Huerco S. - Apheleia's Theme

This is house with classic written all over it. Huerco S. has emerged from the murky experimental end of US house in the last couple of years, releasing a couple of obscure cuts on Opal Tapes and the Ukrainian label Wicked Bass. Tracks like Battery Tunnel demonstrated a downtempo, downer type melancholy take on house music in the vein of Noi No by Madteo, but somehow there wasn't enough to be truely excited about.

The first (title) track off this new release for Washington label Future Times is a 9 minute killer, starting out hard and purposeful the track builds slowly adding just enough to the mix as it progresses to keep it immediate, there is a shade of UK Bass at times and the whole track feels like it draws on his past variety, giving it an air of mood music - it sounds dark and hypnotic or dancefloor heavy depending on when you hear it. Already a part of many big mixes this is a definite lasting tune.

Ausschachtung is a brooding affair which reminds me just slightly of A1 on Workshop 16 (Marcellis) though built from sound-fx and vocal samples, a weirdo sound collage which wouldn't sound out of place on a David Lynch film.

Cercy on the other hand merges the two sounds, closest to Madteo's gloom-tunes than either of the first two, it is sample-scapes with a hi-hat backing which makes for a decent head-nod.

It's definitely the title track that makes this release, but a solid 12 nonetheless, the B-side is perhaps the most concise representation of Huerco's past, but the A is two steps forwards for a fast emerging producer.

Kristina Records (Dalston)
Phonica Records (Soho)

The Siege of Troy

It's hard to mentally put together all the elements of The Siege of Troy, released as a self titled album and EP by Gunnar Wendel under this new name. It's also hard to really call it house music, though doubtless it pulls many elements of that genre into its loose yet freely evolving sound; the term thrown out as a descriptor on its release last month was Jacknoise, a tag which may adds something but certainly doesn't seem to sum up the release. 

Throughout there is a very disorientating quality to the music, seemingly somewhere in orbit about a house music core it pulls kicks and bouncing beats off at will, precariously close to spiraling off into broken beats or even freeform noise, yet somehow balancing sounds in a chaotic motion which evolves faster than anything Wendel has previously turned his hand to. Similarly when trying to describe the music, it begins to touch upon a genre briefly before taking off in a completely different direction, at times a middle eastern edge makes it feel close to Muslimgauze or the militant abrasion of Vatican Shadow, then suddenly a morph and you're left closer to Madteo or some mutant house hybrid. There is very little here to lend a tag to and very little stable ground at all, compared with the Kassem Mosse styling this feels like a mood board, with each track potentially a separate LP's worth of material, but for that there is a lot of intrigue and this is certainly a tape to be left on loop for a full 3 or 4 rotations before you feel able to settle on it. 

A full on experiment in the blending of sounds to form something cohesive, this kind of depth, variety and freeform composition is so rarely attempted by producers with a club music background, whether the project will go anywhere is pretty questionable, but this is a gem of a release which will definitely bring you back on occasion for a full on mindfuck.

Officially dropping on 13th May on cassette (& a shortened form on 7") through Wendel's Ominira imprint, this was instantly gone, but Phonica Records have a few copies in stock as of today, be quick.

Raime & Romeu Runa at St. Luke's

Tangible anticipation around the rarest of live performances for a duo who released one of the most intriguing albums of last year, albeit at the dark tail-end of the year, Raime created something unique with Quarter Turns Over a Living Line which was both an evolution and devolution of their previous sound. They dropped the grand cityscapes, dark as they were, for a bleaker scale, partially draped in the fuzz of power electronics and built from desolate looping which was in places closer to Basinski than Regis.

The performance is set in the London Symphony Orchestra venue of St. Luke's, on Old Street - unfortunately a venue whose grand old stonework has been obscured by sound enhancing surfaces and swaths of electronics and lighting rigs. You couldn't help but feel like the show would have benefited from a lower-key type setup in an old building with a little more preserved character.

As the lights dim and Tom Halstead & Joe Andrews walk out behind the small setup centre-stage, a quick applause and silence, the words RAIME disappear and the show begins. Slow and jittering static-like electronics are overtaken by the plodding beat of Soil & Colts, the first visual elements of dappled lighting and distorted green-screen type shapes are replaced with the darkly-lit image of Romeu Runa wrapped in leather, the slow-motion movement of his contorted expression and reaching, grasping hand movements veiling him in a cloud of dust. The track creates a hypnotic state of commanding repetition before embarking on a climatic build into more noisy territory where the show really becomes more than the home listening experience of the album. Though the initial temptation is to want to experience the show with closed eyes, the extreme slow-motion of the defined movements of Runa really helps to keep the drowsy repetitive element of Raime's music at the fore, even as the sound becomes intense and moves away from the confines of the album.

