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LP
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AVM 076LP
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Cloud Management is a project concerned with processes and progress. Featuring Love-Songs members Thomas Korf and Sebastian Kokus and the prolific Ulf Schütte, the Hamburg-based trio has tirelessly expanded upon its sound and extended its musical style. After 2022's S/T documented the results of their first jam sessions as a newly-founded group, V.A. started even more modestly and became an even bigger undertaking. Originally conceived as a small one-off release, it grew into a full record which sees the group embracing dub music, collaborating with Peaking Lights' Aaron Coyes and inviting other artists (No UFO's, Seekers International, Coco Em) who reworked select tracks in true dub style. V.A. is marked by inconsistency, openness, and heterogeneity in the best sense of those words: ever-changing, constantly surprising and consistently in motion. In calling it V.A., they paid tribute to their somewhat loose, but conceptually consistent concept of giving various artists full creative license over their own work. Neither a true album in the strict sense of the world nor just a compilation, V.A. is actually the essential Cloud Management record: ever-changing, constantly surprising, consistently in motion.
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LP
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AVM 072LP
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The debut of Hamburg trio Cloud Management stages the meeting of three proven exceptional figures: Thomas Korf and Sebastian Kokus have been responsible for some stunning leftfield neo-kraut releases with their band Love-Songs in recent years; Ulf Schütte has been one of the most productive, and innovative protagonists of experimental electronic music in Germany for many years (see Datashock, Phantom Horse, or his collaboration with G. Steenkiste/Hellvete on Umor Rex, for example). Following Love-Songs' highly acclaimed collaboration with Schütte, Spannende Musik, released in 2021 (BB 383CD/LP), the formation of Cloud Management as a group in its own right marks a new beginning, which is celebrated with the long player on Altin Village & Mine. The album is characterized by a dense texture of repetitions in which (modular) synthesizers and bass go head-to-head. It is on this foundation that the formal grammar of the album develops over its nearly 45-minute running time, organized along precise interventions into the hypnotic pulse: What is recognizable as echoes of 1960s/70s minimalism or Cluster functions on Cloud Management not in the sense that the sequences or the sequencers are left to themselves, but as highly concentrated, microscopic work on repetition. This virtuosic arrangements, groove-based and even danceable density of the seven pieces never sounds strained or as an end in itself, but floating, cloud-like. The polyrhythmic workouts are at all times in the service of a refreshing expanse that opens up from the sonic saturation and is far removed from the formulaic box-checking often associated with the attribute "kosmisch". Cloud Management, thus, marks not an exercise in the traditions of a musical past, but a distinctive position within contemporary electronic music. All songs are written, recorded and produced by Ulf Schütte, Thomas Korf, and Sebastian Kokus. Mastered by Fritz Brückner at Haunted Haus. Sleeve design by TEOTH. Includes printed inner sleeve.
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