Boomkat new Cut Hands, Nova Scotian Arms, Evol, Decismus, etc

**Edition of 700 copies for the world – Initial stock comes on extremely limited transparent vinyl** Type mark their 100th release with a reissue of Porter Ricks’ essential ‘Biokinetics’ – never before available as one vinyl set. Back in 1996, dark ambient pioneer and sound designer Thomas Köner, together with engineer Andy Mellwig, presented the Techno community with one of it’s most enduring and definitive albums in the form of ‘Biokinetics’. It was the first album release on Basic Channel’s Chain Reaction imprint, birthing three 12″ singles which expanded and twisted the templates of Moritz Von Oswald and Mark Ernestus with an aquatic torque and unique vision, taking the sound to immersive, isolated depths previously unexplored to this degree. Womb-like systolic pulses plunge us fathoms into darkness penetrated by only the faintest trace of melody, its oceanic pressure profoundly meditative and transporting, reflecting the unimaginable vastness of space. But most importantly, ‘Biokinetics’ achieved what so many others tried but failed within this realm; managing to shape the infinite wave with an individual sense of narrative, one which will entrance a dancefloor and equally flood the senses of a home listener, dissolving the boundaries between club functionality and artistic experience. Fundamentally, it just sounds incredible – as good as the original copies thanks to a new cut at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering. This is the first time all of these tracks have been presented on one vinyl package – with a CD edition to follow in the coming weeks.

*Long awaited vinyl editions (split into 2 parts) of one of 2011′s best albums – including bonus tracks* FINALLY available on vinyl with extra tracks – surely one of the most celebrated, provocative electronic projects of recent years, beloved of everyone from The Wire to Blackest Ever Black/Fact Mag’s Kiran Sande and far beyond. Whitehouse’s William Bennett indulges his passion for Congolese and Ghanaian percussion on a brilliant debut as Cut Hands. ‘Afro Noise’ is (surprisingly) relatively short on Noise, but heavy on the African rhythms which form the core of the majority of tracks. The drums are largely suffused and rendered with spacious, industrial-sounding reverbs but played with a polyrhythmic, African/Voodoo sleight of groove which has completely got our attention, while the noise element is well tempered and ranges from atmospheric texturing to immersive drones and even more symphonic electronics. Utterly compelling and unmissable, strongly recommended to rhythm and noise freaks of all stripes. Tracklist: Side A – 1. Welcome To The Feast Of Trumpets 2. Stabbers Conspiracy 3. Rain Washes Over Chaff 4. Nzambi Ia Lufua. Side B – 1. Who No Know Go Knows 2. ++++ (Four Crosses) 3. Brown-Brown 4. Shut Up And Bleed.

*Long awaited vinyl editions (split into 2 parts) of one of 2011′s best albums – including bonus tracks* FINALLY available on vinyl with extra tracks – surely one of the most celebrated, provocative electronic projects of recent years, beloved of everyone from The Wire to Blackest Ever Black/Fact Mag’s Kiran Sande and far beyond. Whitehouse’s William Bennett indulges his passion for Congolese and Ghanaian percussion on a brilliant debut as Cut Hands. ‘Afro Noise’ is (surprisingly) relatively short on Noise, but heavy on the African rhythms which form the core of the majority of tracks. The drums are largely suffused and rendered with spacious, industrial-sounding reverbs but played with a polyrhythmic, African/Voodoo sleight of groove which has completely got our attention, while the noise element is well tempered and ranges from atmospheric texturing to immersive drones and even more symphonic electronics. Utterly compelling and unmissable, strongly recommended to rhythm and noise freaks of all stripes. Tracklist: Side A – 1. Munkisi Munkondi 2. Impassion 3. Ezili Freda 4. Nzambi Ia Muini. Side B – 1. Bia Mintatu 2. Krokodilo 3. Backlash 4. Rain Washes Over Every Thing.