As the show progresses the set takes a varied form, using elements of the album and combining them with what feels more like freeform noise creation and sections of new material, the consistently super-slow-motion images of Runa add intensity as well as consistency to the sound, which builds and drops to silence, always keeping the well defined elements of Raime's sound distinct, never letting the noise blur into a full on power electronics sound. Despite the bleakness and at times sheer volume, the show has a surprisingly warm and lulling feeling to watch, a valium-like calmness which washes over you, whilst the visuals are at times a fascinating experience of human motion and at others take a bewilderingly abstract form that your mind cannot entirely place or understand.

The show seems to be over quickly and feels like it could easily have been extended over another half an hour, but despite that there is a definite sense of intricate consideration of the whole. Whether the visual element was important is a very personal thing, though it is clear that to Raime themselves it was a well considered and exact presentation; it's what they wanted to show and how they wanted it to be shown.

Vakula - You've Never been to Konotop

Vakula's music has been on my radar for a couple of years, in which time his output has been fairly well relentless, 2011 saw him release 11 EPs through 7 different labels (albeit with the interconnected links pretty common in electronic music's micro-scene setup) and last year saw a similarly packed schedule of pressings from a host of different places.

It has to be said that without actually listening to anything he has released there is a pretty distinct aura to the guy as a music producer, the implied logic says that this music will take an outsider view on western electronic sounds, throwing in a Slavic element to dancefloor house. Everything seems to fit, including references to Ukrainian poet Lesya Ukrainka, and later Russian theoretician Kazimir Malevich, whose geometic painting adorns at least one of his 12s. Hailing from the Ukraine also seems to be the buzz-fact that consistently gets thrown into any article or comment associated with Vakula, a producer whose music actually seem to have very little in common with the traditions of the Ukraine or even hint at that area of eastern Europe and its Russia surroundings.

Having spent a little more time immersed in his sounds lately, there is very little of a defining element to his music at all. Though you could say he fits into the house genre, that would be a fairly broad-brush label for someone who seems to mix and merge sounds not just across a variety of labels, but within most of his releases. Blissed-out ambiance washes over tunes like I Want to Dance with You All My Life, a gorgeous love song of a sunny-days dance tune which is just charged with soulful energy, similarly on releases such as the first release on the Shevchenko label (a probable Firecracker offshoot with nothing of a concrete description to be found across the 'net) the sounds of blissy ambience merge into a more tribal vocal chant, fading and dancing through the distorted but relenting hi-hats. Bug Powder is something of a psychedelic foray into weirdo instrumentation with a left-right swinging fade filling the room with sweet incense and the scent of 'shrooms; the track lifting finally into a mid tempo house beat.

It's a Kafka high.. you feel like a bug

Acid Release on Picture of You swings right into acid (unsurprising, that one), dropped right in the middle of the EP it just turns the atomsphere of the whole release, dragging compressed acid synth into squelching tones which somehow avoid sounding dated despite the straightforward setup on show; there's a turning point around 3 minutes which washes the track in dreamy vocals until it turns 180 degrees right back and into Music, a funky 80's dance tune of blurred city lights and pulsing tone.

But just like Vakula's music isn't some Slavic-tinged house gimmick, it equally isn't a patchwork of disconnected sounds. Everything he produces exudes some intricate geometric understanding of the way to weave dance music, and indeed his own sound, into something which doesn't rely on a definable genre: each release stands as a varied but connected statement of intent, all the elements sitting together, not blended but still united.

Next month, Vakula will release a full length album in which apparently he will be " combining elements of Ukrainian folk melodies, esoteric cryptic rhythm patterns, field recordings, interludes and overgrown organic effects hidden beneath acres of cosmic murk " which on the surface sounds like the sound I'd been expecting from the off, but somehow to have this as a concise body of work sounds intriguing. It does feel like Vakula's music is approaching a point of distillation, perhaps with a reduced output of more focused releases, this seems like a great way to move forward into new territory.

You've Never Been to Konotop is released through Firecracker Recordings soon. 

