Boomkat – new T.C.M., Applehead, Zwischenwelt, etc

*Second limited edition transmission from this Demdike Stare / Andy Votel orchestrated boutique imprint. 400 copies for the world*Pre-Cert Home Entertainment return from the vinyl pits of Manchester and much further abroad to present a compendium of clues exploring the semi-fictitious and quasi-symbolic qualities of Applehead. With sublime references to Roman Catholicism, Politics & Agriculture, corruption, fairy-tales, Horrotica, Post-war European Surrealism and fumetti/giallo crime fiction Applehead’s first LP is presented within the aesthetic context of cold modernist-pop and Italian and Spanish horror film music featuring randomized spoken word segments and concrete compact tape experiments. It’s a seriously absorbing trip. Their sonic seed trails lead to seemingly dead ends which turn out to have secret trapdoors into yet more catacombs of references to the belgian surrealism movement, the films of Lucio Fulci, the outrageous prog ideals of Franco Battiato and a hive of sounds homaging Carpenter, Oram, Massiera, Simonetti and Besombes among them. By the end of the record, when the miasma begins to recede you’ll be clearer as to the essence of Applehead’s macabre mediterranean folklore and his connections to the industrial North West. Until then, you’re in the dark. Album features subtly disturbed artwork from Anworth Kirk and vinyl was cut at Berlin’s D&M. Limited to 500 copies and highly recommended.

*500 COPIES ONLY* Bee Mask’s mind-melting ‘Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico’ was released in 2010 on a c30 cassette through Gift Tapes. Editions Mego’s John Elliott-helmed Spectrum Spools label has given it a vital vinyl reissue, faithfully remastered by Rashad Becker at Berlin’s Dubplates & Mastering. To say we’re excited by the potential of this label is a given, but let’s deal with the incredible album in question first. Chris Madak aka Bee Mask’s music exists in a continuum of musique concrète and tape experiments stretching back to the earliest emissions of Pierre Henry through more recent sounds captured on The Lovely Music label and the present day hypnagogic/synth noise of Emeralds, Rene Hell or Oneohtrix Point Never. However, unlike the improvised, “one-take” stream-of-consciousness approach preferred by many today, ‘Canzoni Dal Laboratorio Del Silenzio Cosmico’ has been meticulously sculpted from a range of sounds (listed here as Synthesizers, percussion, piano, tape, and voice) recorded, mixed, and edited between 2006-2010 in Cleveland and Philadelphia. The result is a highly structured and often breathtaking confluence of contrasting sounds arranged with a magnetic mystery and a cryptic logic which will reveal itself in due course. Bee Mask already counts the likes of Autre Ne Veut (who included a large chunk of this LP in his Altered Zones mix) and Will Bankhead (who released ‘Frozen Versioning (Hyperborean Return)’ on his The Trilogy Tapes label) as big fans, and no doubt your good selves, soon enough. Frankly, this release is unmissable for anyone on the hunt for exceptional new electronic music – Essential Purchase.

Killer drop from Rephlex, compiling the hugely sought-after early 12″s by legendary UK HipHop unit The Criminal Minds. While at college in 1985, DJs Halo and Chase 1 formed TCM, incorporating DJ Spatts and MC Iceski later on. As the story goes, DJ Halo sold his decks in 1990 to fund their first release, the ‘Guilty As Charged EP’, and soon after were joined by MCs Safe D and CMD before producing the ‘Tales From The Wasteland’ EP in 1991. They were limited to runs of 300 and 500 copies respectively, hence the cool asking price of £800+ for originals nowadays. After the ‘ardcore explosion of ’92 the group went on to produce a string of jungle records for White House including the notorious ‘Baptised By Dub’, but these discs are solely concerned with that pair of visceral early releases, featuring ‘Urban Warfare’, ‘Just Check It’, ‘Police State’ and ‘Section 12 Paragraph 0’ from 1990s ‘Guilty As Charged’ 12″, plus ‘Systems Overload’ and ‘Illegal Procedure’ from their 1991 12″ ‘Tales From The Wasteland’. The crunching breaks, the ruffneck scratches, the wildcard samples and most of all, the fierce, rocking attitude which just can’t be touched. Listening to these tracks you’re hearing the birth of ‘ardcore, jungle, and D&B and the kinetic energy and discipline which would influence everyone from Autechre to Demdike Stare, the raw and basic ideas of the original UK HipHop invasion feeding forward into today. Essential purchase!

