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/

Vinyl & digital album

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Limen

MIRA新伝統 - Noumenal Eggs

UCC Harlo “United” LP - SUB028
Vinyl & digital: http://bit.ly/UCCHarlo-United

Release date (vinyl & digital):
March 22, 2019 

In United, her debut LP as UCC Harlo, classically-trained musician Annie Gårlid distills hauntological pop, sound art, medieval and baroque music, and left-field club production into a series of ecclesiastical-wave ventures.

Written over six years in Germany, United began on train commutes during Gårlid’s stint as a violist in an opera orchestra near Cologne and developed further during her time in Berlin. Through gestures such as reframing music by Bach and Magister Zacharias through DAW experimentation and field recordings, United proposes sonic reconciliations between the old and the new. 

United also reflects the idea that sound and music always exist in broader, complex contexts loaded with historical and environmental information and mediated by internal emotional landscapes. For Gårlid, this acknowledgement is a metaphor for our urgent need to be attentive to non-human agencies and voices. United acts as a means of claiming a right to obscurity and of “sounding” ambivalence, doubt, and messiness in an age that demands transparency and clarity. 

Annie Gårlid is a New York-based writer, musician and musicology researcher concerned with our ever-shifting, tenuous relationships with ecology, technology and care. 

Creating and discovering links between the old and the new, Gårlid operates equally in the realms of experimental, club and early music. She is a member of the Holly Herndon Ensemble and the band Songs, has collaborated with Caterina Barbieri, Bill Kouligas and Emptyset, and has performed with ASMR-artist Claire Tolan. She works regularly with an array of composers and artists, and performs as a viola player and singer in both Europe and the USA.

@uccharlo

Vinyl & digital

UCC Harlo "United" (SUB028)

Joshua Sabin "Sutarti" (SUB030)

Munich’s PYUR (Sophie Schnell) makes her Subtext debut with “Oratorio for the Underworld”, a nimble odyssey through vivid, otherworldly dreams.
Growing up immersed in her family’s work as shamans, Schnell draws on the techniques and stories of her upbringing, through which ephemeral forms, stories and colours seep into her sound—a synthesis of hyperreal sound design, dramaturgy and classical composition.

PYUR’s fascination with the space between life and death is expressed through the weaving together of the organic and sublime in a dramatic exercise in
expansive sonic worldbuilding.

The LP is a form of storytelling in which Schnell reimagines and takes on the roll of psychopomp, ushering the listener into a borderless realm. She relays rich legends while warm, airy timbres (courtesy of cellist Teresa Alvarez and violinist Juan Zalba Fuentes) serve as guides throughout.

Working largely in isolation over a period of two years, Oratorio for the Underworld is a document of “inward archaeology,” and marks an intimate
yet grandiose journey through the psyche, exploring the ecstatic emotional boundaries between life and death, and body and spirit. Over the two year period, Schnell constantly found herself inventing new and unconventional
compositional techniques with which to keep her writing dynamic—a process key in countering her own obsession with the mythos of Oratorio.

The Bandcamp version of this album contains seven tracks not available elsewhere.

CD & Download

PYUR "Oratorio For The Underworld" (SUB032)

Koenraad Ecker & Frederik Meulyzer “Carbon” LP (SUB033)

Myxomy - Myxomy (SUB042)

Stream & download: https://myxomy.bandcamp.com/album/myxomy

Artistic collaborations don't have to be exhaustive, competitive or combative. And for Berlin-based producers James Ginzburg and Ziúr, their work together as myxomy has been almost effortless. Both artists bring with them a deep history of recording in vastly different circumstances: Ginzburg has worked on bass music, folk, experimental techno (as half of Emptyset) and experimental drone, while Ziúr played in a number of bands before settling into her current explorative electronic mode. So when they started working together in 2020, it was their respective backgrounds that provided the touch-paper for an explosive artistic head-to-head.

Ginzburg instigated the process by sending Ziúr beats he'd made in Bristol in a former life, and Ziúr, fresh from finishing her PAN-released third solo album "Antifate", set about sculpting them into completely new forms. In response, Ziúr dispatched vignettes to Ginzburg and he did the same. As they exchanged ideas back and forth and lapsed into absurdity, the songs followed suit, evolving from raw concepts and loops into proper songs as both Ziúr and Ginzburg traded melodies, lyrics and production tricks. The duo's fragmented sketches and scribbles took on new life, channeled, refined and re-invigorated as they developed into anxious, hybridized pop jewels.

Their surprising stylistic choice is revealed immediately on opening track 'Sloppy Attempt', a fractured mood stabilizer that dissociates from Bristolian trip-hop into glossy android pop. Ziúr's singing voice carries the track into a sonic black hole, mutated into an alien gurgle as she gently coos the prophetic words, "a sloppy attempt won't cut it, no no." And as Ginzburg takes the reins on 'A little opaque', singing over Ziúr's twisted neon electronics, it's clear that both artists have pushed each other outside of their comfort zones, providing the reassurance and comfort necessary to evolve.

