Edit of @hystericalloveproject ~ Sn*ke with added vocals from Ena's 'My Way'

Sn*ke (Edit)

sorting

produced by Kissen, Special Guest DJ, Ben Bondy, & nueen <3
@kissenirl @specialguest-dj @benbondy @nueen

Tijuana Fog

Kissen 'Tijuana Fog'

LAVURN is the debut self-titled album from Lavurn Lee, a singer, songwriter, producer, performer and DJ from the inner suburbs of Toronto. He has also lived and worked in Sydney, Hong Kong and Berlin. His music is an emotionally complex assemblage of processed vocals, filtered pads, surgically programmed drums, haunting melodic fragments and hazy textures. This 13 track album of sparse, emotive and experimental R&B is his second for SUMAC and his first under his own name, following a previous record under the name Fake in 2018. Lavurn was made over three years between Toronto, Berlin and Hong Kong in close dialogue with SUMAC founders DJ Plead and T.Morimoto.

Previously, as Cassius Select, he has established himself as a unique voice in dance music, releasing on cult labels such as Unknown to the Unknown, Accidental Jnr, Hypercolour, Banoffee Pies, Raw Basics and Bruk Records. His side projects include collaborations with vocalists such as VV Pete and Daemon, his previous experimental R&B aliases Guerre and Fake, and BV (alongside Marcus Whale and DJ Plead).


THOUGHTS & REFLECTIONS ON THE MAKING OF LAVURN

“I’m trying to make pop music. Not in the industry sense, but in the way that everyone is making their own type of pop music. It wants to be listenable, so it can create emotions. I come from bedroom song writing in the age of the internet. The lyrical content and sounds reflect my demeanor. Big ego with low sense of self-worth. Constantly posturing. At once both strong and weak. I don’t always trust my abilities. I don’t have the voice to produce contemporary radio R&B. I don’t do traditional harmonies, mine are all over the place.

It's the first time I'm writing about my own life in a literal sense. I spent years writing love songs having never been in a relationship. Whereas this feels very raw as a reflection of my experiences. To me the album sounds insular because it was made that way, in isolation. The vocals are used in a sampled way. A chorus for one track might be chopped and turned into another hook. A verse for one song is half timed and used for the chorus of another. Auto-Tune is used heavily. Some tracks are ‘written’ by pulling different beats, textures and vocals from different tracks and seeing what fits together. I tried to take self-sampling further and further. I was thinking of ways to world-build.

Most of the lyrical content on the album is about dealing with a breakup. But the album doesn’t reflect a break-up because it’s completely one sided. It doesn’t reflect the reality that I was an awful person during the relationship. Really it's an inward study of a reaction to rejection. It’s ambivalent. The attitude is “hey imma do me and improve myself”, while also desperately wanting someone back (for all the wrong reasons). There’s a veneer of self-improvement and healing. But it’s all performance. I used to think all the songs had a kind of toxic intent because of this. Trying to impress someone in a way that would make them want to return to you. In retrospect I understand the songs differently. They’re not perfect. A bit confused in their vulnerability. Maybe quite sweet in a way. I think it’s healthy for me to see the lyrics on the album as directed at myself. It’s an album about self-love. I learnt that making music can be a kind of self-care.” 
credits
released February 16, 2024

Written, recorded, produced and mixed by Lavurn Lee
Mastered by T.Morimoto
Photography by DJ Plead

LAVURN - JK

shinetiac - monsoon (nts 2 version)

While this week’s label mix technically comes from Marseille, France, it’s truly the product of the internet. @hyperlinkfr founder Fanny Cahu is an active participant in her corner of internet music, searching for under-the-radar artists to amplify their art through the platform she single-handedly built. 			

“While there's no rigid sound, I aim for coherence within a particular niche, representing what I love most—ranging from ambient to pop to grime, with a strong emphasis on sound design,” she told Nina.

Her label mix is a testament to the label’s diverse, yet aesthetically focused and refined output. She effortlessly steers through catalog highlights, ranging from eerie ambient tracks to post-apocalyptic drum-and-bass to experimental pop. 

Collect the mix for free on Nina: https://www.ninaprotocol.com/releases/hyperlink-nina-label-mix-021

Hyperlink - Nina Label Mix 021

'Closer', taken from 'You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire', 🔥 a collaboration between Iceboy Violet & Nueen 
 Out on 7th June, CD LP/ Digi
Available to preorder now: 
https://iceboyandnueen.lnk.to/holdmyhandthroughthefire

You Said You'd Hold My Hand Through The Fire

Closer

Preorder Album

Iceboy Violet & Nueen - Closer

We are pleased to host multidisciplinary artist and Fixed Adobe label head Rainy Miller for the 13th episode of the Kuboraum Digital Sound Residency, unveiling ‘My Wings, Never Clipped / But They Began Semi-Broken’, an uplifting abstract soundscape not just to be listened to but, most of all, to be felt.