Vakula

Kristina Records (Dalston)
Phonica (Soho)

Edit:
Check out Vakula's new mix for LWE (Via Little White Earbuds)

Latency Recordings: From One Mind to the Other

Last year Deconstruct Music, casually as ever, dropped its first release in 3 years by a little known producer named Joey Anderson. Of course Levon Vincent is not known for his lighthearted "give it a go" approach to stamping his name to new music, he's a purist through and through and believes in only releasing what really needs to be out there, a philosophy which he rigorously applies to his own productions. It was pretty tough to be skeptical at the time, Earth Calls was everything it should have been, rivaling some of the Novel Sound productions, but I couldn't be sold entirely on that record. This month Joey Anderson released From One Mind to the Other on the new label Latency Recordings, and I'm completely sold.

Press Play is slow-build club ambiance, a nod to Underworld's Dubnobasswithmyheadman and the kind of measured minimalism which slots it somewhere between 4am basement tune and sunrise euphoria. Of course it's the kind of tune, like most of Levon's most bewilderingly genius moments, that just needs a balance between sound and bass - listening on laptop speakers can't do it justice, without the thump of the bass everything mellows out just a little too much.

Mind Set's dark vocals and tribal bounce progress slowly, gaining density without becomming cramped, again measured and perfected sampling create something immersive and textured, evoking the simple beauty of Carl Craig's 69.

Attitude takes us somewhere else, straight away a thumping bass drum unfurls twisted vocals haunts, progressing into snippets of synth and bleeps, all the while kick drum presses on, the effect is something like an endless build, sitting between the abyss of Silent Servant's A Path Eternal and the summery shimmers of Four Tet.

The sound across all three cuts is delineated into three separate statements, but with a key joining element that is the method of production; these three are constructed with the same meticulous attention to detail, with patience and a small amount of nerve. They prove there is a hell of a lot to link the dancefloor with the ambient beauty of electronic composition and that you don't have to stray far from either if you take the time to get the balance right.

On top of the production, you have to hand it to Latency for producing a brilliant package of artwork and a stunning video too (below). Truly stunning and caring production.

Artwork by: Timothée Elkaim, Souleymane Said, Pablo Hnatow

Tramma 33rpm

A carefully plotted trajectory in music tends to be proven in hindsight; the way Instra:mental's sound made sense half a decade ago now seems almost too obvious to bare. Tramma on 33rpm was a nightmarish echo chamber that somehow ended up at the core of dubstep, the entire genre now being a hangover from a star-studded MTV afterparty with everyone trying unapologetically to avoid eye contact. It's moments like this which need to be taken in once the the glow dies down, and whilst Resolution 653 wasn't my idea of the album they should have made (and a couple of years hasn't persuaded me to alter that opinion) listening to this slow-motion dub-trip fills me with confidence that they probably weren't meant to make an album. The darkness that now surrounds the resurgence of techno in the UK was tipped by tracks like this, remembering  great electonic music delivers atmosphere above complexity.

Sliding through unrelenting subterranean pipework the bass is made to nod your head to - it feels out the space for you and leaves the slightest trail of a groove which eventually blooms into crystalline beauty. The elements on this track feel so intertwined and rhythmic when you listen at the proper speed, there is nothing kitch about it, but somehow Instra:mental were made to be listened to slowly, everything becomes as sparse as it needs to be to really lay bare the workings of the track and allow it to come to life, it engulfs you with a dark energy that Nonplus+ always seemed to keep in mind.

(if anyone wants to hear this at 33rpm, drop me a message)

Sonic Symbiosis

Long form recorded ambient sound can provide a multi-level listening experience and something different to the experience of repetitive beat-based loops.

