Jarboe – Sacrificial Cake Label: The Circle Music – TCM019LP Format: 2 × Vinyl, LP, Deluxe Edition, Limited Edition, Reissue, Remastered, Lavender, Gatefold, Tip On Sleeve Country: Greece Released: 2022 Style: Abstract, Goth Rock, Avantgarde
1995. Four years since the solo album ‘Thirteen Masks’, Jarboe who is at the same time working in Swans, created the album ‘Sacrificial Cake’ which was recorded in New York’s East Village at the studio of multi instrumentalist Lary Seven. Swans founder, Michael Gira simultaneously releases his album, ‘Drainland’.
In the 16 songs on ‘Sacrificial Cake’, even more sides of Jarboe’s creativity are revealed. A mysterious and magical atmosphere surrounds the entire album of fantasy tales in spooky sounds such as “The Body Lover” and “Troll” and at times with dark tribal rhythms as in “Ode To V”.
The mystagogy begins with the “Lavender Girl” of smoke and desire followed by the undulating “Ode to V”. The journey through Jarboe’s dreams and nightmares has begun.
“Troll Lullaby” (a terrifying childhood vision), “My Buried Child” (a live recording accompanied by Michael Gira on acoustic guitar), “Surgical Saviour” (perversity in an industrial style ), “Deflowered” (a deliberately ironic rock song spoofing the music industry).
“Troll” the ending track extends an invitation to experience it in low light or with headphones while next to a camp fire in the woods.
‘Sacrificial Cake’ is alive. We are proud to release this legendary album for first time on vinyl -on it’s own- and with new mastering, new lay out, luxurious packaging and of course in the color of lavender dedicated to the “Lavender Girl”.
Arche-Fossil (Cønjuntø Vacíø, 2020) is Wind Atlas’ fourth record, which sees the band pushing the boundaries of their own music as genres such as post-industrial electronics, ambient, noise and popular mediterranean music merge, bringing to life a hybrid and intense album.
The gestation process of Arche-Fossil began even before the publication of An Edible Body (2018). With that record, the band changed members and ventured into more electronic territories by using drum machines and synths that still fit their ritual post-punk sound. After two years spent working on this new record, these electronic landscapes have taken over their music.
Arche-Fossil was almost entirely recorded by themselves at their home studio and finished at Maik Mayer’s recording studio with Sergio Pérez. It collects the songs that represent the band’s work over the last two years and that best reflect the issues that weave the whole record regarding the relationship between human beings and reality. Is it possible to know an uninterpretable reality? What is knowing? How does the relationship between human beings and reality work? These questions inform a series of songs that produce a voice that continuously muses on what it perceives and the ways in which it does.
Hunger opens the record amidst a thunder of abstract sounds and a viscous bass loop. By using samples from M. E. S. H.’s “Optimate”, which forms the noisy basis of the song, Hunger approaches more experimental electronic terrains. This song revolves not only around an insatiable and uninhibited hunger for finding new ways of saying and being in the world, but also around an enormous emptiness.
The monumental track Where Nothing Happens explores empty spaces and everything that happens within them when something–a step, a voice, an object–interrupts their eternal being, thus generating new meanings between these spaces and that which suddenly inhabits them.
In Dos Ojos, the band continues navigating electronic landscapes, this time through Spanish traditional and oral literature. They follow this path further in Esta Despedida, where the vocals use one single sentence to unsay: “Todos los nombres van a morir a ti.” (“You are where all names go to die”) From then onwards, the vocals employ a form of glossolalia as a tool to continue uttering after the death of meaning that they have previously announced. Likewise, Days of Sadness, a free adaptation of Galician poet José Ángel Valente’s poem “Latitud”, pays homage to the language of the unsaid, which has heavily influenced Wind Atlas’ discourse over the years.
That Mouth emerges as a dramatic effect when the record has managed to hypnotize us. Trance and an industrial sound meet amidst MS20 roars and a beat going over 140bpm. Metallic blows and the sound of chains burst in, creating rhythmic patterns over a bass drum that pushes forward.
The eeriest and most beautiful moments appear on the record’s B-side. Such moments come to life in tracks like Oceanic Sexuality or the closer Do You Have a House?, along with the experimental Nada, in which, by only utilizing noise, Wind Atlas create a sonic collage poem that draws from power-electronics. Here, some of the band’s recurring themes reemerge: emptiness, water, and the body.
In Arche-Fossil, Wind Atlas continue exploring some of the paths they began mapping with their previous record. This time, however, they manage to approach the heterogeneous in a much more certain and lucid manner, without ever stopping wondering about their own voice.
Andrea P. Latorre: vocals Sergi Algiz: electronics and guitar Raúl Q. de Orte: Synths Raul Pérez: drums
Recorded by the band and final recordings at Maik Maier Studios (Barcelona) by Sergio Pérez. Mixed by Sergio Pérez and mastered by Stephen Quinn at Analogue Heart (UK). Art photos by Àlex Sardà. Artwork by David M. Romero.
Templum N.R. – Spectrum DCXCIII: Poison Portals Label: Aural Hypnox – AHUE07 Series: Underworld Editions Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue Country: Finland Released: 25 May 2018 Style: Abstract, Dark Ambient, Electro, Noise, Monolog
«On one hazy night I met an elderly man sitting in an old wooden chair. He was wearing an elegant white suit and I could not help noticing the simple white lines in his fore- and middle fingers. In the remaining fingers he had circles. The pitch-black sand of the shore absorbed all the light from the sky. Regardless, I saw fifty-meter-high waves crashing down behind him – and at the same time, they remained static.»
