Taken from SBKT057: mmph - Harvest

Release date: 26th April 2023

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It's been five years since Korean-born, Los Angeles-based sound designer and composer Sae Heum Han, aka mmph, released his last EP Serenade on the Tri Angle label in flurry of activity. "Harvest" arrives after an unintentional pause; three years ago, Han was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease that immediately changed his priorities. Bedridden and exhausted from medication, he was only able to work on music for around an hour each day - the rest of his time was swallowed by rest and precarious trips to hospital in the midst of a global pandemic. Now in remission, Han looks back on this period as a time of emotional evolution where the ideas behind "Harvest" could be unravelled. The album emerges from his desire to reconnect with the Korean music he heard when he was growing up in Seoul, using these discernible timbres as building blocks to decorate with his advanced palette of electronic sounds and processes.

Han's music has always balanced precariously between the rigor of classical training and the relative open-endedness of electronic experimentation. This duality is still present on "Harvest", but Han's canvas has widened slightly. He continues to blur the line between the traditional and the modern, emulating and mirroring Korean instruments with synthesizers and sound design elements, and blending them with acoustic sounds and live percussion samples. But where his previous records and scoring work highlighted his ability to weave baroque forms into tight, contemporary sonic tapestries, this album adds the drama, yearning and spirituality of folk. On 'Dialogue' for example, pitch-warped traditional vocals twist through an ensemble of bizarre future-ancient sounds; fluttering strings dissolve into spiked percussive barbs and synthesized wails cut through walls of industrial noise.

'Spirit' follows quickly, coaxing listeners into a trance state with its flurry of microtonal string plucks and irregular percussion. Han is a master of breath control, letting his brief moments of negative space interrupt any expected regularity and guide the track away from electronic music's expected grid. This just about prepares the ground for the title track, a labyrinthine maze of dramatic compositional motifs and dizzying sonics that mutates from gugak forms into a cacophony of pneumatic blast beats before snapping back. From here the album lurches towards the dancefloor for a moment, absorbing and contorting cantankerous club rhythms on 'Avnue' and 'Moon Jar', slowing to a crawl on 'Harvest II'. Despite hijacking its theme from the title track's blast beat section, it transforms into a ballad, acting as a fittingly tearjerking finale.

The record is rounded off by a trio of remixes that draw Han further into the SVBKVLT family. Egyptian producer ABADIR chops up 'Harvest' and reassembles it into a jerky banger, extracting its dancefloor potential and evolving hardstyle thuds into spectral concertina flexes. 'Moon Jar' meanwhile is turned into twitchy trance by Shade Seoul's NET GALA, and Yen Tech stitches together 'Avnue' and 'Dialogue', creating an anxious backdrop that shuttles mmph's android folk to the modern metropolis.

Artwork by Sae Heum Han
Mastered by Raphael Valensi

Harvest

mmph - Spirit

@nozagam is a solo project by French experimental-club producer Etienne Zastko who takes a bleak view of a destructive Anthropocene Epoch, in which “utopias can’t exist and we’ve lost our way in our blind devotion to technology”. The album pieces together a chronology of catastrophic events. A fictionalized soundtrack to humankind’s end-cycle. The abrasive textures and suffocating atmosphere immerse us into a total universe where everything that could have gone wrong has. Affirmations and tech bro optimism didn’t quite cut it. And if those disembodied voices that sporadically reach out are the survivors, that’s not good news.

The visual aesthetic of Zagam is one of fusion, a medieval plague doctor mask with a 23rd-century twist. “Anthropocene” mines a similarly disparate set of influences, spanning an evermore hybridized clubspace. Gqom, grime, industrial techno, footwork: everything is fair game. The rich musical background and hard sonic palette of Zagam make for a perfect match for the hybrid electronics approach of Unizone.
credits

Anthropocene is coming out on May 4, 2023 as a digital and physical release (50 limited edition cassettes available via label‘s Bandcamp page).

original tracks by Zagam
remix tracks by Miedo Total, Wulffluw XCIV, personalbrand & B E N N
mastered by Wim Dehaen
artwork & visuals by Erranth
tape design by Mr. Maquerelle
text by Thomas Romana

Bandcamp + Cassette

ZAGAM - LANDUTOPIA (MIEDO TOTAL REMIX)

