★Hapna
Sifantin och morkret
This is the fourth full-length release for Sweden's Hans Appelqvist, his third for the Häpna label. Hot on the heels of his last record Naima, released in November 2006, Hans has a new album ready, entitled Sifantin och mörkret, containing 12 new tracks and a beautiful video for "Tänk att himlens alla stjärnor," made by Andreas Nilsson (The Knife, José Gonzales and The Soundtrack Of Our Lives). The music shows Hans from a new side, the album being more open and spontaneous than previous works. A…
s/t
Following last year's incredible 'Gesine' comes Italian experimental guitarist Giuseppe Ielasi's latest full-length, an album which may come as something of a surprise to fans of his earlier work. The obvious inclusion of electronic elements comes at an odd time when the majority of experimental musicians seem to be moving further away from anything electronic rather than embracing it, yet Ielasi manages to infuse a glitchy almost minimal techno frame with the most intriguing guitar structures t…
Gesine
Apparently mining his own aural Sutton Hoo, Giuseppe Ielasi is an Italian experimental guitarist and electronic botherer, who pulls all sorts of musical styles from the trench labelled 'Gesine'. Coming across as partially improvised, 'Gesine' is Ielasi's first solo work since 2003's 'Plan's, and is again witness to a veritable cornucopia of finds. Ranging from shuffling Bert Jansch folk and diet-drone, through to glitch plagued bass and waterlogged guitars, 'Gesine' is superficially sepulchral, …
Hundloka, flockblomstriga 1
This is Sweden-based Anders Dahl's first release on the Häpna label. From documentary audio recordings of his travels to India, electronic manipulations of toxic ooze, to "wildlife" recordings of digital birds, Dahl goes places where the natural and the digital world meet and obfuscate one another. Using steel bowls, bouzoukis, bottles, pans, drums, guitars, electronics, and anything else on hand or in his surroundings, Anders Dahl, much like his esteemed botanist compatriot of the same name, se…
A year of the aural gauge operation
3/4's new album, A Year Of The Aural Gauge Operation, was recorded in their own studio in Bologna along 2004. It features nine songs composed after live improvisations, all of them quite different in genre, but again 3/4's aim is to create a psychedelic musical flow, one in which new elements and different styles can be superimposed to enrich and develop the peculiar narrative of the album. We generally think of it as a opera.
"A collection of off-centre songs verging on…