Andrea Bruera is a musician from the Italian Alps, near the French border. After playing in various post-rock, metal and experimental bands, he started his own solo project, nepantla, with just a laptop and a rusty electric bass in 2012. He put out a self released EP on OD the next year and started playing live across Italy. Three years later, in 2015, he drops the mask. He decides to start using his own name, to expand his sound palette by adding a mandolin, some synths, manipulated percussions and field recordings, equally inspired by Tim Hecker, Neurosis, Lawrence English. Along these lines he crafts some new music, which will eventually come out in april 2015 in an EP called 'Lost, Found'. His home, now, is a newborn label/collective named SØVN, which Andrea created together with Guybrush and Stefano Venegoni, also member of Dropp and visual artist.
credits

released on 25th April 2015 

Composed and recorded in the winter between 2014 and 2015, in Turin and Barcelona 
Artworks by Anna Rubi. 
Mixed by Andrea Bruera. 
Mastered by Guybrush.

https://sovnrecords.bandcamp.com/album/lost-found

Andrea Bruera - Lost, Found [SVN001] (fragments)

Guybrush is music for pirates. He was born between two legs and drinking instant coffee.
Grown up in a small town where he became fascinated by the noise of the small things, he starts to play guitar in a punk band. After trying to destroy himself several times into music he approaches to sound engineering and to electronic music. After a brief period living between London and Bristol he moves to The Hague where he studies electroacoustic music at the Institute of Sonology.
Inspired by artists such as James Turrell, David Lynch, Bernard Parmegiani and Paul Auster he combines uncanny multilayered acoustic sounds with the gloomy and unstable computer music aesthetic.
"That is not what I meant at all" is his debut ep, released on SØVN, that is his new home shared with Andrea Bruera and Stefano Venegoni, graphic artist and member of Dropp.

“These 18 minutes of sound are an attempt to explore the treadmill, the unknown and states of psychological panic."

Picture by Maria Elettra Esteri

releases 03 June 2015

Composed and mixed in The Hague between November 2014 and May 2015.
Special thanks to all the amazing people I've met at the Institute of Sonology. 

Guybrush - That is not what I meant at all [SVN002] (fragments)

Giulia Rae is the solo project of Giulia Francavilla, an Italian composer, researcher, performer and sound designer based in Turin, Italy. In academia, she obtained her Master's degree from the Sonology Institute in Den Haag, Netherlands, where she works as a Research Associate. In the real world, she first started performing in the local punk and noise-rock scene. Later, she started exploring new pathways cutting across algorithmic and club-oriented music as Giulia Rae, performing across Europe and publishing on labels such as Light Item, Ovaal, Intersezioni, Solium Records, Guerrilla Bizarre. Since 2021 she carries out a series of acousmatic compositions for multichannel systems entitled Flow States, where she explores data-driven composition and 3D sound. During 2022 she worked as an artist in residency in the studio for 3D audio at the University of Paris VIII and at iMAL studios in Brussels.

𝘧𝘪𝘦𝘭𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘴 𝘮𝘪𝘹𝘦𝘥 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘥𝘪𝘨𝘪𝘵𝘢𝘭 𝘴𝘺𝘯𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘵𝘪𝘤 𝘴𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘤𝘳𝘰𝘴𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘭 𝘱𝘭𝘢𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘥𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘷𝘢𝘴𝘵 𝘨𝘦𝘰𝘨𝘳𝘢𝘱𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘢𝘭 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦𝘴
𝘮𝘰𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘤𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘰𝘣𝘫𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘴 𝘮𝘦𝘦𝘵 𝘦𝘢𝘤𝘩 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘪𝘯 𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴𝘤𝘢𝘱𝘦𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘴, 𝘢𝘪𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳

The notions of immersive sound and listening experience shape Nocturnal Drift, Rae’s latest EP. The music follows a slow pace, as suggested by the title - creating a space within sound, and giving the listener the possibility to explore it. The landscape alternates between dreamy and nightmarish; between close-ups and long shots; between sonic objects which are easy to grasp and impossible to seize.
Nocturnal Drift, closing the release, was born as a site-specific multichannel piece made for Kinetic Sounds, a custom-built sound system of rotating speakers developed by Klankvorm and Macular Collective. It was composed in May 2022 during a 3-week residency at iMAL (Brussels) and then readapted for stereo.
Spinning Tree and Canyon Blu came later, still embracing those traces of absurdity felt through shaking gear, cyclical gusts of warm wind, circuits hidden by the trees.