*Initial copies come on limited edition coloured vinyl* Since 2009 Grant Evans has been peering ever deeper into the kosmische abyss with his records as Nova Scotian Arms for Aguirre, Preservation and Hooker Vision. He’s also known for the lush Quiet Evenings releases with his wife, Rachel Evans (Motion Sickness Of Time Travel), but in solo flight his sound is more wide-eyed, exploratory, reaching heady new climes on ‘Cult Spectrum’, arguably his most vivid vision yet. Perhaps it’s thanks to an exquisite mastering job by Lawrence English, but there’s a tangible elevation and expansion of his sound here, offering panoramic views of intergalactic proportions while still remaining true to a fairly stripped down and modest aesthetic. It’s a melancholy sound, composed with considerable grace and tact. To open, ‘Gathering/Composition’ renders this dichotomy with the tension between stereo-swirling, dissonant cosmic synth swells and vast, yawning bass subduction, before the shimmering harmonics of ‘Overcast (1st Delay)’ are lapped by crashing waves of tempered synth noise which spray off into infinite space. And that sense of space is no more lucid than ever on ‘Emulsion’, an epic 16 minute zone of gaseous synth hues mingled with distanced shoegaze strums and banking dissonance seemingly scythed and shaped by some spectral hand.

**Edition of 500 with full colour double-sided insert** Intrepid and mightily impressive solo debut LP from Matt Carlson, who is highly respected for work as one half of the fantastic Golden Retriever duo and with avant-pop group, Parenthetical Girls. ‘Particle Language’ is a much anticipated follow-up to his ‘Stereo Face’ and ‘Gecko Dream Levels’ cassettes for Gift Tapes, and appears as the first vinyl release on their sub-label, Draft. In our experience his music has consistently pushed at the peripheries of perception with its ingenious ability to morph and manipulate waveforms far beyond the imagination of almost anyone you’d care to mention – It’s a genuinely far out sound. And as the title suggests, there’s a preoccupation with physics at play, articulated in his accompanying short essay on self-observing feedback loops and Meta-physical epiphenomena, and manifested in the unstable, diffuse shapes and sounds created by his modular synth and innovative use of vocoder. They are highly chaotic systems; fragmented, fractal sounds scurry, squirm, flutter and dissipate within seemingly self-organising ecologies, colliding in a synthesized pressure chamber which itself appears to change shape and reconstitute at will. At crucial moments shredded vocoder voices serrate across the stereo field, sounding like the tortured ghouls of OPN’s ‘Returnal’ attempting to re-establish contact through the ether, but always kept tantalisingly out of reach and diffused into gaseous particle play. Rhythms are decimated, time structures in flux and bent like light. But, for all their haphazard arrangement, there’s a visionary navigator in the cockpit, channelling and interpreting the stream of electronic information with an omnipotent power. We’re left reeling and think a lot of you will be too. Highly recommended if you like Bernard Parmegiani, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Pat Murano’s Decimus project, Daphne Oram, or Oneohtrix Point Never.

**First edition of 200 copies. Packaged in booklet including interview with creator of the “Hoover” sound.** For the past three years experimental computer music cell, Evol has been de-constructing rave culture icons under radically different compositional strategies. On a 7″ and 10″ for the Alku imprint, they’ve been caught f**king with air-horns and the classic hoover, or mentasm sound – a preset originally called the “What The?” patch developed by Eric Persing for the Roland Alpha Juno synth and most commonly associated with early ’90s rave Techno. ‘Wormhole Shubz’ is essentially an expansion pack of their Mentasm manipulations on the ‘Punani Xerrameca’ 10″ for Alku; seven tracks of mind-burrowing buzzsaw tones and swarming noise which, coincidentally (as pointed out by Nick Cain in the Wire) strongly recalls Haswell & Hecker’s ‘Kanal GENDYN’ soundtrack, despite their idiosyncratic compositional techniques. What they both do, is to take the mentasm-liek sounds to the Nth degree, fulfilling the most twisted ravers’ fantasies in abstract and cerebral style, warping that alien, energising sound into labyrinthine knots and whorls. In a sense, we could also compare it with Leyland Kirby’s work on the ‘Death Of Rave’ series, albeit at the other end of the scale, but rather than suffering serotonin depletion, this is like an intra-venus overload, rending the mind plastic to a stream of visceral, heightened rave intensity. In other words it’s properly bonkers, mate, and strongly recommended. 

