★Denovali Records
Machine to Machine
Following on from early 2015’s exercise in dissonant formalism “Sarava Exu”, “Machine to Machine”, Donoso’s newest full length work sees a return to a more melodic sound. “Machine to Machine”, continues to bridge the gap between Ricardo Donoso’s more rhythmic and melodic work alongside his more experimental, loose and dissonant side yet still maintaining his unique signature feel; “WTF”-polymertric rhythms, elegant cinematics and spine chilling tension. Recorded over the last two years …
Fogh Depot
Fogh Depot is not just a collaboration between three musicians weaving a cozy melancholic cocoon in the midst of a looming, cold, unwelcoming metropolis of Moscow. It’s a creativity lab where complex cryptoanarchic ideas rigidify in the viscously flowing Phrygian mode, while the simple and naive piano melodies sweep the listener right back to childhood. Fogh Depot’s debut album contains eight stories told by different people in different places. "Anticyclone" feels like a massive hedge-maze amid…
Split
This split constitutes an exciting collaboration of these two French experimental/avant-garde/dark jazz acts. In mutual respect and appreciation, both Dale Cooper Quartet and Witxes selected a track of their split companion and created a fundamental and independent rework of around 20 minutes length.Based upon parts of Witxes' "The Apparel" -- from the last album "A Fabric of Beliefs" -- and afternoon summer recording sessions, the Dale Cooper Quartet's "Le Strategie Saint-Frusquin" contains the…
Quatorze Pieces De Menace
Dale Cooper Quartet and The Dictaphones are back with their third album called "Quatorze Pièces de Menace". This new full-length of the cult French Dark Jazz collective is the follow up of the highly acclaimed 2011 output "Métamanoir" - the second release for the German experimental music label Denovali. Halfway from their debut "Parole de Navarre"'s ambient and drone driven soundscapes and the more orchestrated "Métamanoir", this new collection of tracks is following their quest for dreamy but …
Sarava Exu
In contrast with the continual pursuit of achievement, that today's culture teaches us, the theme of Descent, found in many myths in the shape of the hero going underground to pass a period of solitude, is no longer represented. A cultural space existed in most traditional societies for such a period in a person's life and it was seen as necessary in order for the initiate to re-connect with their past and concomitantly with his collective unconscious, or humanity’s primordial existence. …
Deterrence
A year before exploding onto the electronic music scene in 2011with the critically acclaimed Progress Chance, Ricardo Donoso's debut release "Deterrence" was issued as an extremely limited cassette edition - a through-composed ambient piece, "Deterrence" is stripped of all the rhythmic flux which he has become known for. Considered by many in underground circles to be a true masterwork of the Dark Ambient genre, "Deterrence" is often times compared to works by artists such as Lustmord, Bi…
Loss
The 2nd EP by Moon Zero (London-based Tim Garratt) 'LOSS' is the result of a year spent working out how to play Moon Zero live and then going on to play concerts. Using a wide range of instrumentation such ad drawbar organ, bass synth, vocals, fx processors and guitar pedals, Loss was written & recorded over 2 days at St George in The East Church in London, October 2013. Whereas 'Tombs' was more concerned with exploring melody in an ambient space, 'Loss' is looking at pulse and movement i…
Tombs
The 1st EP by Moon Zero (London-based Tim Garratt) 'Tombs' is, especially for a debut, a bold and confident musical statement, which reimagines the possibilities of processed organ and vocal sounds in a live context. The opener 'Dalyan' builds from slowly wavering layers of sound into a crumbling, decaying wall of fuzzed-out, peaking noise, which in turn builds again into ever-moving blocks of chopped loops and feedback, absorbing the listener completely into Moon Zero's musical space. A …
Splintered Instruments
While looking back to an extensive period of creating music with his ambient project “Sketches for Albinos” Matthew Collings felt the urgent necessity of starting with a completely different approach to music, as the ambient aesthetic didn’t match any longer with new ideas burgeoning in his head. He wanted to create a more direct sound to involve a much grander and more dangerous range of emotions. The composition process of “Splintered Instruments” came out of personally reckoning with tw…
Silence Is A Rhythm Too
Matthew Collings is a Scotland-based composer. Not only being a solo recording and live artist, he collaborates regularly with artists from all kinds of fields including musicians, dancers and filmmakers. He’s responsible for several installations using custom-made software, which have been exhibited at Burning Man Festival in San Francisco or Glasgow's Centre for Contemporary Arts. His work for films includes a specially commissioned live score for Dziga Vertov’s 1929 silent classic, ‘The…
Tiento de las Nieves
Shipping on Monday "Love is life’s snow. It falls deepest and softest into the gashes left by the fight—whiter and purer than snow itself. What is life without love? It is like this ice—a cold, bare, rugged mass, the wind driving it and rending it and then forcing it together again, nothing to cover over the open rifts, nothing to break the violence of the collisions, nothing to round away the sharp corners of the broken floes—nothing, nothing but ba…
Parole De Navarre
Formed for the improvisation nights Dynamo in Brest, France, this quartet made of musicians covering a wide variety of musical styles creates a sound that mixes electronic (samples, cuts, sound treatments) and acoustic elements (guitars, saxophone, trumpet). They’re playing moody ballads that sound as if they would come out from one of David Lynch's movies. Like in the films of Hollywood’s master of bizarre pieces, there is something like a dark and poisonous colour broken by red thunderlights a…
Melt into nothing
“Melt Into Nothing” is Ensemble Economique’s most lucid seance to date. The prolific Humboldt County musician has stripped layers off of his trademark haze but retained the beautiful desolation that’s earned him a rabid fanbase. The solo project of former Starving Weirdos member Brian Pyle, Ensemble Economique has crossed a land bridge from apocryphal world music and dusty soundtracks to gauzy 4AD-style atmospherics. Trellises of guitar embolden Pyle’s whispered, threadbare lyrics. On “Hey Baby”…
Interval Signals
Brian Pyle is becoming a big name in disquieting ambient and haunted audio, and two new releases (this and Light that Comes, Light that Goes) from him this week aptly explain why. Interval Signals is an enticingly evocative story, a single-take journey through a series of interiors and exteriors spaces layered with memories and geographies. Melancholy like an old crime scene, its mixture of ancient broadcasts, echoes trapped in the dusty twentieth-century telephone network, spiritualistic tuned …
Light that comes, light that goes
One of two new releases from Brian Pyle (the other being 'Interval Signals'), Light that comes is a rich exploration of Ensemble Economique's range and power. With a palpable sense of the sublime throughout, the listener is guided through drones like the pillars and buttresses of a cathedral for a sombre new religion, into the sounds of the ocean (somehow elegiac), flute tones springing up in the fog like gravestones, and fallen kosmische. These are followed by the wonderfully odd 'As the Train …
Novaya Zemlya
Novaya Zemlya (lit. "New Land"), also known in Dutch as "Nova Zembla" and in Norwegian as "Gåselandet" (lit. the "Goose Land"), is an archipelago in the Arctic Ocean in the north of Russia and the extreme northeast of Europe, the easternmost point of Europe, lying at Cape Flissingsky on the northern island. The artwork, by Jon Wozencroft, includes an essay by Thierry Charollais, "Thomas Köner's Novaya Zemlya: towards a metaphysical geography"... Of course we find the unique Köneresque glow…