The EP comes as a limited edition cassette, whose artwork was created by LAPO SORRIDE.


Spinning Tree

Nocturnal Drift

Canyon Blu

YokoKono is part of a wider creative process of Cristiana Palandri, artist that creates a double identity from visual arts and music bonding together.

After playing electric guitar in various progressive rock and experimental bands, from 2011 she started djing and producing her electro acustic music. Her music influences are coming from psychedelic music such as Acid Mothers Temple, CAN and from Steve Reich’s minimalism : YokoKono stands for a polyhedral and multi-shaped electronica, that spaces in between acid sounds to drone reaching IDM.

The album is inspired by a chapter of Victor Hugo's 'Toilers of the Sea', 'Sub Umbra' is an exploration of the pitch-black, menacing, timeless shadow of the Cosmos, moments before its birth.

Recorded in 2014/15. 
Mixed by Umberto Saba Dezzi
Mastered by Andrea Prato 
Thanks to ULSD

YokoKono - Sub Umbra [SVN004] (fragments)

Release date: 09/01/2018
Limited edition cassette and digital download.

https://sovnrecords.bandcamp.com/

African Ghost Valley - AKI (Preview)

Incandenza is the second ep by Guybrush, one of the SØVN founders. After published "That is not what I meant at all" in 2015 he has immersed himself in a deep long journey, living between Paris and Montreal and touring around Europe alongside Andrea Bruera.

This ep isn’t something to consider as a whole but rather a multitude of point of views: “I image myself as a composer and a listener walking on a corridor with a lot of windows. Each window overlooks on a different landscape with its own peculiar objects. You’ll never know exactly what’s out there, they’re just glimpses of uncertainty”.
Incandenza is the outcome of a fragmented travel where things haven’t be necessarily related, it’s a collage of different genres and hasty composing decisions.

Incandenza is an homage to Hal and James O. Incandenza and to all the people at the Enfield Tennis Academy.

Bandcamp

Guybrush - Incandenza [SVN018] (fragments)

canopy hoc is a solo project by So Oishi, an electronic music producer and DJ from Tokyo, Japan. He started DJing 10 years ago when he lived in New York City, inspired by the local scenes of underground techno and psychedelic trance. He moved to the Netherlands in 2012 and studied electroacoustic music at the Institute of Sonology, where he met Guybrush, one of SØVN's founding members. “Playground” is his debut EP. While his music ranges over techno, electronica, ambient, and experimental, a perpetual state of flux is always his main subject.

Canopy Hoc - Playground [SVN003] (fragments)

Volkatovicz is the outcome of a long period of music creation conducted by a search minded person. Constantly seeking the perfect sound Volkatovicz plays with nature and modular recordings. During his musical journey he bumped into "Evo-Sonic", an important pirate radio station in Germany during the 90’s that has encouraged him to make music.

Remschaid Pres. Volcatovicz - Reagenwald [SVN009] (fragments)

Richard Francés is a French composer/musician born in Alicante in 1981 and now based in Paris.

His project Acid Fountain seeks to bring together abstract and representational art, improvisation and composition, experimental and dance musics.

“The concept of a "mineral society" comes from the book "Vers la sobriété heureuse" (Towards a happy sobriety) by Pierre Rabhi, as opposed to the idea of a "vegetal society". A mineral society is the one we live in, where we are destroying ecosystems in order to extract the oil we need for our mobile phones, computers, cars, food and nearly everything else we own.
I am trying to live in a more ecological and ethical way, by growing my own food and using my music to spread a message and make sense of things that surround me.”

acidfountain.bandcamp.com
www.hyletapes.com

Artwork by Rixt de Boer

Rixt de Boer is a multidisciplinary dutch artist, her production includes photos, videos, drawings and installations. She investigates the border between the 2 and 3 dimensional through different point of views and the way we relate to the landscape, often by highlighting the cultural and symbolic value of objects or matters from our everyday surroundings. The main core of her work is how these elements play a role within the collective memory. With a conceptual approach Rixt work relates to themes as history, traditions and habits.