Ramadanman heads up the latest Fabriclive session with a crucial 30+ track selection spanning House and Grime to Shangaan Electro. This guy should require little introduction: his singles and remixes over the last three years are some of the most forward thinking dancefloor productions coming from the UK, and the Hessle Audio label he co-runs with Ben UFO and Pangaea is just owning things right now. His mix embraces the best of electronic dance music in 2011, judged with a pacing and narrative well beyond his years. The first section sets an efficient House vibe with cuts from Levon Vincent and Marcello Napoletano blended with Elgato’s exclusive ‘Music (Body Mix)’ and Tiyiselani Vomaseve’s ‘Vanghoma’ aka the slower one from ‘Shangaan Electro’. From here it’s swing-House with his own ‘Grab Somebody’ and an as yet unreleased remix of Joy O’s ‘GR Etiquette’, and onto the grimy stuff with a fierce Lil Silva dub of ‘Bad Girl’, Jam City’s ‘Night Mode’ and Pangaea’s deadly ‘Inna Daze’. Factor in an inspired blend with Pinch’s ‘Qawwali’ and MJ Cole & Wiley’s ‘From The Drop’, and his own ‘Work Them’ with Joy Orb’s ‘J. Doe’, plus the shark-eyed run of D1 ‘Sub Zeo’ > S-X ‘Woooo’ > Ramadanman ‘Glut’ > Addison Groove ‘F*ck The 101’ and you’ve got a real taste of the UK ‘floor in 2011. Recommended!

Gray was the downtown “industrial sound” band started by Andy Warhol acolyte and avant-garde HipHop legend, Jean-Michel Basquiat. ‘Early Works’ is an astonishing collection of their first creations, reissued in a silk-screened sleeve bearing his distinctive crown motif (the same which adorns Ramelzee’s classic ‘Test Pressing’ sleeve). Named after the medical bible, Gray’s Anatomy, Basquiat, together with Michael Holman formed the group in 1979 and would later be joined by Shannon Dawson, Wayne Clifford, Nick Taylor and a young Vincent Gallo to operate at the core of New York’s downtown scene, playing shows at the Mudd Club, CBGB’s and Hurrahs amidst the likes of Talking Heads and Blondie. But Gray were quite a different proposition, playing ethereal, abrasive industrial “sound effects” music on scaffolding, synths and whatever machines they could lay hands on. One of the tracks here, the spectral, sloping, dread dubbed ‘Drum Mode’ has appeared on a number of compilations over the last decade, most notably on Gomma’s seminal ‘Anti NY’ comp, but the rest are about as rare as a pube in the queen’s soup. There’s the echoic industro-dub collage of ‘Wig’ for starters, next to the ritualistic, Oriental workshop atmospheres of ‘Eight Hour Religion’ and a scratchy, lysergic episode of tape loops, free-psyche drums and textures in ‘Figure It Out For Yourself’, all assuredly ahead of their time. This music forms a vital chunk of art and music history and should be considered an absolutely essential purchase, we reckon.

*500 COPIES ONLY – First release on this hugely exciting new label from Emeralds’ John Elliott and Editions Mego.* Chicago-based, Ohio-bred multi-instrumentalist, Matthew Mullane inaugurates the Spectrum Spools label with the spellbinding voyage of ‘A Sort Of Radiance’. This is his debut album, and first release on vinyl but he’s previously released cassettes in small runs on Fairchild Tapes and Stunned Records. The fact that he’s skipped much of the ferric initiation/screening process should tell you that his music is of a more distinguished character than many trapped in the tape dream. He’s capable of initiating vast astral dialogue between his machines of choice (we’re not quite sure what he uses here – guitar and computer, possibly?), inviting us in to a “multi dimensional organism of sound that has perplexing depth and astounding detail” according to the label, and sublimely immersive if you ask us. Its structured around five longer compositions and slightly fewer vignettes, or palette cleansers for the epic sections. Those epic sections rove from dense, skin-tingling ultraviolet fog and cascading arpeggios of ‘Leaving The House’ to the HD synaesthetic phenomena of ‘Light Float’ and stereo-spiralling columns of synth movement on ‘Soft Disconnect’, all vividly rendered and deeply detailed while the shorter pieces allow for more condensed, dynamic ideas like with the woozy stereo swirl of ‘Control’ and the abrasive space-grit textures of ‘Left’. Cut by Rashad Becker at Berlin’s D&M, January 2011. RIYL Emeralds, OPN, or Rene Hell – don’t miss!

