While no stranger to the label as one half of Orphic Signals with Lee Norris, ‘Viridian Loops’ sees Wil Bolton release his first solo album for TXT

As the nights darken and the winter chill starts to creep in, let this album transport you to the exotic island of Sri Lanka, where Wil’s field recordings of his time spent there intertwine with the analogue warmth of looping synths and enigmatic, dreamy melodies.

“Rausch with no name / My beautiful shine / You are the sun / This is where I want to be / Rausch with no morning / This is where we burn / The Stars sparkle / In a sea of flames / Horns and fanfares / Fanfares of joy / Fanfares of fear / The wine we drink through the eyes / The moon pours down at night in waves / Careful with that axe Eugene / Personal Jesus / No beginning no end / Eighteenth of Oktember / The night falls / The king comes / The hunt starts / Freude schöner Götterfunken / The long march through the underwood / Trust me there’s nothing / Once upon a time, there was a bandit / Who loved a prince / That was long ago / Spring Summer Fall and Gas / There is a train heading to Nowhere / Drums and Trumpets / Future without mankind / Warm snow / Alles ist gut / The bells toll / You are not alone / The murmur in the forest / The murmur in the head / Light as mist / Heavy as lead / Music happens / To flow like gas /A clearing / Heavy baggage / Debut in the afterlife / Death has seven cats / World heritage Rausch / Finally infinite.” –Wolfgang Voigt, 2018

Delicate and most strangely created, the Carpe Sonum collaborative debut by the enigmatically nicked Specta Ciera and Arbee is a wondrous slice of ghosttronica seemingly forged in hauntological climes where the spirits of 90s IDM’ers lurk about. Recalling such ancestral stalwarts as Norken, Pliiant, Bigeneric, and artists of similar stripes, these two have joined forces to excavate from electronica’s rich history all that was luxurious, sublime, and intoxicating about the genre when it’s bubble peaked two decades ago. Syrupy synthesized homilies, irising atmospherics, and softly purring asides arc above rising thermals of time-stretched beat patterning that reach for the heavens. The two-part opus that makes up “Lanterns” offers a crystallization of the duo’s ambitious sonic goals: quiescent, alien thrush and static caught in echo-chamber flux, in a near-perfect example of slow-motion kinetic synergy. Dynamic pillow talk for lethargic synthetes.

Includes bonus CD of Elemental Gathering, previously released digitally on Relaxed Machinery Records.

Si Matthews’s Carpe Sonum debut, Tales of Ten Worlds, glorified the Namlook template to usher in new vistas of expansive headtones; to mix Fax-ian metaphors, something like an ‘environmental space music’ that trafficked in Germanic kosmische traditions while not becoming wholly subservient to them. On Across the Ether, Matthews’ manages to find a way deeper into the cosmos with a purity of essence and engulfing outreach, using a broad range of merry modules to free your mind for your soul to follow. Beginning with the prickly drone clusters, shimmering galactic bubblewrap, and moog-esque whoosh of opener “The Search”, snatches of abandoned astronauts dialog frozen in a distant quasar’s bandwidth eerily paint a picture of beings trapped in all-encompassing voids, the light of farflung orbs their only accompanying illumination. It’s an utterly compelling beginning that finds Matthews doing what ‘classic’ synth/space music does best: erect whole new imagistic textures never before heard, considered, or contemplated. With the ‘renaissance’ of electronic and synth-generated music going on full-force for nigh on a decade now, Matthews remains one of the movement’s most talented young whippersnappers, amorphous by decree, providing us with, to borrow an album title from Hawkwind, astounding sounds, amazing music.
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Lee Norris and Matt Hillier return for another Zeit release.

Primordial innocence in music, which sets sound apart from the untamed drones that roam the forests, resides somewhere deep within sound,and will continue to do so until sounds last breath. We can bring out this undying innocence within us,perhaps we’ll chance upon it in a moment of unrealised happiness, which catches us unawares and brings out an uncontrollable smile to our ears…Or maybe not!! CD contains 2 bonus mixes from Ishq and Dividenthal.

CD only and no digital release

It’s been four years since Lorenzo Montana has graced Carpe Sonum with a solo album, though he surely hasn’t lain fallow: in between that recording and the sheer aural wonder that is Iso Le he found time to collaborate with CS colleague Mick Chillage, as well as Alio Die, and released records for labels such as txt, Psychonavigation, and Projekt. Montana’s canvas of hues and tinctures is vast and seemingly bottomless, which explains the almost painterly compositional methods that make up the complex interplay of sound and vision informing his tracks. He maintains that the fundamental designs for Iso Le lie in his fascination with Martin Denny, Arthur Lyman, Yma Sumac, and other dabblers in exotica. While little of Denny or Sumac’s frenzied glossolalia appear to have survived intact within Montana’s own supple grooves, their serpentine synth lines and wildly percolating programming still retains some of those faux-pop artist’s own mercurial aesthetics. Iso Le also benefits greatly from Montana’s innate fascination with video, still photos, and landscape; it’s easy to imagine the topography of a track such as “Tiche” to arise from the humid environments gracing foreign warm worlds and otherwise, or likewise, the kinetic motion within the underbelly of “Vineta” centering its locale inside computer-pixellated greenhouses of splashy primary colors. Echoes of Montana’s kinship to early 90s acid house, an obvious admiration for widescreen flair, and the hyper-drama resulting from the marriage of swift ambient-inflected textures to machine-soldered beat patterns certifies Iso Le as a potential future classic, carrying the torch in the finest post-Fax tradition.