On 'In and Until', they find an exact median between their two most recent albums. Twanging hurdy-gurdy sounds remind of Ginzburg's 'crystallise, a frozen eye', compelled forward by brittle foley percussion we last heard on "Antifate". A scalding industrial boil of deranged synthesizer squeals and rolling drums parts like the Red Sea on 'Toxin Out', cooling to a crust for Ziúr's half-sung words to echo overhead. "Burn the bridges it's a choice, eat the rich, and throw up on the fuckbois."

"Myxomy" isn't an overtly political album, but driven by a desire to create and a shared philosophical space, Ziúr and Ginzburg are naturally outspoken. Their vision of pop is twisted through history and floated on frustration, growth and constant reinvention. It's a unique mix of polar elements - light and dark, noise and silence, joy and melancholy - that centers itself on one important theme: together, we're far more powerful than we ever could be alone. 
credits

releases November 12, 2021

All tracks written and produced by Ziúr and James Ginzburg
Album art by Stefan Fähler
Design by Philip Marshall
Artist photo by Kasia Zacharko
Mastered by Joker
Published by Multiverse Media Publishing © & ℗ Subtext / Multiverse LTD 2021
license

http://subtextrecordings.net/

Myxomy

Myxomy - A Little Opaque

From KMRU & Aho Ssan's Limen LP

Vinyl & digital album: https://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

http://subtextrecordings.net/

Limen

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Rebirth

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Resurgence

KMRU & Aho Ssan - Ruined Abstractions

Noumenal Eggs

Disembodiment

Howling Machines

Chronosis

Hosting of an Inorganic Demon

UCC Harlo “United” LP - SUB028
Vinyl & digital: http://bit.ly/UCCHarlo-United

Release date (vinyl & digital):
March 22, 2019 

In United, her debut LP as UCC Harlo, classically-trained musician Annie Gårlid distills hauntological pop, sound art, medieval and baroque music, and left-field club production into a series of ecclesiastical-wave ventures.

Written over six years in Germany, United began on train commutes during Gårlid’s stint as a violist in an opera orchestra near Cologne and developed further during her time in Berlin. Through gestures such as reframing music by Bach and Magister Zacharias through DAW experimentation and field recordings, United proposes sonic reconciliations between the old and the new. 

United also reflects the idea that sound and music always exist in broader, complex contexts loaded with historical and environmental information and mediated by internal emotional landscapes. For Gårlid, this acknowledgement is a metaphor for our urgent need to be attentive to non-human agencies and voices. United acts as a means of claiming a right to obscurity and of “sounding” ambivalence, doubt, and messiness in an age that demands transparency and clarity. 

Annie Gårlid is a New York-based writer, musician and musicology researcher concerned with our ever-shifting, tenuous relationships with ecology, technology and care. 

Creating and discovering links between the old and the new, Gårlid operates equally in the realms of experimental, club and early music. She is a member of the Holly Herndon Ensemble and the band Songs, has collaborated with Caterina Barbieri, Bill Kouligas and Emptyset, and has performed with ASMR-artist Claire Tolan. She works regularly with an array of composers and artists, and performs as a viola player and singer in both Europe and the USA.

@uccharlo

United

Ave Giove

UCC Harlo - Áve Giove

INTERVIEW / FEATURE:
self-titledmag.com/2019/02/21/ucc-harlo-united-album/

UCC Harlo - Ceres

Joshua Sabin "Sutarti" LP (SUB030)
Pre-order: https://joshuasabin.bandcamp.com/album/sutarti

Release date: July 5th, 2019
@joshuasabin

Sutarti

Joshua Sabin - Sutarti: VI

READ THE ARTICLE: https://www.paynomindtous.it/sutarti-joshua-sabin-subtext/
@subtext-recordings
@joshuasabin

Edinburgh-based composer and sound designer Joshua Sabin is an experimental artist which has been working since the mid-2010 with extensive sample and field recordings manipulation. He released his debut record, called Terminus Drift, for the now Berlin-based label Subtext Recordings in February 2017. 

Sutarti is the latest Joshua Sabin's work which will be officially made available tomorrow, July the 5th in vinyl and digital formats. While his debut album explored humans' relationship with the environment, space, and ubiquitous digital technologies, Sutarti draws influence from the psychoacoustic features and the compositional structures existing within early Lithuanian folk music. In this record, Sabin taps into the exterminated field recordings archive of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre Ethnomusicology massively editing, distorting, pitching, filtering, and manipulating them to better exploit the emotional impact of the human voice on the listener's conscious (and unconscious) self.

We are very happy to present you the third episode in the overall 40-minutes-long Sutarti record, split into six separate movements. Sutarti: III takes on with more than 6 minutes of archival voices radical recontextualizations, which, at the same time, manifest from Joshua Sabin's very personal, interesting and inspiring artistic research, and also try to directly reflect and recontextualize the universal, ancestral potency of the Voice as humans' primary means to express themselves.

