Vinyl & digital album: kmruahossan.bandcamp.com/album/limen

Released on April 29th, 2022

Last year, Kenyan sound artist Joseph Kamaru (aka KMRU) and French digital alchemist Niamké Désiré (aka Aho Ssan) were invited by Berlin Atonal to collaborate on a project for the festival's Metabolic Rift edition.

The duo had already been working together, but the offer provided the momentum to shift the conversation into another gear. Initially, they looked for thematic connections within their individual practices that might match Kamaru's meditative soundscapes with Désiré's crumbling cyberpunk expressionism, and surprisingly for two artists renowned for their grasp of minimalism, it was the opposite that drew their attention. Watching the world shift as it reacted to the spiraling pandemic, Kamaru and Désiré were moved to experiment with volume, physicality, and intense emotionality.

“I never made something so extreme," Désiré says of the duo's first recording, 2021's 'Ruined Abstractions', an extended composition that matches dense, powerful low-end drones with fractal digital fuzz and smokestack bruit. It set the mood for a back-and-forth that resulted in their seismic debut full-length, "Limen", described by the two acclaimed artists as an attempt to scrutinize the yin and yang of destruction and creation.

Cacophonous, concrete crunches fanfare the album's opening piece 'Resurgence' - the result of their Berlin Atonal commission - but the track refuses to languish in wrecking ball devastation. Instead, powerful synthesized harmonies ring from beneath the rubble, before stifling everything in a humid fuzz of dense, emotionally-charged cinematic electronics.

Influenced by the prescient post-apocalyptic mood of Katsuhiro Otomo's "Akira" and the mythological phoenix, an immortal bird said to be reborn from the ashes of its dying predecessor, "Limen" is an album that sonically snapshots the anxious, floral beauty of an explosion or the colorful intensity of a raging fire. It's rooted in concepts of duality - the idea something unsettling can be viewed from a different angle and re-interpreted.

On the album's epic, 21-minute centerpiece 'Ruined Abstraction I + II', swirling electromagnetic interference paints a haunted parallel vista that dissolves slowly into subtle, orchestral tones and booming, widescreen thuds.

Almost angelic closing track 'Rebirth' meanwhile is the most unashamedly beautiful composition Kamaru and Désiré have written together, but its choral bliss is doused in petroleum noise and saturated distortion.

"Limen" is an album that seeks to lift a veil of silence from the world, replacing it with maximalist bombast and vivid passion. It's a dynamic piece of work that finds its creators pushing themselves to the limits, deconstructing history as it detonates around us.

All tracks written and produced by Joseph Kamaru
and Niamké Désiré; mastered by Joker

Published by Multiverse Media Publishing
© & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2022

subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

Vinyl & digital album

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Ruined Abstractions

The Light That Flickers in the Mirror

The Light That Flickers In The Mirror

Nerve Net

Juju Space Jazz

Function Advance

The second release of POSITIVLAND by Mancunian artist:

Faff
@ffaf

PSTVLND 002 - 04/01/2024
positivland.bandcamp.com/

Limited ≈200 copies in Black vinyl, 180g.
Very Limited 26 hand-numbered copies, Splatter vinyl 180g
* Release Limited Edition 25/01/2024

****************************************
Note from the artist:


Faff’s Scrapbook.ep

This record is a collection of tracks I made from the start of 2019 to the end of 2021. They all exist completely independent of each other. My intention while working on music during this time was to create a time capsule/memory album for me to remind myself of my moments with. I had a lot of different experiences and substantially changed during this time. The early tracks were made by a completely different person than the person typing this. Of the 6 tracks on this EP, only one of them was made with the knowledge that it would be put together with the others and released as one cohesive article.

I wanted to make music again after abandoning it for 3 years. One of these tracks marks the turning point where a projected pipe dream of determined mastery was cracked through by what the speaker cone did when piano roll blocks were placed intuitively for the first time. 

In this .ep, I present:

THE CONCEPT

In its disjointedness, this music has presented itself to me as a scrapbook. It is rough around the edges, vague in its sentiment, and has more of an emotional than abstract association. While brainstorming for visual ideas to package these tracks in, I spat a bunch of words into a GAN and the words might be useful for you to get a sense of the general themes:  “synthesizer drum machine back catalogue emotional syneasthesia-inducing dance music” “vibrant energy synthesiser music record” “faffing about analogue synth music maker colour-changing light experiment” “bedroom studio acid bass sentimental rave artisan” “braindance analogue synthesiser data catalogue metaphysical music” “psychedelic synthesiser contemplation heartfelt breakbeat lullabies” “reaction diffusion rephlex records melancholic analogue music journal” “cerebral rave chromatic anthem dirge synth memories” “tr-808 analogue rave cerebral music energy ritual”

There is a dualistic nature to this EP, as it is a highly organised arrangement of totally disparate tracks. They are all (except one) built inside a DAW, but largely featuring live performance recordings of analogue hardware. The recordings are then processed after the fact. Layers on layers of humanity and machine, analogue and digital, specificity and ambiguity. All of the tracks are also subjectively experienceable pieces of music, but they sit in an objective folder structure on my laptop. Each one also was ignited by a unique occasion, but absorbs new meanings and connotations as time flows through and around them. These polarised paradoxes are key to the idea of this EP. Even to have a concept EP assembled from standalone tracks without any uniting concept is an example of the intertwining of opposites. Visuals associated are DAW architecture, poorly managed cables in thrown-together bedroom studio, piles of photographs printed out, computer folder structure, MIDI information in piano roll/automation envelopes, synthesiser encoders and pots.

