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CREP 094LP
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More than a decade after the release of Land Lines, the mythical Humboldt County, California based duo of Brian Pyle and Merrick McKinlay reappears seemingly out of nowhere with Atheistsaregods. With past releases on such cult-like labels as Root Strata, Weird Forest, Blackest Rainbow, or Digitalis, Starving Weirdos were an indelible part of a sprawling and loose network of artists in Northern America whose DIY work ethic and extreme activity revolved around shoestring-budget constant touring, numerous limited editions on CDR, tape, and vinyl, and a relentless drive to push the boundaries of genre. Out of that cauldron, Starving Weirdos stood out as one of the most persistent and visionary acts, developing a mind-altering body of work that went from warm soundscapes through droney digressions, freeform improvisation, and raucous noise summoned from a myriad of instrumentation and low budget processing -- vocals, keyboards, violin, flute, percussion, and an assortment of less identifiable sound sources. Ten years on their legacy remains a timeless and wildly under-appreciated one, but hopefully this new album will shine a light on their idiosyncratic approach. As time itself was never a constraint. This is music suspended outside of it. Right from the start with the echoing percussion, dissonant keys and processed vocals of "Haiku Nagasaki", Atheistsaregods draws a continuous flux of psychedelic elevation that goes from the gloomy electronic motifs not unlike the early Cluster vibes of "Invocation" into the dank percussive maze of the appropriately titled "Barulho do Samba". The self-titled track induces a sense of post-apocalyptic vertigo via hallucinatory scraps of voice, suspended synth tones and reverberating field recordings, connecting into the droney mystics of "Dudukahar (Reed Prayer)". Coming full circle, "For Vinny" brings back the echoing percussion amidst hypnotic cello lines until it drifts off into the unknown. With the same palpable sense of urgency, Starving Weirdos feel as vital as ever. Welcome back. Artwork by Mioshe. Mastered by Rashad Becker.
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CREP 102LP
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"This device isn't a spaceship, it's a time machine. It goes backwards, and forwards... it takes us to a place where we ache to go again. It's not called the wheel, it's called the carousel. It lets us travel the way a child travels -- around and around, and back home again, to a place where we know we are loved." --Don Draper
Call Back Carousel is an audio time-travelogue, a slideshow of the mind's eye -- projecting Kodachrome memories directly into the listener's mind by means of sound alone. It is a way of travelling without ever having to leave the home. A vicarious vacation for the imagination. Pure audio escapism. Each episode is based on a found tape of a pre-recorded slideshow commentary. Most of these tapes were made by amateur tape-recording enthusiasts and hobbyist photographers of the '60s and '70s. Their recorded commentaries would at one time have been used in conjunction with a sequence of 35mm slides but only the taped voices now remain. The recordings themselves come from Vernon's own archive of found reel-to-reel tapes that he has collected over the past twenty years. Using these found slideshow commentaries as a framework, a series of musical soundscapes have been created to bring the absent images to life, activating the listeners' imagination in the classic tradition of "cinema for the ears". It's a little like looking through a family photo album where only the handwritten captions and mounting corners remain; the photographs themselves have all been removed. The evocative rattle and clack of the projector shuffles through different slides as the fragile voices of tour guides accompany you on a sonic journey that fractures time -- and through the cracks, the past bleeds through into the present.