‘Spectrum DCXCIII: Poison Portals’ has a luring, fatal beauty of its own. Redirecting, throbbing analog electronics, slowly swallowing droning textures and sinuous rhythms are accompanied with eternal, eerie melodies – all reeking of the primordial pleasures. Obscure radio transmissions and telepathic resonances are emerging from the parallel universes and will sink you even deeper into the ignorance of your very self or towards the ravishing beauty of transformation.
The other worlds and realities are present both in sound and vision; A triple-bladed iron dagger, brought to this world through trancework. Assume its form, pass the Poison Portals, and continue until the opposites intermingle and known territories vanish beneath the colossal waves.
This CD version also includes the previously limited ‘The Mass Rattle’ ep with tracks ‘The Viscous Tomb Liquid’ and a Telepath Remix of the ‘I am His Sacrifice’.
The album is enclosed in a customised and screen printed Sublunar series cardboard covers, including five two-sided insert cards. Limited to 300 copies.
Halo Manash – Unetar Label: Aural Hypnox – AHUE08 Format: CD, Album, Limited Edition, Reissue Country: Finland Released: 08 Oct 2019 Style: Abstract, Dark Ambient, Ambient
All audio material on this album originates from the “Tulitania” private ritual held in the deepest forest of Northern Ostrobothnia in December 2006.
“Unetar”, an entity awakening after a decade-long hibernation was evoked by Anti Ittna H. in the somniferous Katajan Kaiku studio during January and March 2016. The album’s opening track «Unetar» also features a spectral appearance of JKV captured on tape right after the ritual in 2006.
The first two liminal hymns were weaved together on the night of Total Solar Eclipse, 9th of March 2016. This CD edition also includes the original “Tulitania” version, that previously appeared on the «Desert Space» compilation album released by Tosom 2007.
The album is enclosed in an oversized, screen printed covers including three insert cards. Limited to 400 copies.
Aural Hypnox – Underworld Transmissions Label: Aural Hypnox – AHUE09 Format: CD, Compilation, Limited Edition Country: Finland Released: 08 Oct 2019 Style: Abstract, Ambient, Dark Ambient, Drone
Underworld Transmissions was Aural Hypnox label series, filmed and captured on tape in the private séances held in our subterranean lodge located in Oulu, Northern Ostrobothnia.
The concept was to invite artists from the Helixes collective, in different combinations, to join a séance and to establish through sound and movement an elemental communication. In greater sense, apart from personal goals, these séances aimed to bring forth the seasonal currents of the lodge; the undertone of the Aural Hypnox label and the artists involved.
Each séance was guided by a unique automatic-portal-portrait reflecting the planetary and stellar distances seen at that particular time in the lodge altar mirror-receiver.
All audio was captured live on tape by using binaural recording technique. Films were captured during séances and also in the preceding and subsequent sessions that took place in Other Rooms and in the surrounding wilderness.
The candles have been extinguished; transmissions completed.
Underworld Transmissions CD edition is housed in an oversized, screen printed cardboard covers and includes a 16-page xeroxed booklet. Limited to 150 copies.
Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello – Acute Inbetweens
Label: Crónica Format: CD, Album Country: Portugal Released: 15 Mar 2011 Style: Abstract, Drone, Experimental, Minimal
Since their initial meeting in Australia during 2006, Stephen Vitiello (USA) and Lawrence English (AU) have enjoyed a long distance collaboration orbiting around the joint passion for field recordings and modular synthesis.
Exploring the points of convergence and divergence between electricity and environment, the duet’s “Acute Inbetweens” is a collection of works derived from hazy environmental memory, imagined landscape and field recorded actualities. It’s a blurring mist of encountered spaces, recreated by means voltage controlled. Like the spatial inspiration that guides the record, “Acute Inbetweens” pace is tempered and during certain pieces borders on a sense of timelessness.
Pieces such as “La Voix est absente” unfold with a pacing of the lauded opening Lotus flowers at Sinobazu-no-ike pond, individual elements revealing themselves in subtle arcs of sound, swelling into a rich harmonic whole. By contrast “Exposure in Relief” is a more robust and pulsing work in which micro melodies spiral into one another. “Acute Inbetweens”, sharp moments diffused in time.
Label: Reverse Alignment – RA-20 Format: CDr, Album, Limited Edition Country: Sweden Released: 22 Feb 2016 Style: Abstract, Experimental, Glitch, Minimal
Mollusk is a project from sound artist Per Åhlund, known from previous releases on Reverse Alignment (with Skare and Kahl) and Johan Boberg, musician and composer that has been working with varied forms of approaches towards music. Schooled by Stockhausen and Coltrane, Johan has been part of the electronic music scene since the ‘90s and has, just like Per, become a very much active part of EMS and Fylkingen in Stockholm.
During 2016, Reverse Alignment release a series of three Mollusk albums where “Aeon Synapses Connect” is the first, followed by “Astral Mechanics” (June) and “The Cloud Expedition” (September).
With Mollusk the duo create “modular soundscapes resonating within the organic machinery feedback”.