Buy it:)!!

Special thanks and love go to Weefween, Robert and Chloe 

********************************************************************

credits
release January 4, 2024

Written, composed and produced in Manchester, UK, by Faff.
Mastered in Groningen, the Netherlands, by Johanz Westerman at Balyhoo Studio Mastering.
Designed in Manchester, UK, by Faff + Weefween + Positivland.
Distributed from Sardinia, Italy, by Desslab.

www.desslab.net
www.positiv.land

Faff - Voicenote (Snippet)

CD available directly from Important Records - imprec.com 

Strange Times is a virtuosic realization of contemporary
electroacoustic soundscapes composed and performed by Stephen
Ruppenthal and Gary R. Weisberg. With masterful employment of electroacoustic techniques and tools, including the original 70's Buchla Music Easel Ruppenthal used in the Electric Weasel Ensemble, these two artist create an essential, psychedelic, electro-acoustic experience.

Strange Times is a hallucinatory journey into our epidemic-ridden
times through a collection of startling sonic landscapes. From epic
acoustic journeys into re-imagining myth to the phantasmal soundscape world of the Bardo, Strange Times is not for the innocent or delicate listener. Time turns elastic, and folds in on itself; you are approaching the event horizon of a black hole. The only way to make sense of any of it is to mentally rewind; speed up or slow down the voices in your head in random attempts to find your way through this electroacoustic aether. Strange Times explores the ability of sound to alter consciousness, creating sonic environments, mental and physical states where one can allow the experience of listening to become transformative.

Stephen Ruppenthal (Berkeley, 1949) San Francisco Bay Area new music trumpeter, electroacoustic and text-sound composer, Stephen studied electronic music and composition with composer Allen Strange, and ethnomusicology with Lou Harrison, and holds a Masters of Arts Degree in Contemporary Musicology, writing the first comprehensive treatise in English of Sound Poetry, “History of the Development and Techniques of Sound Poetry in the Twentieth Century in Western Cultures.” Stephen was a founding member, along with Don Buchla and Allen & Pat Strange, of the Electric Weasel Ensemble, and more recently, with Brian Belet and Pat Strange, of SoundProof, and is known internationally for his live electroacoustic performances, and writings on text-sound
composition. Stephen has been composing and performing electroacoustic works for Buchla instruments since 1971. Flamethrower, a 2017 CD of electroacoustic works for trumpet and flugelhorn, by Allen Strange, Brian Belet, Bruno Liberda, and Elainie Lillios, and performed by Stephen is currently available from Ravello Records. 

Gary R. Weisberg, composer-sound designer-digital audio artist was
born 1951 in Brooklyn, NY. At age 2, Gary was exposed by his mother to the music of Brahms, Khatchaturian and Rimsky-Korsakov. He also had a fascination with dinosaurs. He first picked up a musical instrument in 1972, playing free- jazz improvisation on flute and alto sax. Gary moved to San Francisco in 1976 and was involved in a loosely knit collective of jazz and experimental musicians and artists, operating a small performance space called The Blue Dolphin. He studied music, computer programming and electronics at San Francisco State University, graduating with a degree in Electronic Music Composition. He spent two years building a modular analog synthesizer, and began composing electronic music and text-sound compositions for art/ photography gallery openings. From 1986-1994, Gary maintained a MIDI project studio for the production of his own music, as well as sound and music for TV/Film/Video productions. Since 1994, Gary has been composing PC-based experimental electronic music, as well as pieces
for electronic and acoustic instruments, occasionally performing with other composers and collaborating with visual artists. He currently resides in New York's Mid-Hudson Valley.

1. Post - Apocalyptic Biscuit (Ruppenthal)

you might wonder why i deleted the file for this one

bacon

時の性質は、様々なことから影響を受け、液体のように変わっていくのである。~  The nature of time, under numerous influences, changes like a liquid.

Umé Records presents the album "Equal Parts" by Great Britain's Paul Oednom.

Listen: https://umerecords.bandcamp.com/album/equal-parts

ume028

Download

Paul Oednom ~ Equal Parts (snippets)

Produced by: @alyrik
Mastered by: Alex at quiet details studios
Artwork by: Kryscina Karbouskaya
Label by: @alyrik
Release Date: August 29, 2025

support

𝐏𝐑𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐄𝐑𝐄 | alyrik - Monumentime (Outro) [Self Release]

bandcamp

VAATICAN RECORDS

Grellgelb

Subtext Recordings is a Bristol founded / Berlin based label curated by james ginzburg.