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CREP 098LP
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Eight years almost to the day after releasing his unique re-interpretation album of his field recordings made in the late '90s in Tanzania, Kink Gong is back with another volume of bushmen madness. Here's what Kink Gong aka Laurent Jeanneau has to say about his end of millennium trip: "My experience in Tanzania is now over 20 years and most of the so-called remix was started in Tanzania and left un-finished, then eventually retouched in Vienna, Paris, Shanghai, Kunming, Dali or Vientiane. 20 years later I searched my Tanzanian files and rediscovered unfinished tracks which are being now refreshed on this new record. Back to the early days of the XXI century, when I lost my health trying to survive with the Hadzas, the last bushmen in northern Tanzania. In 1999 James Stephenson from NYC invited me to join his Hadzas friends. I would leave the bush to rest in a place with enough food and electricity and start to edit, loop and work on the original recordings, to trans-form them into organic abstract compositions, the only instrument I had recorded a lot with the Hadzas was the malimba and I bought different malimbas in Arusha to take back with me to Europe, I used either the original recordings or me playing malimbas on some tracks and applied some electronic treatment to it, at that time I used Roland synths for some tracks. The original recordings are related to scenes at night by the fire with the Hadzas, but also three different types of celebrations, 'Epeme Men' was recorded on a moonless night with men and women singing and dancing in complete darkness in Mangola, an Hadza camp. 'Irawk Drum Under the Rain' was recorded during daytime at a Multi ethnic gathering at the Franciscan Spanish catholic mission with a crowd dancing and singing under heavy rain while an IRAWK large (and wet) drum was being played, Northern Tanzania. 'Makonde Island' was recorded in southern Tanzania at the border with Mozambique and is a pure scene of trance taking place on an island where the Makonde fishermen off the coast of Mtwara, get wild, hitting plastic containers for the sound, drunk and stoned men and women are hysterically jumping and falling on each other, ending up with a few wounded. Once again, I'm responsible for this act of multicultural sabotage, but don't forget that you can always listen to the original recordings on the Kink Gong recs collection." --Laurent Jeanneau, Berlin 2023.
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CREP 097LP
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Sophomore album from Tenerife based trio, Lagoss (Gonçalo F. Cardoso, Mladen Kurajica, and Daniel García). Moving away from their megamix vignette based first volume (CREP 078LP, 2020), the trio now experiments with a more song-based approach whilst still keeping their trademark jam infused Tropicália and electronic freak-outs with an offering to their 1970s sci-fi masters -- enter the lift to the stars. First proposed by Russian rocket scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and taken to mystical literary heights by Arthur C. Clark in his 1979 book Fountains of Paradise, the concept of a space lift takes a spiritual turn here, with Lagoss chronicling its construction, right here and there on a near future version of their Island of Tenerife, in the Canary Archipelago. The album moves freely through ideas and moods akin to the world imagined by Arthur C. Clarke. It conveys a new story by sonically imagining future civilizations in a faux ethnographical exercise whilst exploring current ideas of technology, religion and alternative history by creating its own particular insular sound world. The album counts with the participation of dear friends such as a synth solo by Spencer Clark (Monopoly Child Star Searchers, et al.) and a punchy, full-blown remix by Muqata'a. Altogether creating a unique collection of eerie musical moments made of sub-tropical moods and cyber exotica jams from a band that keeps growing and evolving into their very own personal sound. Enter Tenerife in the late 21st century, meet the Aquachachos and Guayechi, and ascend. All music by Lagoss. Artwork by Evan Crankshaw. Mastered by Rashad Becker. One-off vinyl edition of 500 with printed inner sleeve.
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CREP 096LP
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Introducing Marc Codsi's new Arabic-infused synth-oriented album, Songs from the Aftermath. Lebanese musician and composer Marc Codsi has released numerous albums with various projects such as Scrambled Eggs, Lumi, Zalfa and many others whilst maintaining a very active career as a solo artist and film composer. Songs from the Aftermath is his fifth album and presented as a natural continuation to his 2019 opus work, A New World (Annihaya Records). Codsi continues his personal exploration of Arabic music codes, mainly investigating quarter tones scales in a fully electronic environment in order to create new harmonies and textures that still convey a feeling of familiarity whilst keeping a certain aura of strangeness and mystery. The album was recorded between during 2021 and 2022 and the music eventually comes as a very personal quest for transcendence. A sort of speculative answer to the world's ongoing absurdity and what seems to be an incessant array of conflicts, disasters and tragedies. From these dark alleys may we still arise to proclaim a sense of beauty, poetry and elevation. All tracks recorded and mixed by Marc Codsi, Paris 2021-2022. Mastered and cut by Anne Taegert, Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Artwork by Studio Safar Manufactured in Germany.
