[surf034]

https://soundcloud.com/opalbeau

artwork by usof (linktr.ee/usofusofusofusof)

🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️🏄🏾‍♀️
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opal beau ~ No-One To Talk To

Heith - X, wheel
Label: PAN
Cat.No. PAN 119 
Format: LP / DL
Release Date: 07 October 2022
Purchase: https://pan.lnk.to/Xwheel

Heith’s devout interest in the notion of reality started long before he recorded his latest album. The Italian musician, producer and artist probed the spiritual aspects of sound and its cosmogonic potential already in his previous works released on his own Haunter Records label.
Exploring the textures of consciousness through research into the ritual animism, he kept an omnivorous and universalist approach to cultural and sonic influence. This is central to X, wheel, Heith’s debut album and first release on PAN. It’s a deep dive into his creative and spiritual practice, one where art and life are inextricable.

Written and recorded across different studios in Milan, Rome and Florence between March, 2019, and January, 2020, eleven tracks cycle through a world of stylistic references—from psychedelia, psytrance and freak folk to stoner metal, noise and early electronic music—while remaining firmly a part of a singular vision.

Album opener “Letter 4” staggers along collaborator Leonardo Rubboli’s winding guitar melody, while second track “Dero” cycles into layers of assorted sine wave lines and tonal systems outside of the Western diatonic scales. X, wheel sits calmly at the centre of its own vortex of dissonance and diversity, moving through a spectrum of ideas, moods, and emotional states with uncanny ease. A glimpse of contributor Jesse Osborne- Lanthier’s synth melody briefly surfaces from a cacophonous flood of reverb and distortion on “Stoned Witch”. Aase Nielsen’s lonely saxophone wanders around the nostalgic hypnagogic noir of “Ensemble For Somnambulists”.

Heith draws together an array of philosophies and fictions together into a sonic tableau that exists outside of linear time. As the titular wheel spins, it does not bring about repetition, rather constant change and movement, spiralling into infinity.

The hypnotic nature of the release is translated in the album’s liner notes. It’s a collage of sorts, constructed from Heith’s own diary entries using the non-phonetic alphabet and linguistic experiment called “Angel’s Hair” developed with artist Pietro Agostoni. Together with contributions from ZU drummer Jacopo Battaglia and didgeridoo player Fabio Goldaniga, X, wheel is an exercise in creating new forms of meaning through sound, turning spectral vibration into conscious awareness.

Heith - The hermit (PAN 119)

LUDWIG BERGER - GARDEN OF EDIACARA
Cat #: OUS047
Release date: May 17, 2024
Distributed by Kudos: https://kudosdistribution.co.uk
Label Bandcamp: https://ousooo.bandcamp.com

«Music is a form of world building. I love to develop sonic characters and set them into fictional ecosystems with unique textures, acoustics and atmospheres. Each song forms a different landscape, through which a vocal character guides us and tries to tell us its stories.» — @ludwigberger

Ludwig Berger’s ‘fictional’ debut album «Garden Ediacara» unfolds as a musical eco-fiction, guiding listeners through a speculative ecosystem with synthesized vocals. Infused with storytelling techniques from sci-fi and fantasy, the album intertwines melodic songwriting with electroacoustic sound design. Inspired by hydrofeminism and eco-fiction novels, such as «A Door Into Ocean» by Joan Slonczewski, the album delves into the geological period of Ediacara around 600 million years ago — an era so remote it resonates as a glimpse into a possible future. The Ediacaran period was characterised by a peaceful and thriving ecosystem inhabited by soft-bodied creatures without eyes and bones, which were completely wiped out through the appearance of a new species. «Garden of Ediacara» alludes to this period, celebrating both the pleasures of biodiversity as well as mourning its inevitable loss. The narrative unfolds as an exploration of growth and interconnection in the shadow of a coming extinction. The track titles, written by Daisy Lafarge, reveal themselves as a cohesive poem and contribute to the album’s narrative.

Informed by his practice of field recording that focusses on intimate encounters with plants, animals and geological phenomena, as well as his studies in electroacoustic composition, Berger expands his palette for his debut in ‘fictional’ music. The album prominently features a post-human, non-binary death metal voice synthesizer, physical modeling instruments, and microscopic field recordings of plants, insects, as well as aquatic and geological life. With impressionistic strokes, Ludwig Berger crafts vibrant worlds using glassy timbres and more-than-human voices, guiding listeners through emotionally ambiguous terrain, seamlessly oscillating between moments of intimacy and irritation, melancholy and playfulness.

