Boomkat – new PRURIENT, LA VAMPIRES GOES ITAL, NKC, etc.

**Includes digital download code redeemable from the label** This eagerly awaited new LP from Prurient begins with a blood-curdling scream – but thereafter all expectations are defied. If like us you’ve always been fascinated by the more reflective, electronic side of Dominick Fernow’s catalogue – thus far restricted to the odd album, his work with Cold Cave and a couple of choice side projects – then all your Christmases have come at once. Reportedly inspired by long drives around mainland Europe listening to minimal techno, Bermuda Drain pulsates with sequenced electronic menace from the off, and is the first Prurient record to pack bass heft to match his customary treble assault. While Fernow’s vocals have always been central to the Prurient project, they’re usually barely audible beneath the punishing swathes of feedback; here they come to the fore, sounding more vulnerable and more powerful than ever before, if occasionally a touch comical (for all the cathartic force of delivery, his lyric about wanting to “take a tree branch and ram it inside you” on ‘Palm Tree Corpse’ is liable to raise a smile). Sniggers aside, some of the best and most accessible music Fernow’s ever recorded can be found on this album: the title track is a masterful bit of post-apocalytic ambient, reminding us of that Stars Explode split with Cold Cave, but less clogged, more vividly realised. Bold, original and astonishingly well-produced throughout, Bermuda Drain really is a new peak in Prurient’s prolific career; noise fascists might turn their nose up at its synth-pop mannerisms, but for the rest of us it’s a welcome twist in the tale. From the cinematic minimal wave of ‘Many Jewel Surrounds The Crown’, through the snotty electro thrash of ‘A Meal Can Be Made’ and the coruscating industrial noise of ‘Watch Silently’, this is an album that surprises and stimulates at every turn; hell, ‘Let’s Make A Slave’ could almost – almost – be Detroit techno.

*Initial copies come on semi-opaque yellow vinyl – pressing limited to 450 copies for the world* Charlatan is the moniker adopted by Digitalis label-head Brad Rose to express his most lucid electronic visions. In contrast with his multifarious body of works, he articulates the majestic crests and synthesized shapes of ‘Triangles’ with far sharper contours and a taste for more piquant dissonance which resonates on the mind like a mild acid. This heightened clarity also renders its emotional impact that much more powerful, lending the whole album an almost quasi-religious atmosphere and intent. This sense of lambent electronic spirituality radiates from the gracefully ascending chords of opener ‘Lime Beauty’ while a slowly motorik machine beat chugs us deep into the landscape, the dissonant, arpeggiated vortex of ‘Faint Blue Outlines’ and the sombrely reflective penitence of ‘Vodka Rocks’. Turning over, there’s the poignant pay-off of ‘Traces’, casting a spellbinding mesh of skyward synthlines over loping drum pulses, slowly shuffling forward in the queue to be received by the deliciously warped dissonance of ‘Foxes’, recalling the ambiguous twinges of Leyland Kirby but with the glorious impact of Rose’s own Altar Eagle compositions. The final deliverance is Brad’s celestially sanguine ‘Swimming Pool Summer Nights’, a transcendent piece of instrumental ambient pop drinking from the chalice of Talk Talk and Joy Division but augmented by blooming 808 beats which define the record’s supernatural sense of space.

**First time ever on vinyl, including bonus remixes from Pantha Du Prince and Biosphere – Includes MP3 download voucher redeemable from the label** This incredible new album could have been tailor-made for these pages: its combination of warm, evocative ambience and submerged percussion directly taps into the legacy left by Wolfgang Voigt’s GAS project whilst offering a fresh slant on that post-classical sound that’s so rarely executed with any originality but which is here crafted with an expert hand. ‘Dour’s skeletal framework of minimal 4/4 kicks brings some rhythmic structure to the glistening guitar tones and nebulous surges of electronic ephemera, meaning that this is more than another drone record – there always seems to be a purposefulness and incredible emotional weight to these compositions. The presence of a rhythmic guiding hand adds a further dimension, ‘At First Touch’ exposing an interplay between sparse, drum-imposed machination and a liquid musical core that slowly reveals itself in bright colours, while ‘Further Away’, leaves a 12k-esque brand of microscopic construction that, once again, works perfectly. The beats are restored at the very foundations of the mix for ‘The Sunset Passage’ though, with some careful filtration momentarily channelling that sublime Konigsforst feel, topping off one of the year’s first great albums.