1.
Whilst listening to something like Ricardo Villalobos's epic looping Enfants (Chants) I begin to develop a hypnotic sense of minute change - something so minor that it would become an academic exercise of sound-wave analysis to tell exactly whether there is any change at all (something which I cannot see as being a worthy task even if I were inclined towards interest) - which is to say that the sound bends both my sense of time and my ability to focus upon a sample large enough to positively identify change in the music. The structure of this track is so well defined that after a time I feel that in some way my brain re-imagines the elements of the music and in doing so brushes on a sort of false-positive interpretation of progression - one which is not there and one which feels always to be on the brink of a defined and quantifiable expression. I cannot tell whether this is something intricately woven into the production of certain tracks and therefore a feature of the music, or whether it is a deliberate manipulation of a way the brain functions - or neither and simply an unwanted wavering from the purity of repetition - but it does raise questions of the fundamental interpretation of any music (and probably other things outside of music). As humans I feel that we always sit somewhere between two states of wanting, on the one hand we approve and crave repetition - a healthy way to live is one in which we have expectations that routines exist and we can accurately plan for the immediate future. On the other hand there is an expectation of progression - this is undeniable in as much as our love for capitalism, our need to explore the world, our thirst for knowledge and technology and our need to feel that we have ways to express our individuality &etc. Whilst these two states exist side-by-side, it is probably acceptable to generalise and say that whilst we crave change when we are young, the tendency, as a comfortable state is achieved, that we err towards repetition, predictability, we become somewhat accepting and happy to live with the nuance of perceived variety day-to-day and week-to-week, that is to say we become attuned to subtle variety and perhaps even imagined variety - whilst I am willing to swear tonight is unique, it is actually incredibly similar to any number of other nights I have experienced in the last few months, tomorrow will not be very different to every other friday in 2013. An ability to appreciate something repetitive is possibly an in-built given trait of an organism designed to live for 70 years or more and it is probably the exact reason why a piece of repetitive sound can become a nuanced and progressive trip and an experience rewarding beyond its basic elements. The idea that through the production of club music a sweltering mass of people can dance for hours on end implies the intricate link between person and soundwave and how much the brain adds to sound when it translates it to mental and physical experience.

2.
As I experienced today whilst immersed in Kevin Drumm's Night Side - a barely layered ambient piece clocking in around 61 minutes which appears to drift and swell imperceptibly - whilst the experience on headphones standing on a deserted platform somewhere in South London was one of great inversion, the feeling of glazed perception of the towering brick arches around me - my whole interpretation of the sound was changed whilst navigating the streets through a crowded London Bridge, where found I could zone in and out of noises outside of my bubble, the ambiance created a backwash to the environment which over time morphed and distorted the reality of the sound. After some time the environment and soundscape became so intertwined that it felt as though I could detect changes in the structure of the piece independently of the interference - these changes were at times subtle and at other times less so, but always impossible to define and therefore impossible to regard as truly present in the recording. I wondered whether this same change in interpretation of the sound would present themselves in a silent atmosphere or whether it were the external sounds creating undulations and ripples in the pool. It is hard to imagine that an external 'noise' element could create independent changes in the structure of a piece of music above the superposition of waveforms, though perhaps less tough to understand when you consider the way the brain is drawn to focus this way and that, adding a constantly varying spatial element to what is otherwise an immersible and insular sound experience.

Epitaph i

I think it was purely about creating slabs of ‘Exotic Hypnotics’; it was about forsaking any form of melody or traditional structure and building a mantra. 

- Karl O'Connor

End of Party

Artists talk emphatically about the end of the party, light rushes in, filling our consciousness and by dispelling a void of the visual, it closes off our hearing. Audibility fragments into a collection of whispers and as we drift towards the nearby exit our head fills gaps in the numbness with echoes of the just-past sound.

One of my most memorable musical experiences came as an unceasing wall of noise receded into nothing in a split second. The speaker system tripped a switch somewhere and what had built into a crushing force suddenly opened up into an instant and intense eternity of silence. The moment immediately following the silence felt like my sense of hearing had been ripped from me, residual shuffles and hums inaudible until my ears began to readjust, the dividing line between noise and silence was the most intense, as disorientating at the time as it is indescribable now. As my mind struggled to adjust to the change in sensory load, sounds became fractured; I experienced them differently, as if for the first time, I found myself lost for words as I tried to make sense of the morphing soundscape around me.

The transition from club to sofa in the early hours of the day brings with it a certain set of feelings, a way of experiencing the world under a new regime, through a new set of filters. Conversations have a lightened quality to them, the early morning light seems to paint a different set of colours. When people speak about this new music, post-rave music, they speak of a variable bpm, a speeding up or slowing down of their experience at different times of the day and under different frames of mind. It has a transient quality; the watershed between intense club experience and understatement of the waking world. It hints at the reasons for dance culture, sound pushed towards one extreme, to experience the world by blocking out visual dominence - hypnotising us for an extended period of time and enough to shift our experiences of the world and to renew and refresh the way we experience day-to-day.