For "Société Minéral" Rixt focused on a collection of stones that was given to her mother by a friend. His father throughout his life had collected the stones but when he passed away, his son did not know what to do with the collection. Therefore he decided to give them away to someone he thought would appreciate this great variety of stones and minerals from all over the world. De Boer made rubbings on paper of 30 different stones, turning them into 2-dimensional surfaces, one drawing for each cassette. This transformation symbolizes the loss of the value of the stones after the one thing keeping them together disappeared.

www.rixtdeboer.com

Acid Fountain - Société Minérale [SVN10] (fragments)

‘Devoid’ actually is Amelia’s real name. She sees this as a sign of a mysterious ancestral connection to the Native American tribes hunted into hiding in Vermont’s history, forced to change their identity to survive. In her mind, the words of ‘Foucault’s Pendulum’ by Umberto Eco and ‘The Amber Spyglass’ by Philip Pullman created a compulsion to communicate with metaphysical “dust” through computer music programs.

Classically trained in the choral tradition, Devoid was introduced to musical programming by her father, whose early passing in 2004 catalysed her interest in production.

Hypogeum was composed and recorded at the New City Galerie, during an artist’s residency. It is an album dedicated to the Water Protectors. As such, the main inspiration were underground culture and tribal resistance. Devoid’s musical performances originated in the artist basements of Burlington, Vermont (ever wondered where Sen. Bernie Sanders started from?), that were secret safe spaces for free thinkers. The human timeline is strewn with subterranean enclaves and temples, where people gathered for protection in times of great war and natural disaster, or simply to pray. Amelia recognizes that many people that gather underground are beings that have also explored the...  more
credits
released March 30, 2017

Thank you to Joseph Pensak and New City Galerie for the generous artist’s residency, where this album was composed and recorded. Love to Vincent Marksohn, Grace Weaver, Abigail Connolly and Dale Donaldson.

Hypogeum is dedicated to the Water Protectors. Mni Wiconi.

Amelia Devoid - Hypogeum [SVN011] (fragments)

La Salina (“the salt pan” in English) is the debut album by Giorgio Sarno.
Despite having trained as a jazz guitarist, Giorgio got involved in the electronic music scene in Turin, Italy, with his band Dropp. They published a string of EPs and an LP on White Forest Records between 2012 and 2015, and their sound was a cross-breed of Lorenzo Senni’s synth-heavy experimentation and Holy Other’s sampling style, within more canonical song structures.

And yet, La Salina is a solo prepared guitar album. All the sounds come just from his guitar, a bunch of pedals and a tube amp. A salt pan, after all, emerges when the water has dried up: and La Salina is the core of Giorgio’s sense of music – the salt of its earth. The music in La Salina came after Giorgio moved to Marseille, in the south of France, during a windy spring in 2016. And that city had a huge impact on him. As he recalls, “Here I started to completely change my perspective and my previous beliefs. The city is overwhelmed by the sun, surrounded by harsh rocks and by the Mediterranean scrub, the houses are all painted in white and yellow and everything is full of light. Here all things are down to the bone, there’s no space for ambitions or celebrations, life goes on frantically and the city forces you to reconsider your priorities, eroding your beliefs and drying useless trappings, your personality is your personal bedrock”.

The guitar sound too, is stripped down, essential. The sustain is taken away by the preparation Giorgio applied to it, and the notes take a rhythmic quality which is not artificial at all, rather completely organic and bound to the strings’ vibration. A perfect example of this is track number 2, Agavi, where the notes bounce on a sustained, quasi-sinusoidal feedback, and never expand, but rather collide against one another. Sometimes, however, there is in Giorgio’s music a tension towards an opening, like in track number 3, which carries the same name as the album, La Salina, and which is accompanied by a music video which tries to capture the visual essence of the feelings behind La Salina. There, as in track number 5, Les Beaux Jours, the opening is reached by morphing the prepared guitar sounds into a gigantic drone. Track number 7, Un angolo di luce, which serves as the closing track, lets sustain back into the guitar sound, and thus conveys a different feeling of opening: that of the warm summer light of Marseille – and this light fills every corner of the sound space.