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CREP 095LP
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By now a regular and esteemed presence among the Discrepant sprawling household via releases with projects such as Alförjs or Jibóia, Mestre André "resurrects" his O Morto alias (bad pun somewhat intended) after 2016 The Forest, The People And The Spirits. With a diaristic approach where field recordings function as remnants of his surrounding reality and subsequent memories to be processed and recontextualized into an expressionist whole, O Morto expands that previous Discrepant release sonic palette unto uncharted cartographies. Based on a number of field recordings taken during a life-changing trip to Morocco that felt like a fever dream, Dans la Gorge d'un Monstre reenacts that hazy and hallucinatory mind frame through five tracks where no vivid recollection persists, tainted by the extrasensory feeling of not being quite there. A sonic fiction that goes from the processed cymbals and pummeling drums of "The Gorge" with Andrés's mates in Jibóia, through Moroccan Gimbri player Ayoub El Ayady and Khalid Boulhaman's rattling Krakebs on "Lila" and the slowed down Eccojams vibes of "Out of the Atlas" to the dreamy aquatic soundscapes and arpeggios of the appropriately titled "Princesas Batráquio". Comprising the whole of the B side, "A Desert of Rain" is a slow evolving wonder where gong-like tones drift beneath scrambled transmissions of unknown origin, eventually giving way to synapse inducing drone motifs and scraps of realities col-lapsing among themselves -- fire into water, a jetstream into steps, maybe none of this. Along with the LP, the release comes with a companion piece tape titled "Iffrits Habitent", a more impressionistic and unadulterated account of the same travel that could well be this side of the mirror. Then again, maybe he never made it from the other side. Who's to know?
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CREP 090LP
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Anthology introducing the first of a series of albums based on the concept of Aquapelago. "Since the earliest days of the planet there has been a rhythm of tides that creates coastal interzones where humans have foraged and pursued various livelihoods. Developing boats to fish from and technologies that enabled them to immerse themselves deep underwater, the aquatic realm has been one explored, experienced and imagined in various ways. In an effort to express the vitality and richness of this environment I coined the term aquapelago in 2012. The wordplay was deliberate. The neologism was designed to distinguish the liquid inbetweenness of this space from the dry, scattered, lands of archipelagos. The concept of the aquapelago coalesced around themes taken from various places . . .This compilation album takes the concept of the aquapelago into new depths and breaches it on fresh shores. The tracks are soaked with the aquatic. Bassy sonorities boom as if heard deep underwater. Bubbly textures breach the surface, water drips and seabirds soar high above waves. Sugai Kei samples fragments of text concerning the Ningen, a fantastic humanoid/whale that reflects the 'aquapelagic imaginary' of modern Japan and its preoccupation with industrial whaling. Andrew Pekler continues the orientation of his Phantom Islands project -- a sonic atlas of imaginary places -- with a soundscape as if heard by a swimmer just offshore, mixing sounds of the island and the sea together. Mike Cooper's sonic reflection on Hong Kong's Lamma Island is similar, combining the island's ubiquitous barking dogs with the slurp of waves on rocky shores, conjuring a languorous time before Chinese crackdowns on the territory. Taking another tack, the Dead Mauriacs gleefully water-ski through collage of tropical island exoticisms, replete with glitchy orientalism, while Babau combines skittering idiophone melodies with resonant glissandi. Vica Pacheco moves between dense and airy sounds, as if crossing between surf lines and the space above. Yannkick Dauby's track is also imbued with in-betweenness, evoking ambient sounds heard through a ship's hull. Sculpture's 'Froth Surfer' realizes its title, with bubbling sounds and rhythms that evoke Hawaiian surfing filtered through layers of time and distance. Reminding us of the shore necessary for aquapelagic spaces, Franceso Cavaliere and Tomoko Sauvage's composition anchors the album, centred around shaken rhythms and resonant ringing tones and drones..." --Philip Hayward, December 2021
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CREP 087LP
