Smokescreen
*Edition of 200* Singapore ’90s electronic music pioneer makes his extraordinary comeback on modular synth. Inspired by the writings of Paul Virilio, the figure of the liu bai yuan 柳白猿 (archer-assassin) in wuxia (martial arts) films, and the global information war we are all experiencing, George Chua’s Smokescreen is a bold piece of electronic music with a no-wave sensibility. It is filled with abstract beats, eclectic samples and blistering noise – not exactly dance music, not quite modern comp…
<3
Uwe Schmidt runs sly and dry commentary on modern electro-dance-pop, recalling a ruder take on his seminal Pop Artificielle project with nods to Rian Treanor, PC Music and Grimes. Full of upfront, processed vocals and precision tuned, up-to-the-moment drum programming, ‘<3’ is the sharpest thing we’ve heard in years from the artist with more monikers than we can count. Following 2013’s ‘HD’ album for Raster, he recalibrates the rhythmic mechanics from techno to a slick mix of electro, EBM and e…
Aural Illusions
**Limited edition of 500 copies on heavy clear vinyl in clear plastic cover** Based around digital lock grooves this work by Digital Terrestrial is also observed by composers like Steve Reich (Minimalist/Systems music) and will eventually be performed by a String Quartet. It could be thought of more as a piece of conceptual art rather than just a piece of music. This vinyl only release could well be described as 'a lock groove record without the lock grooves...'. Playing time over 38 minutes.
I…
Pedreres
New album from Nad Spiro in a special vinyl edition co-released by Geometrik and Munster Records. In her new sonic fiction, Rosa Arruti, aka Nad Spiro, reveals an unusual dimension of her work, using just one guitar and four pedals on her sonic explorations through the lost quarries of Montjuïc, the legendary mountain of Barcelona. Armed just with her guitar, Spiro activates subterranean echoes, spectral loops, and secret vibrations on an initiation trip through invisible labyrinths. Enigmatical…
Practice Chanter
The inheritor of Brigitte Fontaine’s torch. Practice Chanter is complex and multi-faceted but also a joyful, hugely expressive and light on its feet. (The Quietus) Léonore Boulanger : chant, harmonium, toy piano, casio SA-46, guimbarde, mégaphone, machine à écrire Jean-Daniel Botta : chant, guitare, contrebasse, piano, boîte à musique, casio SA-46, balafon, trompette, practice chanter Laurent Sériès : percussions, toy piano, flûte chinoise hulusi, toy box
Volta Penta
Marius Chwaleks debut album Volta Penta, in which he explores the world of electro magnetic fields and transformed them into sounds located between Experimental, Ambient and Musique concrète. 2018 release
Point Line Cloud
P028X is the reissue of the seminal Point Line Cloud album by Curtis Roads, 15 years after its original publication on Asphodel. Each piece here revels in the microscopic level of sound that Roads discusses in his book Microsound. He devises rich textures by exploring relationships between tiny sonic shards, juxtaposed, layered and manipulated on the minutest of timescales. If this all sounds terse and scientific, you're right, and wrong, as Roads is equally competent in the theoretical and arti…
Soder Malarstrand
Lena Andersson is a fictional character created by Berlin-based Japanese artist Kyoka and Irish producer Eomac. Both met in 2016 during a residency at the Stockholm EMS studios. The initial spark of their collaboration was a joint session on the studio's Buchla system, quickly expanding to multiple other sound sources and instruments. During the improvisations, a call-and-response working principle emerged immediately which joins the special talents of both musicians. Kyoka's free and experiment…
III
**213 copies** III, as the title clearly implies, is the third album by Ihan (Yan Arexis, member of Coume Ouarnède, Stille Volk and Cober Ord). After the first Ihan album released on Mille Plateaux back in 2000, with this project Arexis continues to explore minimal electronics, rhythmical archaism and mineral textures. This is the fifth volume in the «Synesthetic Alchemy» serie curated by 213 Records and comes with a silkscreened insert.
