Bristolian artist, illustrator and toymaker Ed Cheverton debuts as Earth Mother Spectral Pilot with a cosmology-inspired melodic ambient album on SWIMS. 

The album is a musical accompaniment to visual works created during a period of deep obsession with cosmology. Snippets of music, loops and improvised explorations coalesced into a set of tracks.

"Earth Mother" and "The Spectral Pilot" are two characters from a comic about two humans that get stranded in a chaotic dimension of space called The Spectrum and are transformed into mythical beings.

True to his craft, Cheverton has enhanced the album with thematic art in the form of series of illustrations within the tape insert and a postcard + fold-out comic/zine accompanying physical orders.

PREVIEW: Earth Mother Spectral Pilot (Ed Cheverton)

The inaugural release for SWIMS, a new experimental-focused imprint of Cold Blow, who are releasing the LP alongside London label and NTS residents Kit Records.

French lifeguard and sonic artist Roméo Poirier’s long sold out debut tape finally gets a vinyl reissue. “Plage Arrière” is a deep sea meditation on a constellation of Greek beaches across three islands. Trumpets, echo-clicks and Harold Budd-esque shimmer piano whirl together on these seductive scapes, which recall the sub-aqeaous ambitions of Jürgen Müller or Jan Jelinek inspecting a coral reef. 

Like sand-caked postcards, or pieces of seaglass tumbled and re-engineered by their surroundings, each piece exists a keepsake from the song's namesake beach. 
These missives glide in and out of earshot, bustling like miniature engines, finely tuned and rhythmically confounding. They echo the factory sampling work of YMO on Technodelic: industrial but somehow good-natured, a symbiosis of machinery and wildlife - like an artificial reef or propeller blades smothered in algae.

Plage Arrière is Roméo’s second album this year following “Kystwerk”, where he joined forces with the Norwegian poet Lars Haga Raavand.

The album has been remastered for vinyl by Sam Annand of Esk. Building on its original artwork, the vinyl edition features new photography by Roméo himself.

Roméo Poirier: Plage Arrière ‎LP [KR22V/SWIM01]

"Following Roméo Poirier’s much loved collage ‘Plage Arrière’ LP, the blessed matrimony of SWIMS and Kit Records spawns this enigmatic beauty by undisclosed figures working as Electric Capablanca, hitting a mark of toytronica and pastoral charm somewhere between Isan, Cluster, Laurie Spiegel or Werkbund

Like watching bucolic scenes become frayed under the influence of acid, ‘Puzzles & Studies’ unfolds on the mind with a gently poetic, lysergic quality. It sounds like the work of drifting minds who’ve been at it for a good while, but the labels are being cryptic about the provenance of Electric Casablanca, so let the guessing games begin in earnest.

A patchwork jigsaw of melodic rivulets are carried on effortlessly diverse rhythms ranging from sloshing to brittle and windswept, stepping into and out of the grid at their wont. Seeping in with the lather of flyaway arps and arcing pads in ‘Baltic Variation’ the LP turns in nine stages from the concise, hallucinatory framework of ‘Zugzwang’ to crisp, brooding Metamatics-style IDM/electro in ‘Karpov Counter’ to lump-in-throat swells of angelic strings and choral sighs on ‘Casablanca Spin’, before it all really becomes diffuse on the B-side with a captivating trio of chamber-like mirages, and comms to rest in the percolated glossolalia and tape-weft widescreen scaring of ‘Gluoco Piano’ that wraps the LP up in a pretty bow and a thizzing kiss on your forehead." 
- Boomkat

"Electric Capablanca is a mystery artistic outfit who, on this evidence, are lovers of pastoral landscapes, innocent lullabies and day dreaming. This collection is a spellbinding one with clean, crisp synths and distant pads, soft focus arps and, in some cases, gentle IDM patterns all washing over you time and again. The music here is too detailed and meaningfully structured to be classed as ambient: it demands close attention and rewards it in kind, either with soul soothing and diffusive moods or more edgy drone tracks, amongst a range of other immersive styles." 
- Juno

Puzzles & Studies

Electric Capablanca - "Puzzles & Studies" LP Teaser

Out on vinyl, digital & streaming on 1st of July 2020. Visit our Bandcamp for more info.

Finomehanika

[SWIM03] Robert Merlak: Finomehanika (clips)

Those familiar with the first SWIMS album by Roméo Poirier will likely be as thrilled as us about the juxtaposition of his soothing aquatic ambience, with the intensity of Robert's work. The result is a wonderful symbiosis. The distinct sound of both artists conversing, merging, dividing, submerging.

Please download, enjoy, share with a friend and if you haven't yet - check out Robert's Finomehanika album on our Bandcamp.

“Delicately assembled combinations of organic and electronic sounds, wherein piano, field recordings and synths are made indistinguishable from one another in a layered motion of abstract ambience and gratifyingly crunchy textures”
- Steph Kretowicz, The Wire

"Sound collages that capture the feeling of moving in and out of sleep."
- Joshua Minsoo Kim, Tone Glow

"Finomehanika’s cover art is indicative of the music contained inside. The exposed corrugated steel, peeling paint and futurist structures that interlock hint at a tussle between the familiar and otherworldly, a synthesis of real-world materials and a preternatural focus reserved for the most experimental of compositions."
- Matt Blair, If-Only

Robert Merlak: Skele (Roméo Poirier Stereo Shuffle Remix)

London/Helsinki based ambient & experimental sister of @cold-blow-records
SWIM03: Finomehanika by Robert Merlak
SWIM02: Puzzles & Studies by Electric Capablanca
SWIM01: Plage Arrière by Roméo Poirier

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