*KILLER LP of slow motion fugged-up strut beats, tape loops, stray synthlines and waterstained vocals.* NNF’s latest sees Los Angeles’ most respected label mistress flick through her rolodex for a new hookup to cruise the strip with. This time it’s Daniel Martin-McCormick aka Mi Ami aka Ital, aka one of our favourite producers in the world right now. ‘LA Vampires Goes Ital’ is a slow motion hi-five of fugged-up strut beats put together from mushed tape loops, stray synthlines and waterstained vocals fed through a matrix of 2nd hand effects. The results are primed for the most dazed days of summer, bobbing from the sun-melted drone pop of ‘Streetwise’, to the sounds of an inner city festival heard through low-lying smog from ten blocks away on ‘Tons Of Love’, hearing the baked Soul II Soul vibes of ‘A Woman Is A Woman’ booming from a nearby car, and checking the head-wreck of ‘The Chic Shall Inherit The Earth’. Like they say, it’s “…too gritty and blasted for dancing but too bangin’ to sit still, this is a real mutant zone…”. A must have for those heads who love noise in the middle of summer.

* Amazing album of sub-Techno pulses and introverted Kosmische from Not Not Fun’s Mudboy. Limited to an edition of 500 copies, includes 22″ x 22″ insert and a download code redeemable directly from the label* Mudboy’s ongoing minimalist kosmische saga ‘This Is Folk Music’ brings him to the Weird Forest (label). A multidisciplinary artist also known for his installation works, Mudboy’s musical output has been compared with Terry Riley but is also in thrall to processes of Dub reduction and Cagean ideas of the very principles of sound, leading to compatible split releases with Ducktails and Belgium’s Orphan Fairytale for a load of labels including Last Visible Dog and, most recently, Not Not Fun. Mudboy’s conception of folk harks back to that school of German electronic pioneers like Roedelius, Schulze and Die Welttraumforscher, and it’s perhaps the more eccentric side of the latter with whom he shares most in common. His music isn’t quite as indebted to Swiss/Germanic folk melodies, but it does have that odder feel for endearingly twee, naif melodies, albeit filtered through the mind of an underground American artist obviously exposed to all kinds of freaky musical madness. Through eight tracks he dreamily segues from reedy, meditative repetitions recalling Ducktails, Skaters or Riley, through darker zones like the amazing ‘Beirut Dance Party’ underpinned by droning sub-Techno pulses and scrawled with hyper-pizzcato strings, to blissfully glassy, timelessly pastoral experiments such as ‘Dawn Treader’ and ‘Sailing Song’. Highly Recommended.

*Hand-numbered, letter-pressed sleeve with insert* Kassel Jaeger returns to the rarified Senufo Editions, following 2010’s ‘Aerae’ disc with ‘Algae’, a concentrated study on the intersections of instrumental improvisations and field recordings. A resident of Paris and a member of the city’s famed GRM, or Groupe de Recherches Musicales institution, Kassel’s meticulous methods of microphone placement create fragile, or metastable sonic ecologies with acute attention to the filigree balance of tones and interlacing soundwaves. His improvisations are performed on positive organ, marxophone (a kind of fretless zither), tremoloa (another sort of zither), Turkish crescent (an archaic sort of marching band percussion), nfir and EMS Synthi AKS, and have the quiet, meditative quality of “tidal movements and leave, here and there, inanimate organisms that sediment and dry”. The album takes a palindromic structure formed around three tracks: two 15 minute pieces sandwiching a four minute segment. Firstly ‘Algae I’ organically evolves catalytic small sounds which fizz and flesh into a quivering, respirating mass of metallic shudders and droning harmonics. In the middle, ‘Plateau’ conducts a relatively brief piece of tender, pale-hued harmonics, while the ‘Algae II’ is much more kinetic, revolving around tensile, processed strings and swelling mass of drones reaching a climactic moire of metallic harmonies with a larger emotional payoff than you might expect from something so ostensibly esoteric. Recommended.