Malikan

Seraphim w/ Axine M - 12/07/2023

AB-009 is DJ Relax - Secret Garden EP

“dam….feels like I jus woke up. office life got me sleepy af..u kno its easy 2 get caught up in the chaos. 1 time a lil bird told me that sometimes u just gotta relax n not think about everything so much..so that’s what I been on lately .. i stepped outta that corporate environment n now my lifes been real relaxxxing..makin wtever trax I feel like makin. goin wherever I wanna go. nothin tyin me down..the bird still hangs out in my hat most of the time too. sometimes it fux off for a bit and comes back with a usb or a burnt cd or a tape of some crazy rave shit. Idek where it finds them but I’m not rly worried about it.

most of these tunes I jus made for me n this bird homie to rock out 2 on our travels..if I never met zap and those other bambinos that 1 time in tokyo we’d prob still just be goin wherevr the wind took us… feelin like I might have to hop back in the game now tho. mayb now more than evr the world could use a little relax 😎”

Music by @djrelaxxxxx
Masters by @nahashisalive
Art by @bruno-lauzon-tanzi

DJ Relax - 2 Many Thoughts

POSTWORLD: personalbrand w/ Dali - 18/09/2023

Taken from SBKT060: ABADIR - Ison
Release date: 28th September 2023

Limited edition vinyl + digital

Artwork: Luke Griffiths
Photography: Omar Elkafrawy
Mastering: Raphael Valensi
Special thanks to Amira Elmasry

For our 60th release, we are very excited to present ‘Ison’, a new album by ABADIR.

Growing up in Heliopolis, Cairo, I used to visit different churches with my parents for Sunday mass and on Christian holidays. Fascinated with the choir and chants by various sects, I absorbed all these different sounds into one hybrid memory, which was the main inspiration for ‘Ison’. Using segments and field recordings from Coptic, Syriac, Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Catholic choirs, I present my own vision of what can be described as fresh hymns, fictional chants, or parts of a contemporary Sunday mass.

This is not representational. This is not a cultural relic for the exoticizing gaze. This is purely personal; a fictional sound rooted in the present.

While ‘Ison’ is clearly different from my last album, ‘Mutate’, it follows the same approach of revisiting cultural surroundings for potential mutation. If Mutate’s clubby vibe was made “to make the floor burn”, Ison is intended to cure last night’s hangover.

Ison

ABADIR - Sacraments

Tracklist:

ARATA Didge - Dark Water
Miedo Total - Suffer
Toumba and Duswunder - Fawda
SHALT - Cull
Karkossyn - Lost Cause
Autogenesis - Flesh Culture
MOSHTRQ, Postdrone - Yaa
Young Muscle - Beat Up By The Drum
Matt X - Vortex (Myler Remix) 
Aunty Rayzor - Nina
Inès Cherifi - Open
Mina, Dee Traits, Omagoqa - Bounce Shandisi
Aryu Jassika - Gqomking Express
Pura Pura - Odyssey Club
Tony Quattro - Unknown (Noire Remix)
Martini - Show Me
Bluetoof - Inverted
Exmantera - Nerve
Fauste - Rx 369 
Benbo + Ovid - Quick Hands
LR Groove - Hear Me
Dansa - Kill The Body And The Head Will Die 
Mosca - You Smell That, Marsha?
Lloyd SB - X Out
Traces - Ritual
Slikback - KENEKI
Mor Elian - Double Dip
zwansound - TURBO GALLERY 
Lyo XS - Presión
hydra:bad - hydra:bad
Entrañas & PVSSY - Calor
Objekt - Bad Apples
K-OH - Cortina de Fumaça Riddim
B E N N - Mangaya
Sangre Nueva - Moskito

Capiuz's Hectic w/ B E N N - 18/09/2023

Another Dimension (Lullabies Live Edit)

FROZEN

AI Generated. Inspired from the artworks of the Kalika series on foundation.app. A slow-tempo, chant-led journey across myths and symbols—from deep-water Abaia to sky-thunder Tinia and Kintu’s origin tale—woven into spacious experimental electronic sound with Amapiano-inspired pulse, where each track’s voice, form, and timbre echo its cultural root.

08 Fire Sigil

booking: mia@lb-agency.net
ziurinhell@gmail.com ∞

Malikan

Ziúr