Giorgio Sarno - La Salina [SVN019] (fragments)

Ido Bukelman is an Israeli multi-instrumentalist and one of the owners of the label OutNow Records, which specializes in jazz and contemporary improvised music - leaning towards the free edges of contemporary music-making (quite appropriately, Ido cites Ornette Coleman as one of his main inspirations). He is currently living in Berlin and he played and recorded both as a solo artist and as part of trios and duos (Ground Birds, EFT), playing Jazz festivals all around Europe. He started out using as main instruments the acoustic guitar, the banjo, and various percussions, but in recent times has narrowed down his explorations to the acoustic guitar.

The Wire journalist Bill Meyer, when reviewing his album called “Solo” (The Wire 336), states that “this stuff needs to punch out of the speakers”. And in some passages of the present EP, named “If You Came By The Rough Road”, which we are produ to release, the assault is full on.


My Home's Across The Water - recorded at the Setz Kasten, Vienna
Turn Behind the Pig-Sty - recorded at Madame Claude, Berlin
All The Way Back Rotterdam Was On My Mind - recorded at City Art Rotterdam, Rotterdam



www.idobukelmanmusic.com
credits
released February 20, 2019

Mastered by Avi Elbaz

My Home's Across The Water - Ido Bukelman - If You Came By The Rough Road [SVN020]

Jeff Lane is the man behind Tereshkova, whose record Bubblegum Études is the 21st release by SØVN Records. Jeff has recently moved to Seattle, WA from Portland, OR, where he started his own label Never Anything Records back in 2015, creating a gathering point for local ambient and experimental sounds. Bubblegum Études is a record which was recorded all along during those inspiring Portland years, between 2016 and 2019. 

The packaging for the release indeed tries to play along this mood: the cassette tape is contained within a case built out of old LEGO pieces, found who-knows-where on the shores of ever-present childhood. But this time, the LEGO pieces are glued together and can’t be reused: a final playful prank, which turns on its head the nature of LEGO and probably will leave some listeners disappointed… after all, what’s better than listening to music while playing with LEGO, dreaming of Hawaii?

Made by Jeff Lane
Mastered by Philippe Vandal
For Ariel

Hawaii - Tereshkova - Bubblegum Études [SVN021]

Kru Love

Springback

Rough

Tunnel

Motor

Dilian - Red Program

Dilian - Esca

Dilian - Excuse

Dilian - Pin

Dilian - Navarte

Dilian - Lassoed

Preview of the forthcoming ep by Machinefabriek & Berlinde Deman. 

Pre orders available at https://sovnrecords.bandcamp.com/album/luchtwezen

Limited edition CD (Glassmastered)and digital download

Luchtwezen - Machinefabriek & Berlinde Deman [Preview]

Bjarni Gunnarsson is an Icelandic composer, programmer and academic involved in computer music and algorithmic composition, while being a faculty member at the Institute of Sonology, Royal Conservatory, in The Hague. Bjarni has performed his works in festivals such as Tectonics, Rewire, Today's Art, Sonar and Presences Electroniques released his music on labels such as Vertical Form, 3LEAVES, Granny or Tartaruga Records. At the centre of his attention is sound as a process - internal activity and motion happening within sounds, which in Bjarni’s compositions are always fluid, fuzzy objects.

Cendres consists of two electroacoustic compositions that have been performed in a multichannel setting: respectively, on the Acousmonium at GRM's Sonology concert in Paris in October 2019, and at the Institute of Sonology in The Hague in June 2018. For this release, they have been totally reworked and extended in duration while reduced to a stereo format. The central notion underlying both pieces is that of dynamic intervention: both in a technical sense, as the algorithm is based on it, as well as conceptually, in that the music is created through intervention and interruption on flowing sounds .

Bjarni Gunnarsson - Cendres (preview)

Bjarni Gunnarsson - Polytree (preview)

Forward-looking, at the intersection between ambient, noise, drone, post-everything. 

It revolves around music, but is keen on all art forms. 

Home is whole Earth.

SØVN

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