*Incredible LP from Ahmad Zahir, one of Afghanistan’s most enduring and best loved singers* Born in 1946 as the son of influential politician and later Prime Minister (1971-72), Dr. Zahid, Ahmad pursued a career in music from school, where he was already penning his own lyrics and compositions. He amassed a cherished repetoire including his own takes on well-recognized Dari poems, and by the peak of his fame he’d been chosen national singer of the year six times and laid down over 19 albums, each containing 12-16 new songs. A charismatic personality and rich catalogue of recordings meant he was considered something of a national treasure, and he would attempt to reflect the voice of the people in line with socio-political changes through the ’70s, eventually leading to his assassination on his 33rd birthday, in 1979 at the hands of his best friend on the orders of communist backed General Daud Taroon. Today he’s given the title of Afghanistan’s Nightingale, and that name resonates through his deep tenor on these nine songs, ranging from lush folk-pop ballads to some truly killer, dubbed-out and psychedelic moments such as ‘Laily Laily’, Nishe Gazdom’ or ‘Az Tangna & Mahbas Tarrikey’. Includes 12×12″ liner notes. Tipped for all exotic sonic time travellers and fans of Finders Keepers or Sublime Frequencies.

Terrors, aka Elijah Forrest has been honing a distinct sound built on his experiences travelling America, from Baltimore to California. He’s been dropping tapes on the likes of Bathetic, Cavelife, and Monorail Trespassing for the last few years, from which Weird Forest have culled a sort of best-of-to-date collection for ‘Lagan Qord’. They’re all remastered, but still trustingly swaddled in tape noise, texturing his often sad, simple songs with a mystery and tempered timelessness. They range from hypnotic slabs of drone/noise to fuzzily distanced folk ballads, solemn instrumental guitar wanderings and semi-mystical ambient glows reminding of The Caretaker. Lovely.

*30 minute EP of dismantled Techno, House and squashed electronics from Miles, one half of Demdike Stare* Miles is one half of Demdike Stare and Pendle Coven and has recorded in the past under the aliases Millie and MLZ. After almost 15 years writing music, this is the first release Miles is putting out under his own name and marks a turning point of sorts in his production style, or rather, in its sequencing. ‘Facets’ brings together different ends of his production style, unifying elements of the House and Techno he’s most commonly released as MLZ together with the more broken production signatures usually reserved for Millie and the darkened tribalism of Demdike Stare. “Flawed” opens the set with a Linn loop from the archives, stretched and slowed down with an intoxicated aesthetic that’s somewhere between House and Dub, before “Lustre” re-configures source material originally keyed in by labelmate Andy Stott with a nice line in squashed percussion. ‘Primer’ on the flip extends from a Demdike Stare outtake and veers off into an analogue drum machine ruckus, before “On The fly” ends the set with a recording made straight to mixing desk from an array of mis-wired and malfunctioning drum boxes, contact microphones and samplers, over at his studio The Mill earlier this year.

Holy Strays follows up his scuzzy debut tape for NNF with two surprisingly lush and undeniably ace electronic trips. The meld of sparse, reverberating drums and plangent psych licks on ‘Enlightenment’ calls to mind Forest Swords jamming with a lo-fi Raime, on some sweet Hoffman’s in a cabin in the Alps, after listening to loads of Amon Duul. Flipsude ‘Phrenesia’ is a moodier counterpoint, sucking us in with wormholing synthline while blunted programmed beats and a lone rave mistress vocal threaten to almost launch into a kind of FSOL track, but thankfully hold back and ends up spinning into a sort of smudged Balearic trance pattern for the Knew Age mystics. Aces, both of them.

Rudest wrigglin’, optimised acid jams from London’s highly regarded Funkineven. This is is his fourth shot on Floating Points and Alex Nut’s Eglo label, and really doesn’t let up with the deeply satisfying 303 burns. A-side is the massive ‘Roland’s Jam’, running bulky kicks set with biggest warehouse reverbs against lip-bitin’ acid squiggles and layers of frictional but slippery synths to get ya sweatin’. Flipside ‘Take It Back’ jams on a warped boogie pivot, factored with kinetic video signatures a la VHS Head, and ‘XXX’ takes that vibe somewhere more suggestive and sleazin’. DJs and dancers need a piece of this. TIP!

First spotted on a cool white label for Awkward Movements, NKC drops a bulky load of Grime-laced Funky on Forefront Recordings. The label’s last release, Slackk’s ‘Synthetics’ is hands-down one of the releases of 2011, and to be fair, this one isn’t so far behind. With a similarly potent brew of kinetic Grime agility and rolling Funky suss, NKC dips from the relatively nice and breezy House jaunt of ‘Partisan Efforts’, to more slammin’ snares and distorted kicks fused with hypnotic bleeps for the title track, while ‘Sellout’ is a properly muscular road rager, swinging low and burly for the tribalists, before ‘Untitled’ builds a swirling, swaggering groove from hard-edged drums and tripped-out synths. A super solid TIP!