cold

one kiss

"a path with a name" releases 09/15/23

sodagong.bandcamp.com/album/a-path-with-a-name
sodagong.bandcamp.com/album/a-path-with-a-name
sodagong.bandcamp.com/album/a-path-with-a-name

Atte Elias Kantonen - "mire"

murmuro del mago con la mascara color hueso

Guitar sketch I made for Ben last year. Just wanted to do something fun and different.

Halo4K2DJ

London label @tobago-tracks serving up a vital one as @lovefear1 makes his debut album proper

Big on detail, ‘Schema’ imagines symbiotic futures. A spooling suite of sonic sensitivity and dank, lysergic vision, complete with a cameo from Sydney Bass originator 3NDLESS. 

10 tracks found in a hazy interzone of downbeat-adjacent styles, and it’s woozy number ‘Mother Null’ getting the premiere treatment today.

Pre-order: https://lovefear.bandcamp.com/album/schema

Mother Null

Premiere: Lovefear - Mother Null [TT]

The first katharsis release of 2025 will be the album "Modular" by danish artist and composer Simon Littauer, known for his live performance on modular synthesizers with a very melodic and almost scientific approach to music. As an experimental approach for the katharsis release-schedule, "Modular" will have a long rollout with singles dropping each month until the final album will release on January 10th (even though bandcamp doesn't allow more than 90 days pre-order).

The album is a culmination of Littauer’s over 9 year-long journey with eurorack modular synthesizers. All the tracks on the album are recorded as one-takes, with no multi-track recordings or editing. Having spent infinitely many hours trying to master the instrument (even taking lessons in hardware design, coding, and electronic engineering to develop custom modules for his setup), Simon Littauer has played over a hundred live concerts on the system, including performances at Roskilde Festival (DK), By:Larm Festival (NO) and Spot Festival (DK).

On ‘Modular’, Littauer explores euphoric breakbeats on club-ready tracks like ‘Phicet’, ‘Swamp’ and ‘Xenon’, which might remind the listener of the universe of artists like Skee Mask, Richard Devine and Lanark Artefax, while calm and soothing atmospheres are introduced on ambient cuts like ‘Melo’. On ‘Jona’ Littauer is joined by J. Ludvig III - the drummer of Erika de Casier, for an ambient trance journey with live drum breakbeats. Overall, the album is a playful and experimental album that travels through many different genres, but with a consistent melancholic tone, that maintains the listener all the way through the 12 tracks.

Littauer explains, ‘‘My vision was to build a portable modular system on which I could perform, and improvise, while being able to recall sequences, samples, and settings reliably during live concerts, without having to re-patch between tracks. I feel like I can confidently say, that I succeeded with that. The sound and structures of the album are formed by how I configured my modular synthesizer, what made sense in a live performance context as well as other artists I heard during the process of making it. The complexity, impressive sound design, and machine-fluency of Richard Devine, whom I was fortunate enough to have as a teacher in the lead-up to the making of the album. And having followed the eurorack scene for many years - artists like Colin Benders and Catharina Barbieri have influenced my work as well’.

Littauer’s modular system is a 208 hp eurorack setup developed throughout 7 years. It is based around a Vector sequencer by Five12, the ER-301, configured as a live-effects engine and mixing console, two Hector modules from Poly, and two Bitboxes - one containing modulation signals and the other one containing oscillators and drums. One reverb module and a single module for macros and transitions developed by Littauer himself. The entire album is recorded on the ER-301 itself, during live performance. 

Full album releases January 10th, 2025

Mastered by Joel Krozer at Six Bit Deep
Artwork by jjjacob
PR by Fomo PR

premiere: Simon Littauer - Melo

Title:
Clang

Dates:
21-Dec-2024 (inception), 21-Dec-2024 (finalised), 22-Dec-2024 (released)

Artists:
Music composed, performed, produced by Norman Freund
Artwork by Norman Freund

BandCamp Purchase:
https://normanfreund.bandcamp.com/track/clang

Description:
I have been working on an expressive drone, the NOF_ExciteThePipe to supplement my performances on the Soma Cosmos and Soma Pipe. A stable release has been completed, time to put it through it's paces. And it's my Christmas Holidays, so plenty of time to ponder, ruminate, experiment and lay down some tracks with my Soma Cosmos, Soma Pipe,  human voice, and myNS Wav electric violin. The COSMOS was loaded with the Rhythmic Firmware release R1.51.

This is pretty much a one or two take improvised recording three movement piece. Movements one, two and three were recorded into Ableton Live to capture the ideas and final minor adjustments to the mix. Some reverb was added onto movement one as well as a granular synthesiser, apart from this no other effects were applied in Live as the main effect device was the hardware Soma Pipe, switching between various algorithms live during the recording. A touch of unpredictability was added through the memory station of the Soma Cosmos.

Movement one, features the NOF_ExciteThePipe drone feed from a custom programmed (programming and concept by Norman Freund) Max standalone executable to the Soma Pipe, to the Soma Cosmos memory station, then fed back to the drone for the initial recording. This formed track three. Copies of track three were dropped into the granular synthesiser of Robert Henke, the Granulators III, forming a drifting harmony back drop.

Movement two, features the Soma Pipe played through the Soma Cosmos, feeding it human speech articulations and singing. Having all the Soma instrument dials there in front of me and having my hands free, allowed complete artistic freedom, for an organic performance.

The final movement, much quieter now, was played with my electric violin through the Soma Pipe, then through the Soma Cosmos. This comprised of four tracks, recorded in a layer fashion from Live, but each track used the drifting memory station capabilities of the Soma Cosmos, just a bit more challenging to lay down the violin bow to make adjustments on the Cosmos. The third track used the octaver of the Pipe to emulate the Bass and Cello sections. The fourth track used the Orpheus mode of the Pipe,  a twin resonator, where the resonator frequencies were adjusted live during the recording.


Clang

Am Fluss gelegen Ambient

Waterdemon

Following on from last year´s set of hallucinatory vignettes for Milan´s Haunter Records on "Jemi" and the dissection of the possible tearjerking sensibilities of self-help twitter bots on 'You'll Always Stay Beautiful' for Bristol´s NoCorner, @Broshuda glides on to casually deliver this glistening and equally heartfelt 7 Inch for Cologne based Imprint RDK Island.

On the A side, a reflection in the half light resonance of evening/dawn envelops the fractal heavily melodic core of 'Face2'. Floating in some ebulliently chilled out existence not that far, but still quite on its own trajectory, from some of Mouse On Mars most absorbing moments. An hypnagogic cityscape, brimming with lives, real and imagined.
On the flipside 'Voices' hypnotic melody-as-dream gives way to a smoldering state of aural unease, borderline anxiety creeping in, an "orchestra" of filtered, fading voices & realities. Gliding as a state unto itself, neither here nor there. This reality's what you make of it.

Bruno Silva (Ondness)

Release: 6th September 2019

Tracklist:
Face2 (5:04)
Voices (5:08)

Atte Elias Kantonen - "mire"

SODA GONG