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LP
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EMEGO 285LP
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Chra is the artist moniker for Austrian Christina Nemec (Bray, Shampoo Boy). SEAMONS is the latest missive in her ongoing exploration of suffocating abstract audio. At once designed and falling apart SEAMONS is rough and crude, a stumbling and staggering electronic expedition where nothing presents itself explicit in intent. It's a tense obscure record that teases you into its peculiar vortex from its suggestive nature of exploring the enigma beyond its haunted facade. "VICIOUS WATER REGIMES" stutters along as an "ugly" mass of grey electronica. "CAST(O)RO" shines from light from the depths with its occasional foray into glistening tones. "COLONIA MARINA SERENELLA" is a dank squelching backdrop for a dark age. "CAST" twists tension with flickering electronics chaotic in their perpetual design of order confronting inevitable collapse. "LET SHARKS SLEEP" is not only a great title but a mind tickling adventure of descending/rising digital dance that builds in intensity with its relentless repetition. "WIDOW WALKS" gallops and creaks along a path veiled in whispers. "ENGE" lunges through time with an air of deep uncertainty. SEAMONS hovers on the outskirts, crawling out of the speakers with endless surprising turns, few of them comfortable. SEAMONS is progressive ambient, not the kind that makes you escape, but rather one you can't escape from. SEAMONS crawls into the very guts of sound to uncover and unravel the uneasy and unsettling underbelly within. Recorded and produced in Vienna, Waldviertel, Crete as well as on planes and in cemeteries, 2018-2019. Mastered by Russell Haswell, January 2020. Cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle, Berlin, February 2020. Artwork by Susi Klocker.
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LP
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EMEGO 244LP
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On her latest release, Chra, aka Christina Nemec, sketches out a psycho-geographical map that guides you to the border of the internal and external world -- On A Fateful Morning lets you enter a sphere where the imaginary and the subliminal cross. Evoking abstract images that transcend reality, Chra installs an autarchic time-and-space continuum of vague, nocturnal beauty. Pastose bass drones, airy ambient synths and processed audio samples form a hypnotic stream that lets you enter an altered state of mind. By subtly intertwining musical and non-musical sounds, Chra weaves an intensely atmospheric, poetic tableau of emptied spaces left to the listener's imagination. It's the pulse of arcane memories that is filling these sonic landscapes, operating deep within the subconscious. On A Fateful Morning is haunting music to play in the dark -- conspirative, uncanny, with a dystopian smack. Artwork by Susi Klocker. Recorded and produced by Christina Nemec in Vienna and Horner Wald, 2016; Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin 2017.
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LP
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EMEGO 208LP
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The title of Empty Airport, Chra's second LP and her first on Editions Mego, may be read as a reference to Brian Eno's ambient classic, though this time we find ourselves in a territory of transit that sounds like a dystopian swan song on civilizatoric debris -- a heterotopia emptied of human remains, with only ghostly echoes behind. Chra aka comfortzone foundress Christina Nemec has traced out a post-anthropocene area in which acoustic entries of field recordings are stratified in layers of deconstructed noisescapes. Partly interspersed with clunky technoid basslines, an introspective space is opened, which excavates in a discreet and subtle manner layers of abandoned wasteland. Nemec, who is a member of various projects including Shampoo Boy (together with Peter Rehberg and Christian Schachinger) and the female berserker formation SV Damenkraft, has succeeded in producing a significant LP that merges dark techno and industrial with found sounds and ambient scapes, resulting in a compositoric minimalism that ushers us into a state of existential trance. Recorded and produced by Christina Nemec in Vienna and Hornerwald, 2012-2014. Additional mixing on "Abandoned House" by Christian Fennesz. Guitar on "Soca Valley" by Christian Schachinger, recorded at Twisted, Vienna. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin, 2015. Artwork by Susi Klocker.
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12"
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CZ 010EP
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"Von Der Liebe" was one of the secret hits on Chra's debut record Derive, which was released in 2009. The track is equally a technoid song as well as an electronic chanson and thereby creates a new relation between techno and melancholia. Mathias Schaffhäuser adds even more techno and also despair in his two remixes, creating two pieces that bring a lost feeling onto the dancefloor.
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