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Somewhere in the middle of the first track, "Torres e Baldios", there's a sudden change of pace with percussion rhythms interfering with the trance-like sound of the first six minutes. It sounds like steps, people running away on a corridor bashing their feet. It dazzles you because of how unexpected it is, how unpredictable those sounds sound like and, most of all, how it makes perfect sense. It is a monstrous piece. And the beginning of a new age for Ondness, in the same year he defied his Serpente moniker to create an absolute classic, Dias da Aranha (SOUK 009LP). What makes Oeste A.D. so remarkable is the intangible idea of nostalgia. "Aqua Matrix Alternative Nation" recreates with a slowed down mentality the theme of one of the main events of the Expo 98 in Lisbon. It's nowhere similar to the original, what it does is to mess around with the global ideas that were such a big part of that event. The Portuguese musicians that were invited to collaborate with Expo 98 were mesmerized by the ideas of union and globalization, creating overpriced music that sounds like shit today. "Aqua Matrix Alternative Nation" messes around with that vibe in a positive way. Think Mark Leckey playing around with his rave memories. Same thing, but in Portugal we had Expo 98. Jokes aside, the B side is more futuristic with "Torres e Baldios II" and "Endless Domingo", a nod to Endless Summer (EMEGO 135CD/LP), by Fennesz, and "Endless Happiness" (from Beaches And Canyons), by Black Dice, mashing up -- freely -- both covers and reminding of how great 2001-2002 was for experimental music. Both tracks are full of sci-fi drama and this sickness of the future that has been traveling with Ondness since its early days. But the approach here is somehow different. Before Oeste A.D. the Ondness sound was fragmented, sparse and intensively reflexive. There was this uncertainty to it that made the previously releases so good. But Oeste A.D. is full of clarity, the phrases are straightforward, and the music moves in one direction, continuously. Before, there were loads of unanswered questions. The only doubt is when will the world start to care and listen to Bruno's brilliant music. Now sounds like a good time. Mastered by Carlos Nascimento. Front cover by Evan Crankshaw. Back cover by Filipe Felizardo.
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CREP 091LP
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Discrepant presents Istanbul based audio/visual artist Koray Kantarcıoğlu's follow-up to his debut album Loopworks (CREP 059LP, 2018). Whilst the first volume used '60s and '70s Turkish records as source material, Loopworks 2 expands the sampling pool to local records as well as snippets from '70s TV and '80s new age and jazz tapes. This disparate material is mangled and glued together with Koray's very personal sampling techniques. This result becomes a dreamy, haunted and enigmatic collection of floating vignettes. Koray also enlists the help of local musicians such as Ekin Fil, who contributed to the album with haunting vocals and sound textures as well as Berke Can Özcan who adds drums and percussion into the haunted mix. The LP comes with a bonus CD entitled Loopworks 2 Extras, that could be another album itself, created from extra material that couldn't make it to the LP. Composed in 2020 and 2021.
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CREP 092LP
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By now counting more than four decades of constant activity, Pierre Bastien erected such a towering and influential body of work that any blurb attempt regarding his music could easily fall into redundancy. Not that his revolving soundworld, deeply personal and unique, has ever stalled into gimmick or self-mimicry, being Bastien the tireless explorer whose vision can never be complete, only continuously redefined in a process of discovery equally playful and challenging. So, completely in touch with Discrepant's ethos. Returning to the label after 2017 The Mecanocentric Worlds of Pierre Bastien, the French musician, composer, and instrument builder, brings an array of instruments from different cartographies and legacies with the appropriately titled Sonic Folkways. Resorting to different types of horns, prepared trumpet, an army of percussion, from gongs and tambourine to castanets and maracas, violin and too many others to mention here, Bastien weaves together a highly textured and hypnotic mosaic that projects an exotica beamed from scraps of the future. "Aha!" in the same interstellar wavelength as Sun Ra's cosmic tones, "Moor's Room" almost orchestral tapestry of small percussion and insects or the non-western strings and tunings salvaged from ancient alien ceremonies on "Pan's Nap". In an era where so much ink has been shed about world building in experimental music, Bastien can actually claim that to himself. The otherworld is right here, indeed. Artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw. Mastered by Anne Taegert at Dubplates & Mastering.
