qStrawberry Ergotamine is the second album from Dividenthal and Aumgn who are also known as Lee Norris and Matt Hillier and also known as Nacht Plank and Ishq to their parents.
Strawberry Ergotamine catches us in the moment of time lost.Sweet melodies stretching shadows over a canvas of hissing machinery.Like an ice cream van playing it’s sonic delights backwards and serving a cone full of rainbow coloured strawberry kraut iced delights. Have a taste of Strawberry Ergotamine…
Created in the studio, but all tracks carry the essence of being among trees. And just like the lives of trees, the album is full of mystery.
With a wide range of deep groovin’ tunes and shades of Dub, “Among Trees I Want To Live” ranges from electro-acoustic sounds to meditative patterns–this music exists somewhere in the landscapes you can listen and dance to.
The opening track “Regenerative” is a deep-ridin’ tune driven by its deep mood and catchy guitar riffs while “Imagination Creates” hypnotically moves through dub chord-driven spaces and unfolds its moving in depth groove. “The Living Green” takes us on a trip into melodic synth patterns that find their counterpart in the electric pad like guitars. “Wisdom of Resistance” carries echoes through the magic mystical forest in an epic but deep and patient arrangement while “Electric Leaves” is tripping through a mysteriously harmonic soundspace. “Days In The Tree” follows the same path continuing that special atmosphere dipped with Indian sounds which leads to “Network Of Life”–a smooth moving Tech track that Gabriel Le Mar created in collaboration together with young new artist Joey K. “Outside Of Time” rounds out the album with a smooth deep shuffling beat an intense synth and e-bow touched singing guitar moods.
Sounds that don’t exist in nature, but they create an atmosphere of tender closeness to the trees.
Solipsism, aka Craig Murphy, has slowly but surely erected on the grand ‘ol ambient/electronica corner a nice little bit of sonic real estate for himself. He’s already graced the presence of labels such as txt and Databloem, collaborating with the former’s head honcho Lee Norris as Ashtoreth’s Gate and with Norris’s Nacht Plank project, and kept busy since 2006 gracing all manners of digital imprints such as Herb Recordings and Ambidextrous. On Kismet, his debut for Carpe Sonum, Murphy lets the bells ring out and flags fly; well, more like reverberate, as the album trucks in an ever-cascading audiofall of beautiful, expressionist shimmers. Murphy’s touch is exquisite, his cycling watercolors simultaneously a balm on the soul and a hair-raising trek across lonely, thin-air vistas. Rarely does ‘ambient’ music challenge the senses as well as tickle them. In that sense, Murphy manages, despite his chosen moniker, to forge stylistic connections with similarly-styled purveyors like the late Oophoi, and, more tellingly, David Parsons, whose taste for grandeur and epic scope Solipsism virtually revels in. Maximum warp music, designed for peak experience.
Mick Chillage
Experiments in Silence
Ishqamatics
Aythar
Autumn Of Communion
Ishq
Lorenzo Montana
Solipsism
Milieu
Stormloop
au Voyage
Si Matthews
Steve Brand
Porya Hatami and Darren McClure
Sleepy Town Manufacture
Orphic Signals
Cryostasis
Murkok
The “Music” of Core−Shell Spheres and Hollow Capsules: Influence of the Architecture on the Mechanical Properties at the Nanoscale. Journal Of Organic Music captures organic musics created by organic brains.
Grass surely doesn’t grow under the feet of Albert Borkent, aka Lingua Lustra. In addition to running the Spiritech label (home to his own work and to colleagues operating within similar aesthetic ambient-initiated spheres), he apparently never sleeps, as releases both physical and digital have inundated the airspace across multiple platforms and on a myriad of labels in just a four-year span. Fortunately, the quality control maintained over his output remains high, as evidenced by this new long-player, Portal, another beauteous slab of hesitant, charcoal-gray ambientscapes. And truth be told, Borkent’s not just getting older, he’s getting better. Where many are content with MIDI presets and a dearth of imagination, Borkent mines the depths of his soundbanks down to its very circuit joins. There’s a grand majesty to the shifting sonic sands of “The Gates of Dawn” that suggests the bastion of a Steve Roach/Eno ethos while subjugating it entirely: the many differing pearlescent tones reveal hitherto untold layers when experienced either in the broader stereo space or through the captive audience of headphones. This isn’t music that is content with simply being ethereal—Borkent wishes to conjure wholly new windswept worlds and unmapped terrain, the sort of thing his Lingua Lustra project now regularly excels at.
