★Blackest Ever Black
Ice Exposure
Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with Ice Exposure, their second album for Blackest Ever Black. A sequel and companion piece of sorts to 2015's Antigravity, its title couldn't be more apt: sonically it is both colder, and more exposed -- in the sense of rawer, more volatile, more vulnerable -- than its predecessor, capturing the combustible energy and barely suppressed violence of the trio's celebrated live performances with aspects of noir jazz, musique concrète, no wave ar…
Weld
Faith Coloccia and Alex Barnett return to Blackest Ever Black with their second duo album, Weld; working with synthesizers, effected vocals, raw electrical noise, field recordings, EVP techniques, tape manipulation, and drum machines to create a music at once lucid and mystic. Its songs embody various experiential philosophies and objectives: searching for the sacred in the forgotten and supposedly useless; exploring the meaning of "natural"; listening for the pulse of the ancient; using technol…
Fooling Around
First vinyl release of the definitive version of "Fooling Around," which appeared in truncated form on Rat Columns' 2014 album Leaf (R.I.P. Society). Its void-chasing motoric and moody jangle evoke Splendour of Fear-era Felt or David Kilgour at his dreamiest, strapped to the engine of NEU!'s "Für Immer." "Living in the New World" summons Orange Juiceor The Modern Lovers, but with a darker, more delirious edge; "Should I Leave You Alone?" closes with square-jawed dub-bass and chewy tape FX yieldi…
To Make A Fool Ask, And You Are The First
Ashtray Navigations's To Make A Fool picks up where the nerve-damaged exotica of 2015's A Shimmering Replica left off - acerbic "surf" guitar and synthetic salt-breeze fit for the Tropic of Yorkshire. Instant immersion in a potent, pungent psychedelia that feels equal parts cosmic and aquatic. What Phil Todd wrenches out of his instrument these days is a language unto itself - a helical, grieving howl, a (super)natural efflorescence, beyond earthly description - ur-rock and post-everything. Equa…
Memory Care Unit
A new long-form offering of poignant, isolationist machine music from Secret Boyfriend. Eschewing the cryptic and compact song-sketches that characterised his 2013 Blackest Ever Black LP, This Is Always Where You’ve Lived, Ryan Martin instead guides us through vast interior topographies and nerve-damaged ambiences that comfort and deceive like memory itself. Beginning with "The Singing Bile" – minimal synth submerged and subjected to an almost oceanic pressure – the tracks are mostly crude, exte…
Never Mind The Bucket
Blackest Ever Black's marked its fifth anniversary in 2015 with events at the ICA in London and Berghain in Berlin. The former featured an unforgettable performance from Mick Hobbs' Officer!, the shapeshifting group's first in twenty-odd years. For this show Hobbs was joined by longtime collaborators Mary Currie of Flaming Tunes (voice, shruti, theremin, glock) and Joey Stack (keyboards, voice), with Tilly Bean on bass, Ed Bernez on drums and Lydia Fischer contributing flute, trumpet and …
On A Business Trip To London
On a Business Trip to London is an album of curious electronics and sissy dance conceived under the shadow of Big Ben by Vivid Extreme. Initial research carried out at Ibis City Hotel, London; purple nail polish applied in Berlin and New York City. The result is the perfect and perhaps overdue meeting of emasculated P.E., limp-wristed ornamental industrial, sickly minimal synth, and cheap suntanned trollop techno. What's more, its tinny rhythmic ringtone cycles of humiliation and debasement evin…
Aura Legato
Blackest Ever Black presents Af Ursin's 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato. Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Van Luijk's process begins alw…
Eclipsed
Bremen return with Eclipsed, a double LP of glacial electronics, strung-out drone-punk, and smoldering space-rock minimalism. Following the release of their self-titled debut on Skrammel in 2013, the Swedish duo of Jonas Tiljander (Brainbombs) and Lanchy Orre (Brainbombs, Totalitär) joined the Blackest Ever Black fold in 2014 with Second Launch (BLACKEST 033LP). If the mood of that record was brooding and stygian, its monochord intensity unfaltering, then Eclipsed, this equally sprawling set, co…
The Composite Moods Collection Vol. 1: House Number 44
House Number 44 is the first volume of The Composite Moods Collection, a cycle of Dalhous recordings that examines the relationship between two individuals cohabiting in a confined space -- their interactions, their sense of self and of each other, and the pregnant space between. One of these people, perhaps the protagonist of House Number 44, is (or at least feels) in fine mental health. The other appears distinctly unwell -- detached, isolated, often feeling helpless and unable to influen…
Tooth
Double LP version. Raime presents their second album, Tooth. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focused futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely up-tempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms. No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding syn…
Deformed Worship
"In my earliest years I realised life consisted of two contradictory elements. One was words, which could change the world; the other was the world itself, which had nothing to do with words." - Yukio Mishima
Blackest Ever Black will release Deformed Worship, the second album by Raspberry Bulbs, in July 2013.