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CREP 088LP
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Multi-groove single-sided LP. Parallel Traces Of The Jewel Voice by dj sniff is a project that takes inspiration from historical narratives and personal memories constructed around The Jewel Voice Broadcast (Gyokuon Hoso) that took place on August 15th, 1945. Contrary to common belief, Emperor Hirohito did not speak live on air to announce the surrender of Japan on this day. Instead, two lathe-cut discs with his recorded voice were skillfully mixed and played by NHK engineer Shizuto Haruna. Haruna's proto-DJ/turntablist performance was heard not only in Japan but also throughout the colonized territories in Asia, marking the end of World War II and Japanese rule. Interested in these aspects which often have been overlooked within the Japanese narratives of this historical event, dj sniff conducted research in both Taiwan and Japan. Over the course of three years, he collected various materials that include; interviews and field recordings, audio samples extracted from phonograph discs and recordings sessions with improvising musicians, and a re-reading of the Imperial Rescript on Surrender in Chinese. These were used to compose two compositions that are paired differently depending on their distribution format. The vinyl release is a multi-sided disc with two parallel grooves cut on one side, which in effect plays a different composition depending on where the stylus is cued. The other side has no audio but features two silkscreened lines that refer to how Haruna played the original lathe-cut discs. Additionally, an extensive text written by dj sniff accompanies this release. Sniff uncovers technical details of the recording and broadcasting of the emperor's voice that took place over 75 years ago. He also reflects on his encounters with the elderly community in Taiwan who spoke fluent Japanese and shared their personal stories after listening together to records from their childhood.
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CREP 089LP
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Third time's a charm. Or a chant in this case. Antologia De Música Atípica Portuguesa is back. Following two sold-out volumes, the unplanned trilogy comes to a close with chants and hymns whilst continuing to merge music genres and presenting them as a world building concept. If the first two volumes were dedicated to work (O Trabalho (CREP 035LP)) and regions (Regiões), it only made sense to close the trilogy with ceremonial music, connecting the real -- each musicians' creation -- with a fantasied celebration of Portuguese folk, traditions, and ghost methods within these unusual anthems. If you've listened to Niagara before, you probably felt this whole ceremonial thing going on. A perfect opener then, for this volume with Niagara's deep dive into proto religious-ambient music with "Paulo, Apolo e Pedro". It sets the tone for the next 35-minutes of ethereal like songs. Either you listen to musicians working within their natural habitat (João Pais Filipe or Filipe Felizardo) or feel them exploring new areas in their realm (Niagara, Joana Guerra or Serpente), this third volume manages to combine eight of the best underrated visionaries working in current day Portugal. In the past, Antologia da Música Atípica Portuguesa created an imaginary folktale where current day creations could live with the idea of archive or fake-folk. This volume forgets the world building and actually lives in it. Because this is the real Portugal. This is Portugal's folk. These are Portugal's chants. Embrace the otherworldly. Also features Jibóia, Folclore Impressionista, and Bruno Ardo.