Sutarti 

Joshua Sabin - 'Sutarti: III' [PAYNOMINDTOUS premiere / Subtext Recordings]

PYUR - Oratorio for the Underworld LP [SUB032]
Release date: October 10th, 2019

@pyur

Oratorio For The Underworld 

PYUR - Flowers And Silvers

READ > inverted-audio.com/premiere-pyur-manta-ride

Sophie Schnell’s @pyur project arrives in limbo via experimental exponents @subtext-recordings with a flutter and a crash: equal parts chaotic and peaceful, it’s a collective hallucination that merges mortal forms with the realm of the underworld.

Oratorio for the Underworld

PYUR - Manta Ride [Subtext Recordings]

Ecker & Meulyzer “Carbon” (SUB033)

Digital: https://eckermeulyzer.bandcamp.com/album/carbon

Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer make their Subtext debut with Carbon. 

Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank located on the island of Spitsbergen, Carbon grapples with the many contradictions that lie at the heart of our shift into the capitalocene. The project began in 2017, when Ecker and Meulyzer scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannesen.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was conceived of as an effort to preserve copies of seeds from key crop varieties, ensuring their persistence in the event of large-scale crises. Yet the area is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the permafrost to melt and putting the seed vault at risk. 

Across from the Seed Vault lie the decrepit remnants of Svalbard’s mining activities of the early 20th century; Carbon wrestles with the incongruities nestled in the town’s landscape. Reflecting on dissonances of stasis and change, closeness and distance, enclosure and expanse, as well as cynicism and hope, Ecker and Meulyzer consider the urgency of our situation while trying to sidestep all-too popular depictions of dystopia. In Ecker’s own words, “we don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.” 

From close, supple sounds to cold, brutal sonics, Carbon meditates on the many challenging questions and contradictions raised by the Seed Vault and its surroundings—a landscape that embodies and makes visible the many intertwined phenomena that shape our current predicament.

Ecker and Meulyzer, formerly known as Stray Dogs, have released works such as Wasteland, recorded in deconsecrated church in Antwerp, and Kalkar, recorded in the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany. 

Koenraad Ecker works in the fields of electro-acoustic music, field recording, radio plays, stage performance and text. Together with Andrea Taeggi, he is part of the Opal Tapes-affiliated duo Lumisokea. His output encompasses studio albums, audiovisual installations, texts, performances, and sound design for film. 

Frederik Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.

The ecological impact of the production of this record will be compensated through a carbon offsetting program .

Bandcamp

Ecker & Meulyzer - Metabolic Rift

Ecker & Meulyzer “Carbon” (SUB033)

Digital & CD: https://eckermeulyzer.bandcamp.com/album/carbon

Koenraad Ecker and Frederik Meulyzer make their Subtext debut with Carbon. 

Based on field recordings made at Norway’s Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a secure seed bank located on the island of Spitsbergen, Carbon grapples with the many contradictions that lie at the heart of our shift into the capitalocene. The project began in 2017, when Ecker and Meulyzer scored the performance “Frozen Songs,” a commission by Zero Visibility Dance Company led by Ina Christel Johannesen.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was conceived of as an effort to preserve copies of seeds from key crop varieties, ensuring their persistence in the event of large-scale crises. Yet the area is warming faster than anywhere else on earth, causing the permafrost to melt and putting the seed vault at risk. 

Across from the Seed Vault lie the decrepit remnants of Svalbard’s mining activities of the early 20th century; Carbon wrestles with the incongruities nestled in the town’s landscape. Reflecting on dissonances of stasis and change, closeness and distance, enclosure and expanse, as well as cynicism and hope, Ecker and Meulyzer consider the urgency of our situation while trying to sidestep all-too popular depictions of dystopia. In Ecker’s own words, “we don’t have the luxury to afford that kind of pessimism.” 

From close, supple sounds to cold, brutal sonics, Carbon meditates on the many challenging questions and contradictions raised by the Seed Vault and its surroundings—a landscape that embodies and makes visible the many intertwined phenomena that shape our current predicament.

Ecker and Meulyzer, formerly known as Stray Dogs, have released works such as Wasteland, recorded in deconsecrated church in Antwerp, and Kalkar, recorded in the cooling tower of a former power station in Germany. 

Koenraad Ecker works in the fields of electro-acoustic music, field recording, radio plays, stage performance and text. Together with Andrea Taeggi, he is part of the Opal Tapes-affiliated duo Lumisokea. His output encompasses studio albums, audiovisual installations, texts, performances, and sound design for film. 

Frederik Meulyzer is a percussionist active in projects including Belgian jazz band Hamster Axis of the One-Click Panther, contemporary music and theatre company Post uit Hessdalen, and experimental psych-krautrock band Slumberland.

The ecological impact of the production of this record will be compensated through a carbon offsetting program .

Ecker & Meulyzer - Growth

Eric Holm "Surface Variations" (SUB036)

Digital album pre-order: https://ericholm.bandcamp.com/album/surface-variations

http://subtextrecordings.net/

Surface Variations

Pre-order

Eric Holm - Alioth

Kistvaen

Vinyl pre-order

Roly Porter - Kistvaen

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

Playlists by Subtext Recordings