Since debut LP Nature Tries Again (Hospital Productions, 2011) RB has grown from the solo project of M. del Rio (HWCT from Bone Awl) into a five-piece of extraordinary force and focus. The …
Manbait
Manbait is a survey of Regis's 2010-'15 productions and remixes for Blackest Ever Black. In addition to three originals (in several different versions) and his celebrated remixes of Raime, Vatican Shadow, Ike Yard, and Dalhous, it features three previously unreleased tracks: a Regis take on a lost song by his own teenage synth-punk group Family Sex, an alternate mix of Tropic of Cancer's "Plant Lilies at My Head," and an edit of his own "Blinding H…
Stop Suffering
Stop Suffering is first music to emerge from Camella Lobo's Tropic of Cancer project since her 2013 debut album, Restless Idylls (BLACKEST 005CD/LP). The towering, time-stopping title-track is the culmination of Tropic of Cancer's work to date; rarely does an arrangement so sparse exhibit such grandeur. Written and recorded by Camella Lobo in LA. Additional recording, production, and mixing by Joshua Eustis (Sons of Magdalene, Telefon Tel Aviv). Cover photograph by Jasmine Deporta. Layout by Oli…
Archive: The Downwards Singles
The three original songs from Tropic of Cancer's two 10"s on Downwards, The Dull Age/Victims (2009) and Be Brave (2011) (now both out of print and highly sought-after), collected on one 12" with new artwork by Silent Editions. An artifact of a time and a place that can never be revisited or relived. The ultimate post-punk, post-techno death-disc. Written and produced by Camella Lobo and Juan Mendez. Recorded in Long Beach, CA, and Minneapolis, MN, 2008-2009. Mastered and cut byMatt Colton at Alc…
Hide Before Dinner
Hide Before Dinner is an extraordinary LP from a group comprising Carla dal Forno (Tarcar), Samuel Karmel, and Tarquin Manek (Tarcar,LST). Deeply drugged, synth-daubed death-folk and DIY electronics of the highest order; acutely psychedelic, inscrutable but emotional, sunken but prone to soaring, with flashes of horror too. Beautifully conjures the mirth and murk of childhood summers... a relatable surburban gothic... grazed knees, hide-and-seek, nettle-stings. Trampled flowerbeds and failing l…
Quarter Turns Over a Living Line
2015 repress; gatefold double LP version.. The precious bloodline of British dread music circulates through Raime's riveting debut album. Two years since their eponymous 12" - Blackest Ever Black's first release - sounded a mandate-like synthesis of late '70s industrial gloom, palsied techno and burned-out breakbeats with a gothic elan, they've come to epitomise the label's aesthetic whilst remaining its most elusive, enigmatic operators, flitting from surround sound installations to chast…
Crack
The Vienna-based trio's second LP following 2013's crushing debutLicht (BLACKEST 016LP), Crack finds Peter Rehberg (Editions Mego),Christina Nemec (comfortzone), and Christian Schachinger crafting a powerful alloy of extreme electroacoustic music, luminous ambience, and the mineral fundaments of rock and black metal. Opener "Spalt" immediately signals a departure from the monolithic doom of Licht, conveying instead a sense of adrenalized movement, of acceleration toward an ever-receding horizon.…
Tearing Down Heaven
Very necessary standalone release of Six Six Seconds' Tearing Down Heaven, standout track from the 2012 Downwards compilation So Click Heels. Written and performed in Berlin by the elusive Eden and deftly recorded and mixed by Karl O'Connor. Darkly rapturous dream-pop; the abyssal swoon of shoegaze meets a harsher, more pernicious order of psychedelic rock minimalism. This 10" features a slightly extended version of "Tearing Down Heaven" and a stunning "Reprise" that unravels the original's comp…
Antigravity
Legendary trumpeter Jac Berrocal joins two fellow travelers in the French avant-garde,David Fenech and Vincent Epplay. A lugubrious mise-en-scène in which ice-cold outlaw jazz meets musique concrète, DIY whimsy, and dubwise studio science, all watched over by the lost souls and hungry ghosts of rock 'n' roll. The trio's first album together, Antigravity is a richly imagined universe combining original compositions and détourned standards. Berrocal revisits his own signature piece "Rock 'n Roll S…