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CREP 086LP
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In what seems like some sort of cosmic alignment bound to happen, the ever prolific and somewhat elusive Niagara make their way into the Discrepant catalog with 1807. Compiling tracks recorded between 2014 and 2018 that appeared scattered among very limited and long out-of-print self-released CDRs, the record feels as much out of time as deeply resonant with these times with no dancefloors. Stripping away most of the beat-based approach of early Príncipe releases and Ascender EPs, these 17 vignettes presented in the classic dance maxi 12" format dabble with escapism in a manner that projects them as potential DJ tools for lockdown. Deeply idiosyncratic, the trio from Loures shows an internal coherence that while not easy to grasp given their mutating creative impulses, weaves each different path into a sonic fiction all their own. Cobbled together from countless hours of jamming on warm spectral synths, field recordings, otherworldly textures or devious drum machines 1807 paints a vivid and dreamlike escape route that goes from the hypnotic arpeggios and rarefied synths of "Esc8" through the glowing tones and fragmented melodies of "Egyptiu" and into the malfunctioning swirl of the stark "Esc 10" or the polluted 4/4 thump and funky guitar line of "Mapas". Equally disruptive and inviting. All tracks composed by Niagara between 2014-2018.
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CREP 081LP
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Contemporary and historical Porest recordings channeled from behind the somnambulistic event horizon. The now sound... The bleak oblique. The minimal and the maximal. Filmic chamber drones, meditative radio massage and forged spiritual violence bury pop ephemera into the swirling murk of de facto instrumental nihilism and orchestral context-free drama. Side A: A harmful journey into sickness and despair. You get sick and die. Side B: You are healed. You stand erect and live forever. Layered field and radio recordings back electro-acoustic experiments via electric saz, strings, balypso, reeds, and synths. Big drones, small ensembles and mood-anthems recorded by Porest and friends between 1995 and 2020 in West Oakland, Germany, Sumatra, Syria, Hanoi and London.
Personnel: Mark Gergis - bağlama drama, balypso, bass, breath density, edits, electronics, gravel, horn, hot volume, foley, glass, Moroccan fiddle, site-recordings, organ, percussion, pulse wash, radios, recorder, reverb, synthesizers, tapes; Jerry Blue - electric guitar ("No Terracotta Relief"); Heco Davis - clarinet ("Liminal Treason"), saxophone ("One Million Dollars"); Erik Gergis - washtub bass & brushes ("One Million Dollars"), synth ("(Terlok)"), accordion ("Liminal Treason"); Peter Valsamis - co-arrangement/production & percussion ("(Terlok)"); Jeremy Wilson - marimba ("One Million Dollars").
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LP + CD + 7"
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CREP 083S-LP
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Kamana is a multiformat release inspired by and channeling the culture and traditions of the Aeta, an indigenous group from the Zambales region in the Philippines. One of the oldest inhabitants of the region the Aetas are also some of the most fascinating and ancient nomadic and hunter gathering cultures. The release goes from the realms of the real to the imaginary, from transcription to syncretism, from concrete to abstract. An (un)real sonic exorcism filled with ancestral frequencies, haunted ghosts and other animistic spirits roaming the Pinatubo forests. The release features a series of materials released in different formats from the field recording digital only release, an LP and CD release to a special 7" vinyl featuring an interview with a bat hunter. Also includes download with additional material.
"Kamana is a long due homage to the Aeta community that hosted me a few years back, fascinated by the endurance of these people and their connection to their land, devastated by the eruption of the Pinatubo volcano in 1991, they continued to go back to their ancestral lands surviving on basic agriculture and hunting bats and wild pigs. Living with them for weeks, I managed to capture some essential field recordings and sounds that form and compose the basis for this release, from the more reprocessed and interpreted LP release to the pure field recording documentation of the digital release. It is meant to be accessible to all and provide a window to the livelihoods of these unique communities. For this reason, this release serves as both an archival document and a syncretic one, trying to channel memories and feelings of living in these jungles whilst listening to their stories as well as witnessing their lifestyles." --Carlos Casas, 2021
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CREP 084LP
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Continuing Discrepant's ambitious People Like Us vinyl reissue program with Welcome Abroad -- a strangely relevant ten-year-old album (originally released in May 2011) when People Like Us aka Vicki Bennett became stranded in the US after the Icelandic Eyjafjallajökull volcano eruption closed much of northern Europe's airspace. Volcanically marooned in Baltimore and NYC, Bennett utilized some of her "free" time to work on the album and even gained audio contributions from fellow experimental musicians Jason Willett (of Half Japanese) and M.C. Schmidt (of Matmos) via her extended stay. Bennett derived thematic material of displacement, travel, and a longing for elsewhere from the natural disaster that caused her own predicament. Now strangely echoed by the Covid-19 outbreak and the various grounding of planes and stay at home policies worldwide. While the general mashup culture often centers on the instant gratification of seamlessly juxtaposing hooks, People Like Us tracks transform the source material into collages that are equal parts dissonance and pleasure, making artful commentaries on our culture and Bennett's own existential amusement within such a wondrous world. No one could have predicted how relevant this album would have been ten years later. Volcanoes or Viruses, Welcome Abroad is what happens when you're stranded due to a freak natural occurrence trapping people all over the world and causing mass plane cancellations.