Rainy Miller, birth name Jack Bowes, was born in Longridge, a small market town eight miles from Preston. Subservient to the northern city in which he was born and raised, the region’s nearly forgotten underbelly is sewn into the fabric of Rainy Miller’s music and motif.
His passion for music and production can be traced back to the idiosyncratic grime sound that swept through his hometown in the early 2000s, a hyper-localised scene that paired grime beats with rapid-fire bars. After moving to Manchester, Rainy quickly became integral part of the North West experimental electronic scene alongside artists such as Iceboy Violet, Space Afrika, and Blackhaine. 

Integrating aesthetics from his childhood through a DIY approach, Miller’s own output is nothing if not strikingly unique. Rejecting any attempt to define ‘genre’, he shapes emotionally charged soundscapes intertwining cinematic autotune vocals around deconstructed drill and industrial ambient soundscapes.

His debut release ‘Limbs’ in 2019 already showed the signs of his very own approach: a soulful neo-R&B excursion throughout ten tracks of emoting autotune over smooth, moody melodic beats interspersed with dabbles of Preston chitter-chatter. 
In 2020, a long-time collaboration started with Blackhaine, whom Rainy shared the studio with. The same year, Blackhaine released his debut EP ‘Armour’ produced by Rainy on Fixed Abode, followed by the co-produced ‘And Salford Falls Apart’ (2021 via The White Hotel’s HEAD II label) and ‘Armour II’ (2022 via Fixed Abode).
Following his second solo project, ‘A Choreographed Interruption’ (2021 via Fixed Abode), in 2023 Rainy released ‘DESQUAMATION’ via HEAD II, his latest and most ambitious project to date. A full bloodied, emotionally visceral piece of work segueing and stretching across a sound world of contorted pop and laconic drill that will cement Miller’s position at the cutting edge of contemporary electronic music, pushing the culture to always move forward.

Rainy Miller will be teaming up with Emma DJ to perform at WE TRAVEL TO KNOW OUR OWN GEOGRAPHY, the two-day festival on April 18th and 19th presented and co-curated by Kuboraum together with Terraforma, in partnership with Combo, during the Opening of the 60th Venice Art Biennale.

Kuboraum Digital Sound Residency: www.kuboraum.com/digital-sound-residency/

This track has been shared exclusively with all subscribers to our newsletter. Subscribe to bit.ly/KuboraumNews to access exclusive content & download the next episode of the Digital Sound Residency.

Rainy Miller - My Wings, Never Clipped / But They Began Semi-Broken

@lovefear1
@tobago-tracks

BC: https://lovefear.bandcamp.com/album/schema

You’re blessed to be hearing the long-awaited Lovefear debut album, live and listenable courtesy of TT.

‘Schema’ is a work of deep focus, a slow-spiralling plunge into a zone of enhanced awareness. What unfolds is crisp yet hallucinatory, like the HD visions of some hyper-advanced biomechanical life form animated by psychotropic research chemicals.

‘Mother Null’ and ‘Red Thought’ render images of flickering holograms on gleaming glass architecture; 360° interfaces and synthetic neuro-inputs. There’s an air of gradually realised tension and unease, a sense of something uncanny at the core of the cybernetic sheen. But Sydney Bass honcho 3NDLES5 lays down a human touch, his impressionistic spoken word flow on ‘Inner’ conjuring smeared metropolitan light pollution and the romanticised blur of half-remembered late night transit.

And then there’s ‘Macro’ and ‘Swan Cross Antonym’. Flurries of accelerated consciousness, a mind operating on evolved firmware. These are aerodynamic flow-state tunes, cold-blooded bangers pulsing forward like quicksilver through veins. But ‘Economy of Ascent’ brings it all down to an introspective simmer — because for all its screen-mediated gloss, ‘Schema’ is deeply felt, not calculated.

Schema

pi pi pi premiere: Lovefear - Great Age (TT)

first time recording my own voice, including the chorals :)
 
poem: Darkness by Lord Byron

not at all a dream

Guitar and break from Mike Midnight's "Smiling in Slow Motion".
Mixing and mastering by Lovefear.

not at all a dream

bino's bin

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