Once a duo, in 2007 Yamaoka became the sole province of Kenichi Oka, and if nothing else, the man hasn’t lain fallow since. On the contrary, he’s continued to ply his trade across a veritable smorgasbord of labels worldwide, and, thankfully, virtually all of it has been on our blessed CD or CDR formats. Making his Carpe Sonum debut, it’s easy to understand why the nomadic Yamaoka is one of electronica’s great hopes for the future. Style-wise, he doesn’t relish sitting still very often, and the remarkable thing is that he traverses such swift alterations in form and function with a singular dexterity. “On Switch” makes mincemeat out of hoary old drum ’n’ bass flexisms due to its liquifying background wetwork and spastic yet cooling synth tropes. Conversely, the achingly lovely chordal loops ringing throughout “Duet” truly paint a picture of what you soul might look like. And “Three Stairs” reasonably ‘remixes’ Tangerine Dream’s lost sequencer art for 21st century nu-school converts, suborning the genre while systematically tweaking it to suit those whose sensibilities arose from IDM’s golden era. Wow and flutter, with emphasis on the wow.

Massimo Vivona is one of the unsung veterans of Namlook’s Fax catalog, and one of the least notorious. Most of his work in the 90s centered around the then-fashionable areas of hypnotic trance, and though ambient pieces occasionally cropped up on his Fax productions, he was known more for auguring intense beatstorms rather than becalming ambient monsoons. With this utterly captivating new long-player, Vivona’s not only flipped his own model, he’s upped the ante. Taking cues from the breathless arpeggiated fantasias of Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze, née the instigators of the well-defined 70s Berlin School, Vivona’s mapped out his own well-articulated star maps and plotted a true interstellar pathway to the cosmos. With reams of velvety, pulsating sequencers, skeins of prog-epic Moog, and a whole host of otherworldly vintage synths taking flight like sleek, analog eagles, Vivona’s managed to concoct a modern-day Teutonic masterpiece, broad in scope, limitless in outreach, kaleidoscopic and eventful in equal measure. This is the kind of aural galactica that many practice but few lift-off; it’s a testament to Vivona’s skills that he can so effectively marry decades of synthesizer workout with such a stark and contemporaneous feel. Beautiful, bodacious, and bold, like the grandeur of the 70s masters, this one is literally godlike.

In space, no one can hear you meditate. Thankfully there’s the mysterious project called Urban Meditation that’s arrived to tell you that, indeed, you can in fact set your soul alight in the vacuum of the cosmos, provided you’re accompanied by waves of bubbly pulsations, trilling synths, and a chorus of disembodied phantasms to clearly mark the path. Whether or not the mind(s) behind this moniker have chosen their name to honor Mssr. Namlook and his similarly-titled, multi-chapter editions is, frankly, moot—this is surely the stuff expansive, intergalactic journeys are made of, bits and bursts of farflung stardust intermingling with the kinds of bass sequencer passages so beloved of Dreams Tangerine, Schulzian, or otherwise. Urban Meditation’s lineage may even have a more direct (yes) analog to the many space critters that emerged from the rubble of the 70s’ Teutonic shifts (think folks such as Gert Emmens, Ian Boddy, Keller & Schonwalder, et al), married to the kind of blip-bots forged from an array of pre-millennial, post-trance/ambient/techno bleep factories (here’s looking at you Heavenly Music Corporation and the rest of the Silent majority). Meaty, trippy, beaty, and bouncy, the wrenching of these blokes’ sonic relics out of the great unknown has reaped dividends for our listening benefit, and we are all the more fortunate for it.

Over the last few years, Ambidextrous has been working mostly on ambient or ambient techno music, but IDM has always been his “first language”, so making this record was like a comeback to home grounds, a fun and easy journey. It started in early 2016 with two or three tracks that became a key part of his live show but soon a brief experiment evolved into a full-length record. Adding more beats to sound texture was a good opportunity to play around with odd time signatures. Nick was also trying to put together digital glitchy IDM sound and the 70s space/sci-fi feel. The ideas of science, technology, and progress (or “научно-технический прогресс” in Russian) were highly motivating for Nick as a child, and electronic music (a frequent soundtrack for movies or educational TV programs in late USSR) was a perfect implementation of this concept.