Probably best known as the violinist for free-noise pioneers Vibracathedral Orchestra, I was pretty sure I knew how ‘…An Indifferent Ocean’ would sound before I’d even sat down to give it a run through. How wrong can a guy be? This is pretty far from the wailing post-psych of Hayden’s previous troupe, and far closer to Grouper’s early, singular haunted drones. With saturated tape sounds forming the backbone of ‘…An Indifferent Ocean’, Hayden throws down gloopy guitar notes and pained vocals to create a barely-heard haze of songs. There are songs there, sort of, but they have to be reached by climbing through a syrupy mass of white noise and shimmering, cavernous reverb. It’s all too easy when making this sort of music to end up with a record that can’t be enjoyed, something that just crosses the line between harmony and dissonance, but Hayden knows just when to reign her compositions in, and manages to come up with an album that is punishing but also deeply enjoyable. These songs could almost sit comfortably with any on the Miasmah roster, such is the creepy, drone-heavy mood pushed forth on the record. And that, as any followers of the label will know, is high praise indeed. Recommended listening.

A full spectrum display of techno might from Mike Dehnert on his first album proper for Delsin. In the space of only three years Dehnert has accrued considerable acclaim for his uncompromising work within the parameters of pure and raw Techno, dominating dancefloors such as Berghain or Tresor and far beyond with an unruly and kinetic sound. This LP version of ‘Framework’ contains nine dancefloor-focussed tracks, from the subs-propelled swing of ‘Infix’ to the welting jack of ‘Palindrome’, the peaking riffage of ‘Teilfolge’ and one of his inimitably swung specials on ‘Beatmatching’, which is destined to become a classic round these parts. He also factors in a couple of more esoteric, beatless numbers on ‘Kontextfrei’ and the ‘IntroOutro’ sections, but really, you’re not buying a Dehnert album to sit down to, are ya? A very smart pick for fans of up-to-the-moment yet classically informed Techno.

Claire Boucher’s debut as Grimes has been a long time coming and has already drawn comparisons with the work of fellow chill/drag/witch/h-pop characters Laurel Halo, Hype Williams and even Autre Ne Veut. When it gets it right – it’s quite the killer too, with opener “Outer” managing to integrate sincere, properly sung vocal harmonies with the kind of compressed low-end rumble that would make Salem blush. “Rasik” is another standout, flexing shoegaze signatures with impressively heavy-hitting vocals and throbbing bass pulses that end all too abruptly, before the majestic “Heartbeats” ingests cinematic conceits without falling into the trap of dragging itself through a vortex of cod-emotions, instead playing with timbre and pitch to create something that sounds like Fever Ray crossed with Enigma – in the best possible sense. Over the course of an hour you’re drawn deeper and deeper into an alternate pop matrix, with only the occasional misstep (such as the British Airways advertising soundalike “Intor / Flowers”) nudging you back to reality. Overall though, “Halfaxa” is one of the more accomplished and absorbing full-length’s to have emerged from the genre with a plethora of dodgy names – and comes to you with much recommendation, make sure to check it out.

**Limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies** Engrossing new Senufo Edition from Oreledigneur, a collaborative duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Renato Rinaldi. Between 2004-2009 Rinaldi followed filmmaker and photographer Armin Linke on the shooting sessions for his film ‘Alpi’, recording on-location sound for the film which was then edited, sound-designed and assembled into this LP by Oreledigneur. With the whole sound archive at his disposal, Ielasi remained relatively faithful to the original material by editing and composing without any additional processing but the end result bears little resemblance to the final soundtrack. It’s a vivid montage of acousmatic sound, removed from their source and rarely evocative of their subject, The Alps, aside form a few distant cowbells and a very un-natural sounding snow. Instead we hear the sounds of artificial ski tracks, maintenance machines, scientific laboratories, tunnel resonances, military academies and broken equipment, clashing the generally perceived image of the Alps in literature, movies and TV with the modern, anthropized Alps full of tourists and recreational areas. Essentially, there are some incredible sounds on here, from ultra-vivid HD explosions to curious, microscopically detailed rhythm textures, all arranged with jarring juxtapositions and a seriously uncanny sense of space. It’s certainly one of the most intersting Senufo Editions so far and comes very highly recommended.

*Amazing, limited edition Radiophonic inspired 7″ from this hitherto unknown producer* Stefan Blomeier is an elusive character. This excellent 7″ of deliriously frothy Radiophonica is the only tangible, physical evidence of his existence while a few virtual clues lying in some corporate-looking websites and an intriguing Tumblr page further flesh out the enigma. So, what of this Danish code-breaking mathematic genius (if the data is to be believed?) and his rather brilliant music? His first release on Research Laboratory Of Electronic Progress sounds like it could have been produced any time between 1960 and last week, the A-side a superbly bloopy tape experiment which could have emerged from the studios of Raymond Scott or Jan Jelinek, full of dusty ferric air and scrambled egg-head melodies of the most charming variety. Turn over and the amazing ‘Radio Astronomy’ gazes out onto wispy plumes of Moogy moon melody and theremin-like sci-fi tones arranged with a sense of urgency and trepidation redolent of any number of classic TV themes. Needless to say, we think any fans of Ursula Bogner, Delia Derbyshire, Ekoplekz or Ghost Box will be conducting their own investigations into this mysterious manipulator of the senses. Highly Recommended.

Nonplus maintain a relentless streak of form with this stunning sampler 12″ for Instra:Mental’s forthcoming debut album ‘Resolution 653’. The duo’s production values have never been in doubt but this time executed to a fierce degree. Face up, ‘Thomp’ operates like some Cyborg funk ritual, deploying Untold-style, cone-folding kicks and grazing percussion with earth-moving subs and minimalist splashes of airlock pressure synths. Face down, ‘When I Dip’ is a certified future rudeboy anthem (by the international association of future rudeboys, don’t u know), a double ‘ard electro rocker intensifying original New York, Miami and Detroit memes with a 2012 production palette. Check the samples – just so good. Highly recommended!!!

Riding a crest of adulation from all corners, Becoming Real impresses on these two killers, backed with a Jam City remix! The naggingly infectious ‘Closer’ picks up where Zomby left off with his near mythical Eski mixes, erecting a filigree, minimalist Grime framework to hold a brilliant bathroom diva vocal, while ‘Antarctic City’ heads on a featherweight Footwork mission in keenest London style. His like-minded brethren, Jam City turns ‘Closer’ inside out on the remix, dumping the diva and replacing her with paranoid bleeps, sluggish half-timed machine pulses and carnival whistles, or possibly a delirious kettle. Who knows? It’s all second to none right now, as long as Zomby keeps those Eski dubs to himself…

Lighworks have the honour of dropping Ossie’s anthemic ‘floor killer ‘Tarantula’ as the first release on the label. In 2010 it picked up attention across the board after becoming a staple in the sets of Ossie’s mate, DJ Petchy on Live FM, followed by support from Joy Orbison, Kode 9, Ben UFO, Bok Bok, and yer ma. For a debut production he’s displaying chops ahead of his years with a firm grasp of crisp, Afro-rhythmic beat programming and silky synths, while his flipside production ‘Creepy Crawlies’ takes a tougher, electroid stance but still with the same sense of finesse. Cherry on the cake, Funkineven tightens the swing of ‘Tarantula’ on a crafty jacking mix with clanking drum machines. Highly Recommended!