*300 copies. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi* Pat Murano’s nebulous Decimus series for Planam and other labels has provided some of 2011′s most outré, beguiling improvisations. For Holiday Records, ’9′ suffuses two sides of wax with oozing drone, kneaded noise and bleeding drum machine pulses channeling thoughts from the darkest recesses of the No Neck Blues Bandsman’s imagination. Elements of ’70s sci-fi synth music, tape-worn Skaters psychedelia and the internal thoughts of ancient machines coalesce, grind and diffuse with unstable and perpetual motion, following unconscious thought patterns into discomforting but fascinating new zones and making for an utterly compelling listen to moochers of the outer limits. It may be a glib interpretation, but imagine Citrac-era Ferraro scoring a sci-fi soundtrack with Jeff Mills and you’re within light years of this sound.

*Silkscreened edition of 250* Pat Murano casts another spellbinding instalment of his mystifying Decimus series for Alga Marghen sister imprint, Planam. In the best possible way, it’s bloody hard to sum up what’s happening on these records. Over two 20 minute sides Pat pushes way beyond conventional structuring and arrangement, acting as a conduit for stray and wilful FM synth waves which knot and tangle, layer and dissolve across the A-face, constantly in horizontal and vertical stereo flux, freely increasing and burning up in amplitude. We struggle to think of anyone else whose sound is so untethered and potently psychedelic like this. On the B-side his synths creak and almost buckle like the degraded hull of a mighty spaceship while distant percussion ricochet against the sides, gradually, ever-so-gradually, giving way to a magical mini symphony of caustic distortion and spectral horror theme synths with a mind-bending rhythmic close. It’s all so much more intriguing and abstracted than 99% of the conventional kosmiche out there and should be well recommended to fans of Nate Young or Leyland Kirby. 

Ekoplekz provides Perc Trax with their most esoteric, out there jaunt to date with three tracks of circuit-fried dub-noise, backed with a bleedin’ Richard H Kirk remix! They’re all much tougher and purposefully rhythm-driven than the majority of his works for Punch Drunk, Mordant or Further this year, and in many respects stronger for it. Both in name and aesthetic, we’d attribute a Berlin influence to the throbbing aquatic churn of ‘Ekoplatz’ which we could easily imagine hearing at daft o’clock on the Berghain ‘floor, while the noiser, nastier ‘Narco Samba’ is fit for the phet-frazzled after-hours and ‘Xylem Teardrops’ gives a wonderfully melancholic conclusion. There are few candidates more suitable to remix this material than Cabaret Voltaire’s legendary Richard H Kirk, and he does the project proud with a wiry, kinky version of ‘Ekoplatz’ begging to be used on darker dancefloors. Recommended!

PPU reissue a DAMN HOT and obscure Detroit moment, armed with remixes from Legowelt, Peanut Butter Wolf, Steve Summers and Maxmillion Dunbar. The product of one Danan Potts aka Superlife, ‘Go Bananas’ entered the world in 1982 as a hyper-limited pressing on Southern Sun Records outta Detroit. At the time, Danan had been hanging around the Recording Institute of Detroit where none other than Juan Atkins was honing his Cybotron releases, and the influence of the Magic one is written right all over this, from the deep fried vocoder sounds to the twitchy Kraftwerk rhythms. It’s unmistakably Detroit, and dead funky with it. On remix duties Legowelt and Peanut Butter Wolf give uptempo, jacking versions spiced with Booty and EBM flavours respectively, while Steve Summers goes to town with extra layers of classic synth and Max D gets busy with the slyding edits for slick feet. A must, really.