mark my words

Takeo.K - Long Season

After the last two weeks' high-octane entries, s.drift arrives to RA Radio with an odyssean wend through stellar textures, humming ambience, technological soundscapes and flickers of glitch.

Across live sets and a number of self-published productions, s.drift has cultivated an uncategorisable sound that slinks between ambient, sound-collage and the variegated rhythms of dance. Yet his music never settles satisfied into any of these and implies always something exceeding the confinement of a label and beyond the bounds of writing.

It's still difficult to describe both Cal's tunes and the way he mixes, where every echoic cymbal, every thrum of bass, every shift in pattern manages to come across laden with an unearthly significance. One thing Cal and I connected over was videogames, and there's this idea in game studies about the technological sublime... that the trick of sublimity in a game is that it always appears to exceed what it shows - a game does not provide you an entire world, it intimates the imagination that the world one inhabits could be entire. There's something similar, albeit with the difference that there's no illusion here, in Cal's mix. A universe is always present, if only as half-dreamt conjectures. There are suggestions of mechanism and the discordance of industry, wisps of dislocated voice and the embers of disco and hardcore and dub. But it's always a peripheral universe, there being something innately charitable in the attitude to music... a universe as-yet undiscerned, a whole lifeworld built of shards into which only the listener's intrusion can clarify some personal coherence. A music that creates a canvas atop which the paints are particles and tinctures, oblique spaces into which the listener might build.

It's like there's a secret in the music only s.drift knows. But this secrecy allures rather than excludes. It adumbrates a planetscape alive and coruscating, an ecosystem of ooze constituting an invitation to the tangibility of fantasy. And because of the skill with which Cal can conjure worlds, fantasy is here simply the given of reality. 

tracklist:

Strategy - A Distant Destination
Pendant - NMQ-HYT
Obi Uto - a5 cyclone version
Igor Dyachenko - TimeStretch
JJ+JS - CRX
Davis Galvin - Humidity 14
O Yuki Conjugate - Black Magic Box
Pavel Milyakov - Mondpfad
Disjecta - Smokehead
dub - Electricity in mind
J. Albert - la flor
effekt - wiki
Shinichi Atobe - World 4
Unt - Grids
Ghost Dubs - Wired Version
exael - choeo3
ELIZA B.C. - B1
James Bangura - Monterrey
Daniel Stefanik - b1_dambala_experience_001
AEM Rhythm-Cascade - Volnushka
Quatremont College - Safari
JEMAPUR - Frictize 412
Jeffre Cantu-Ledesma - Non-person
Ivory Black - Blood Oath
African-American Sound Recordings - Gauze
Kassir feat. Shumopeleng - Tommy III
d.towards - a+r atmo
CA2+ - Stop Mixing Tracks Like This
AQ*8 - traffic gem
Echoplex - Taking Off
Kero X Tetzzie - Trench Mesh
bookworms - disco demo
ccctyyy - C_RA_001
iokera (RIP) - asphodel fields
cypha - Xzirow Command
Hesaitix - Anticrime
Eszaid - Chained
xtclvr - deep scanning
Conna Haraway - 1702

artwork by @frasier77777 // addditional art and typesetting by @manicpixiedreamgirl555

Realist Alive Radio 004: s.drift

To accompany his interview in The Wire 495, Kolkata born Nilotpal Das, aka Bios Contrast, creates a special mix of his own tracks alongside music by influences including Aphex Twin, Madvillain, Deftones, AR Rahman, and My Bloody Valentine
https://www.thewire.co.uk/audio/tracks/wire-mix-bios-contrast-nilotpal-das

“The harmonium I use was gifted to my grandfather by his friend 45 years ago, and then he gave it to me,” says Kolkata musician Nilotpal Das. “I started playing when I was around 14. It’s really old and worn out, with an old sound to it. I wanted to experiment with how I can make drone sounds with it.”

The instrument appears in modified forms in his expansive, sometimes noisy, droning electroacoustic compositions. Another side of Das’s production is a collision-heavy club output that takes cues from “dubstep, noise, jungle, drum ’n’ bass” among numerous other sources of inspiration. Das works under his own name and the alias Bios Contrast, which “comes from the Greek word bios, meaning life, and contrast, which also means against life – I don’t really like the name but I’m stuck with it”.

As to how he decides which name suits each release, he leans into the confusion: “The stuff I put out is like a mixed bag, much like [Japanese video game designer] Hideo Kojima. I feel like now my stuff shouldn’t make sense all the time and that’s good, in a way I’ll have more artistic freedom.” His main tools are his laptop and Ableton, which he runs almost everything through. “My club tracks are mostly sample-based, and I also use harmonium samples,” he explains. Alongside soft-synths and samplers on his drone and ambient pieces he plays “guitar as well, but not as good as the harmonium. It’s been two years of playing the guitar – I used it with a bow like a string instrument. I also have a violin, but I play the guitar as a violin.”

Here, he curates a special Wire mix in advance of his new album SSAC42, which will be released on 27 June by Infinite Machine.
https://infinitemachine.bandcamp.com/album/ssac42

Tracklist:

Aphex Twin “Nightmail [London 14.09.2019]”
Deftones “Engine No 9”
Madvillain featuring Quasimoto “Shadows Of Tomorrow”
Wadaiko Matsuriza “Oni-mo-naku (Even A Demon Cries)”
Baatarjav “Tsuur”
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das “Crossing The River”
Caterina Barbieri “Math Of You”
Bios Contrast “Silence”
Death Grips “Lost Boys”
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das “Gondho Jhaater Chule”
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das “Club Warfare”
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das “everyth1ng 1n l1fe (feat K_anti)”
Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das “ap0calypse 42”
Lucky Ali “Ek Pal Ka Jeena”
AR Rahman/Lata Mangeshkar/MG Sreekumar “Jiya Jale”
My Bloody Valentine “Soon”

Wire mix: Bios Contrast & Nilotpal Das

@oisatsana

https://bio-future-lab.bandcamp.com/album/behind-the-algorithms-space

Oisatsana - Integrated Circuits [from "Behind the Algorithms Space", 19/06]

Thizzing and blown-out ambient trap x dub techno vapours from Ukranian artist xtclvr

xtclvr - blessed loops (SFERIC18) [Preview]

"Illuminotecnica is a slacker’s exploration of ecstatic techniques in sound, echoing the free-form drift of elemental flows across the motherboard. Celestial data streams. Mineral rhythms loop in cycles within cycles. A glitch pulses at the heart of the sun while the sky turns green.

What reveals itself through divergent, simultaneous patterns?
What do we hear when we let the aural flood loose?

Set it free—let it spiral inside out. From the cracked shell, new forms emerge: thought-forms, feel-forms, signal-forms shaped by frequencies we don’t yet know how to decode. Shapes that shimmer at the edge of language. Emotions without names. Visions that flicker in the periphery—half-seen, half-sensed—like memories from a future that hasn’t happened yet."

Music by Cortex of Light
Artwork by Francesco Tosini
Design by Nicolò Pellarin
Mastered at Tapewave Studio
Distributed by Boomkat

Wax: boomkat.com/products/illuminotecnica

Quantum Horses (Looking At The Stars)

Taycan

Turbo Miffy presents Tunnel Fusion - 01/08/2025

Taken from the mixtape 'Losing It Along The Way'

mark my words

thorp

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