What remains integral to the very heart of electronic music is the nature of its diversity, its ability to be mutable, fluid, malleable; in many ways, as a complete ‘genre’ wholly tethered to its current and/or vintage technology, electronic music by design is the most progressive of musical forms. And these characteristics are often what makes such sounds and textures so compelling, even breathtaking, in their scope. The duo of Lee Anthony Norris and Frank Rumpelt, recording as 2xritam, embrace this approach unreservedly. Norris is one of electronica’s long-established journeymen, having made his mark back in the far-flung 90s with both his Metamatics projects and the vital signs he posted across his highly respected Neo Ouija imprint; he continues to be hyperactive in the extreme, recording under numerous aliases for his own txt label and many others. Colleague Rumpelt has kept a lower profile but has maintained a steady presence since the late 90s cloaked under his own collection of disguises, operating effectively along a minimal techno grid of scattered 12’s and digital-only editions. Together as 2xritam, the duo revel in a marriage made in bleep heaven: thorny glades of low-end pulses compete against soaring moogified atmospheres amid an often intense conflagration of systemic pattern logistics and windswept drones. Their project surely echoes the finer mirror moves of the late Pete Namlook and his own variegated collaborative works, and would have effortlessly carried the Fax label’s proud mantle ever forward. Subsequently proffered here from Carpe Sonum, we’re pleased to present Norris and Rumpelt’s newly-minted, ear-intoxicating alchemy of futureshock electronic psychedelia.
Pure vintage analogue circuitry under the spontaneous control of Dividenthal and Aumgn, recorded live to tape, a moment in time, pure analogue circuitry and sound exploration.
The essence of these sonic explorations is Mood, a subjective and personal thing, these works are not about content and clever music production but evocative mood, pure tone and conjuration of place, memory, moment, past and future.
Ceremonial sonic paintings and portals into the imaginary.
Faex Optim is an immigrant from another dimension, beamed in on fairyland constructs made up of colorful light beams and intoxicating aural spirits. On his second album for Carpe Sonum, he trades in a particularly bedeviled skein of pastoral electronica defined by equal parts hauntological menace and gothic whimsy. Tracks often deploy a cascading array of disembodied voices rented from a myriad of astral planes; rhythms, née pulses, whip agitatedly across the stereo field like sprites caught in gargantuan whirlpools; tentative piano notes look for peaceful climes to tether their forlorn cries to. Imagine a cross between the dandelion-wine landscapes of Boards of Canada and various artists spread across early sides from Morr Music and some of today’s Ghost Box contingent and you’re about halfway there. But truth be told, Faex Optim’s sound is not one born from derivative measures but rather a culmination of all the shift-hop strides and quakebasket morning trills that once were common coin amongst contemplative 90s electronica. But now the birds have come home to roost, and the sublime, kaleidoscopic dots and loops so favored by their ancestors have found a home in the becalming, clever motifs eked out so splendidly by Faex Optim.
Many often lament the lack of ‘humanism’ in electronic music, citing its often cold sterility and inorganic elements, sounds created by robots for robots. The very nature of ‘electronic’ music means that this is usually an occupational hazard; in other words, you want warmth, go to the tropics. Well, Jacob Newman’s newest recording is here to tell you that you don’t have to travel far to bask in the sunshine and that electronic music can indeed illuminate the soul in all the right places. Newman’s past work has, in fact, embraced the human condition with true aplomb, a method he lets spring full force this time around, connecting the fragility of our surrounding ecosphere with our own desire to harness nature, in this case via a devastating arsenal of supple, coaxing keys, and some of the lushest digitalia this side of the fourth world. Tracks such as “Six Legs & Wings”, “Forest Floor, Springtime”, and “Creature Loops” finds Newman teasing our ears in a phantasmagorical sonic diorama, replete with agile, unidentifiable fauna sprinting amidst vivid riots of reds, greens, and yellows. How he manages to bring these electronic sprites & landscapes to life remains a mystery, but for us, the benefactors, such ambiguity works beautifully in our favor.
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