In Cotton and Wool
** 300 copies** With his innovative performances, Berlin-based trumpeter Axel Dörner has been a leading figure on the improvised music scene since the 1990s. Internationally popular no-input mixing board player/improviser Toshimaru Nakamura structures sound by controlling mixer feedback. These two musicians released the CD "Vorhernach" on the Ftarri label in 2007, and In "Cotton and Wool" is their second duo album. The four tracks on this album (each between 7 and 12 minutes) were recorded in a …
Constant Linear Velocity
**Limited and numbered to 150 copies** "Constant Linear Velocity" features recordings of a now lost sculptural work that was originally commissioned in 2016 for Colour Out of Space festival. The work consists of over 100 empty computer cases, fitted with 16 customised and automated DVD drives. Between 2016 and 2018 it was exhibited in Brighton, Athens, Croydon, Oxford and Rennes, on each occasion being reconfigured into a new form. The most ambitious of these being at Detritus Festival in 2018, …
Object Shape Description
**Limited and numbered to 150 copies** "Object Shape Description" is the debut recording by Brussels based Italian artist Marco Lampis. Lampis works between the visual and auditory disciplines, creating installations both with and without sound, in which discrete sensory perceptions become entangled. How might we understand sound through sight or be able hear by looking? This collection of recordings is inspired by the rhetorical figure of Ekphrasis in which a visual artwork is described verball…
Synchropath
A surprising combination of melodic accessibility and signature clicky minimalism and precise austerity, in perfect Raster-Noton style. Sync released a special vinyl edition of Synchropath by Schnitt in 2013. It develops a method of composing based on the synchronism of video and audio files.The generated files come from several different sound and video sources. Schnitt selects 42 audio sources and 28 video sources from which they extract 678 audio files and 234 video files. The single files wi…
Plastik / Mechanik
Berlin’s hardcore minimalist Frank Bretschneider tweaks the freqs for Shitkatapult, rolling out pronged stabs and inhuman vocals on the physical electro flow of Plastik, and with head-slapping tones swept up in a sort of drily swanging house vortex with Mechanik. Bretschneider was raised in Karl-Marx-Stadt (now Chemnitz) in the German Democratic Republic. He is the founder of the East German underground band AG Geige and co-founder of the Raster-Noton label. He lives as a musician, video artist,…
Decadent Yet Depraved
Double LP version. Decadent Yet Depraved, the debut album by Belief Defect, finds shelter and complicity in Raster as a home and label. Familiar with the underground music scene and how its skeptical nature can also be an obstacle to overcome, Belief Defect abandon any claim or credit in an attempt to transcend the limits authorship imposes, avoid the boundaries, or expectations, earned or self-imposed, and find the clearest, most direct path to their music for themselves and the listener. At th…
Remixed 01
After their highly-acclaimed debut album Decadent Yet Depraved (R-M 178CD/LP, 2018), Berlin and LA-based producers Belief Defect invited a variety of artists to join their Remixed project. Remixed 01 is about transferring the pieces back into abstract space, and each remixer does it in his very own way. Alessandro Cortini's one-take live recording is a lesson in classical ambient music. Telefon Tel Aviv's remix is timelessly modern and extremely delicate sound design. Rather opposite concepts ar…
Passion
Demdike Stare land a new 9-track doublepack for Modern Love; a delirious odyssey from UKG to angular and freakish rhythmic jackers, highly recommended if yr into their Testpressing series or anything from Errorsmith to Príncipe, Dem 2, Jon E Cash, Wiley to Joy Division, DJ Scud, Equiknoxx, Anthony ‘Shake’ Shakir or Bernard Parmegiani...Since the release of their album Wonderland a couple of years ago, Demdike Stare have been recording material for this new doublepack Passion; an asymmetric re-im…
Vis-viva
Vis-Viva is the surprise of movement, the wonder that leads to imagine new possible configurations of the present, objects created with materials not yet invented move in aseptic and virtual spaces without respecting the normal laws of physics. Used for the first description of kinetic energyinelastic collisions the historical term Vis-Viva titles second OOH-sounds release from Voronoi, a work inspired by post humanism literature, experimental observation and speculative evolutionism where…
Surreal Air Fortress
For a while it was possible to describe the duo Coppice’s often indescribable music simply by identifying their many instruments, particularly the harmonium and accordion wielded by Joseph Kramer and Noé Cuéllar. But the notion of renewal is built right into their name: the word “coppice” refers to the practice of pruning a tree to promote new growth. The label press release says everything "Outside: light-filters-to-be-entered are Surreal Air Fortress. New songs from Coppice for physical model…
(untitled) Kingdom
Black To Comm’s Marc Richter returns under his Jemh Circs guise for a 2nd album of sonic abstractions. In contrast to Black To Comm’s analogue tape and vinyl based sound, in Jemh Circs he works with digital sources by primarily sampling modern Pop Music (and various other oddities) on YouTube (et al.) and sending chunks of it through a variety of arcane transformations and mutations. Using similar esoteric methods as on his 2016 debut album but with very different results the record decon…