. These newly prepared compositions, the first club release on Queeste, are dappled with synthesised colour and unexpected timbral shifts, aligning the producer with global bass permutations while maintaining his own playful course.

The skittering dancefloor percussion of opening track ‘Drosera’ immediately signals this change in direction, leading effortlessly into the tightly coiled drums of ‘Benthos’ whose name is taken from the community of organisms that dwell on the seabed. In a nod to Wandelaar’s serene tones, the track ends with weightless ambience alongside snippets of human voices, a single moment of stillness on a release elsewhere defined by movement. ‘Pantala’ is pristine computerised dancehall teeming with disembodied samples and impressionistic swirls of noise before Taxa ends with ‘Pincertail’ whose bustling syncopations recall UK funky at its nimblest.

No less evocative than his beatless work, on this EP Haron has crafted his own idiosyncratic abstraction of club music, one imbued with joyful melodies and a giddy, pleasingly destabilising sensibility.

releases July 3, 2020

All tracks written and produced by Haron Aumaj
Mastered by Wouter Brandenburg
Graphic design by Fallon Does
Words by Lewis Gordon

Taxa

introducing ⤷ Haron – Taxa (QUEESTE005)

Haron – Taxa (QUEESTE005)
smarturl.it/queeste005

01 Drosera
02 Benthos
03 Pantala
04 Pincertail

Haron’s Taxa EP dips into a world of fizzing electronics and draws from it four potent club mutations.

Having explored spacious ambient on 2018’s well-received Wandelaar, the Dutch producer turns his attention towards full-body rhythms. These newly prepared compositions, the first club release on Queeste, are dappled with synthesised colour and unexpected timbral shifts, aligning the producer with global bass permutations while maintaining his own playful course.

The skittering dancefloor percussion of opening track ‘Drosera’ immediately signals this change in direction, leading effortlessly into the tightly coiled drums of ‘Benthos’ whose name is taken from the community of organisms that dwell on the seabed. In a nod to Wandelaar’s serene tones, the track ends with weightless ambience alongside snippets of human voices, a single moment of stillness on a release elsewhere defined by movement. ‘Pantala’ is pristine computerised dancehall teeming with disembodied samples and impressionistic swirls of noise before Taxa ends with ‘Pincertail’ whose bustling syncopations recall UK funky at its nimblest.

No less evocative than his beatless work, on this EP Haron has crafted his own idiosyncratic abstraction of club music, one imbued with joyful melodies and a giddy, pleasingly destabilising sensibility.

releases July 3, 2020

All tracks written and produced by Haron Aumaj
Mastered by Wouter Brandenburg
Graphic design by Fallon Does
Words by Lewis Gordon

Haron – Pincertail

Haron – Benthos

Haron – Drosera

fmvee - who do u love? (QUEESTE006)
https://queeste.bandcamp.com/album/who-do-u-love

@f_m_v

01 the way you see yourself 
02 everythingUneverKnewUwanted
03 thewayothersseeyou
04 Seed Perfuming (LoLo v665)
05 sobbing

fmvee joins Queeste with who do u love?, an EP of fractious songs recorded over a tumultuous four-month period in Los Angeles. Having debuted in 2018 with a set of club contortions touching on jungle and 2-step, the US artist returns with a work of intense self-reflection. Lived experiences are transmuted into an amorphous bricolage of pummelling kicks, synthetic textures, and diaristic details, what they describe as an act of “remembrance.”

Working and living in LA, the “grind” alongside “aspirational partying,” and the confrontation of depression during an intense relationship, informs the EP on levels both sonic and thematic. The slippery rhythm and melodic stabs of ‘the way you see yourself’ embodies a state of flux, also recalling the early experiments of the LA beat scene. Distant jazz drumming fills its peaceful coda before ‘everythingUneverKnewUwanted’ introduces an echo lifted directly from the artist’s life: a trickling courtyard fountain. This first phase of the release finds resolution with ‘thewayothersseeyou,’ a conceptual mirror to its start, and one which carries a notable shift in tone; gleaming percussion has given way to ominous synths.

Despite the EP’s personal nature, collaboration is crucial. ‘Seed Perfuming (LoLo v665)’ is an fmvee original transformed into a cascading breakbeat by New York producer and engineer Loric Sih AKA LoLo, an ecstatic yet familiar form nestled amidst otherwise bruising encounters. ‘sobbing’ follows, a digital-age ballad of original lyrics exploring dependency: emotional, physical, and otherwise. It’s a poignant conclusion to an appropriately hallucinogenic collection, an intoxicating chemistry of love and loneliness conjured through a fine balance of bass, percussion, discord, and harmony.

On behalf of fmvee, a percentage of all profits will be donated to Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition, a community-based organisation that mobilises community members for the health, dignity, and safety of people targeted by the war on drugs and anti sex-worker policies. 

releases December 4, 2020

who do u love?

fmvee – the way you see yourself

fmvee - who do u love? (QUEESTE006)
queeste.bandcamp.com/album/who-do-u-love

@f_m_v

01 the way you see yourself
02 everythingUneverKnewUwanted
03 thewayothersseeyou
04 Seed Perfuming (LoLo v665)
05 sobbing

fmvee joins Queeste with who do u love?, an EP of fractious songs recorded over a tumultuous four-month period in Los Angeles. Having debuted in 2018 with a set of club contortions touching on jungle and 2-step, the US artist returns with a work of intense self-reflection. Lived experiences are transmuted into an amorphous bricolage of pummelling kicks, synthetic textures, and diaristic details, what they describe as an act of “remembrance.”

Working and living in LA, the “grind” alongside “aspirational partying,” and the confrontation of depression during an intense relationship, informs the EP on levels both sonic and thematic. The slippery rhythm and melodic stabs of ‘the way you see yourself’ embodies a state of flux, also recalling the early experiments of the LA beat scene. Distant jazz drumming fills its peaceful coda before ‘everythingUneverKnewUwanted’ introduces an echo lifted directly from the artist’s life: a trickling courtyard fountain. This first phase of the release finds resolution with ‘thewayothersseeyou,’ a conceptual mirror to its start, and one which carries a notable shift in tone; gleaming percussion has given way to ominous synths.

Despite the EP’s personal nature, collaboration is crucial. ‘Seed Perfuming (LoLo v665)’ is an fmvee original transformed into a cascading breakbeat by New York producer and engineer Loric Sih AKA LoLo, an ecstatic yet familiar form nestled amidst otherwise bruising encounters. ‘sobbing’ follows, a digital-age ballad of original lyrics exploring dependency: emotional, physical, and otherwise. It’s a poignant conclusion to an appropriately hallucinogenic collection, an intoxicating chemistry of love and loneliness conjured through a fine balance of bass, percussion, discord, and harmony.

On behalf of fmvee, a percentage of all profits will be donated to Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition, a community-based organisation that mobilises community members for the health, dignity, and safety of people targeted by the war on drugs and anti sex-worker policies.

Queeste

Popular tracks