Ludwig Berger is a landscape sound artist, educator and musician. In his compositions, installations and performances, he enables intimate and playful sonic encounters with plants, animals, buildings and geological entities. He is founder and curator of the label Vertical Music, which releases field recordings and experimental music. Berger holds degrees in electroacoustic composition, as well as musicology, art history and literature. As a sound researcher and teacher at the Institute for Landscape Architecture at ETH Zurich from 2015-2022, he studied the sonic dimension of Japanese gardens, alpine glaciers and urban landscapes, which among other things led to the release of the acclaimed album trilogy ‘Melting Landscapes’, ‘Dammed Landscapes’ and ‘Buried Landscapes’.



ALBUM TRACKLIST
1. what seed quests for a coralline mud slump
2. where the body’s distant arrivals 
3. bake airwaves into symbols? 
4. like aurochs who fraternised with syntax of the riverbed
5. we stop short, frothy, outdoing the grass
6. rake a song-gush from the outcrop
7. or the noun of naïve particles
8. leeching off the glow-work of organ rooms  
9. we go candied in the marrow
10. grow dream-bark, a tree

CREDITS
Music written and produced by Ludwig Berger
Cover image by Paulin Rogues
Track list poem by Daisy Lafarge
Mastering by Manuel Oberholzer VFBM

OUS047
www.ous.ooo

Garden of Ediacara

rake a song-gush from the outcrop

Buy on Bandcamp

Ludwig Berger - 06 - rake a song-gush from the outcrop

For seven months Russia has been waging a disgusting war in Ukraine. Constantly, we learn new horrific truths about what the occupiers have done on the land, that they proclaim is theirs. We believe Ukraine will be free again and rightful judgement will be brought upon those, who hide their violent, genocidal intentions behind the mask of lies.

With our first compilation - ‘Soteria’ - we want to aid the fight for freedom, that is still ongoing. We at Xpone stand strongly in support of the Ukranian people and against the Russian terrorist regime. We don’t acknowledge the new territories annexed by the occupier, nor the old, and condemn the blatantly fake "referendums" that took place from 23-27 September 2022 on the territories of self-proclaimed “DNR”, “LNR”, and the occupied Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions.

All proceeds from this release will go to Livyj Bereh — a volunteer organisation, which helps to rebuild the homes of those affected by the Russian invasion, as well as provides constant aid for the Ukranian military.

We thank everybody, who participated and all those, who are willing to support the cause.

Design by lovvlifer
Mastering by qwqwqwqwa

XCOMP01

mu tate - Almost Loosing Control

Roadmaps on the palms
Braided, fold over
Where the shore meets the ebbing sea
Forever touching, forever adrift

Whispers of the history fade
Where the sea drapes waning waves
Only to retrace echoing trails
Abiding in ceaseless rims

Rooted in the fertile soil of hauntology, Amulet of Tears presents: 'Before We Melt into the Sea' - chimerical shreds of memoir.  Foraying intervals coiled in visceral resonance, which appear as abyssal, ancestral echoes of elusive moments, where the past unfolds in attendance, like a vapor that forbids to fade.  

Phantoms colliding to forge ahead for what’s to come or to drag us back into the shades of what we once were - enshadowed by imprints of past, present, and future, overlapped upon one another.

Before We Melt into the Sea

yolabmi - Styx

high sugar

@starleaf
The 44th release of katharsis is the debut album “Late Bloomer” by the malmö-based entity Starleaf. A whisper caught between interstellar winds, a tale of a cosmic protagonist - something growing, something distant and near at once. The album manifests the ethereal spirit of Starleaf with deep rhythmic pulses of bass sprouting from the deep, strong melodic forces of trancey synths and hard-hitting space-warping percussion.

Starleaf is an organism thriving on the edge of the comprehensible, drawing from energies that defy the natural laws we claim to know. In its branches, rhythms weave, harmonic growth pulses, and textures bloom from the nexus of the organic and the alien. Its origins are a paradox of seed and starlight, where sound becomes a tendril, twisting through Malmö’s underground and far beyond.

releases September 30, 2024

Artwork by jjjacob
Mastering by jjjacob & Starleaf

Late Bloomer

Brucebo

premiere: Starleaf - Brucebo

Lapinou Nonstop

Kara - Lis Coverdale - Buried Trig

A piece in triple time typical of a waltz. But with spatial elements as always...
Thanks to Djouby for his intergalactic guitar. (stratocaster) 🎸🎸

Link Djouby : https://soundcloud.com/djouby

Space Waltz

Dialect - Under~Between

From Under~Between.
Available March 19, 2021.

Learn more: https://smarturl.it/rvngnl67

Dialect - Under~Between

RVNG Intl.