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CREP 085LP
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Kink Gong is back with his unique take and re-interpretation of the music he's been recording and documenting for years in the South East Asian highlands. Zomia Vol. 1 takes the conceptual idea of Zomia, proposed by James C. Scott in The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland South East Asia (2009), to construct its very own mythological soundscape inspired by a semi-utopic region where state rules don't apply. Zomia might be (almost) gone but Kink Gong is keen keep its spirit alive by releasing a series of albums celebrating the region's quasi mythological features.
"Zomia is an idea, a concept that, not so long ago, there were two very distinct worlds in southeast Asia, the valley VS highland/hinterland, the civilization VS the primitive, paddy rice VS slash and burn agriculture, Buddhism VS Animism, fixed territory VS movement/migration, written system VS oral culture, the state VS anarchy, property VS squat, controlled population VS autonomy, bricks VS bamboo and wood and, at my level museumified traditional mainstream music VS real emotions/songs of devastated lives and/or gongs ceremonies with buffalo sacrifices, extreme heat in the valleys VS shade in the jungle. I could go on and on but let's not forget that Zomia is disappearing fast, if not altogether already. How many of the people I've recorded are still alive? As you might know, before composing new music from my own Zomian experience (from 2001 to 2014 in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, and China) I had to find those musicians, be able to communicate with them, record them as good as I could with very limited finances and gradually release a collection of 160 CDrs. It is very important for me to make sure you to listen to the fantastic original recordings before or after you've listened to this experimental reconstruction I called Zomia. Expect more volumes to come, this is my biggest source of inspiration, and the reason why I've been involved for years in constructing a mythological experimental musical Zomian soundscape." --Laurent Jeanneau, Berlin 2020
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CREP 082CD
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Enter, Angst a series of musical "essays on the ephemeral being" by Portuguese pianist and composer Tiago Sousa. After 2015's Um Piano nas Barricadas (CREP 023LP, 2016) Sousa expands his compositional chops by writing and performing along with a trio made of clarinet, percussion and vibraphone adding a magical realism aura to the music. It was fate that the releasing of these compositions would arrive in one of the most troubled passages of recent memory, just as a new decade begins. If it was already established that anguish is one of the hallmarks haunting our modern era, these last few years expose this existential feeling with even greater urgency. The album that Tiago now presents, part angst part nostalgic escapism addresses this very modern concern as well as other themes dear to the so-called existentialist thinkers such as Heidegger, Camus or Kierkegaard, who among others, seek to directly challenge the Being with various concepts such as Repetition, Temporality, Interiority, Despair... Throughout the eight themes here presented, a delicate attempt is made to sketch a phenomenological cartography through its content and form, loosely describing the feeling of being launched into the wide world and the discovery of one self. In other words, the artist's aim here is to convey the growing pains that the whole question about the meaning of life throws at us. In an approach that is difficult to catalogue, the album tries to avoid genres and crystallizations in which music presents itself as a vehicle to express the ineffable and the incommunicable, expressing instead a magical world of wonder and enchantment.
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CREP 078LP
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Introducing a new project by Discrepant label boss Gonçalo F. Cardoso (Gonzo, Visions Congo, Papillon, Prophetas) and Tenerife electronic stalwarts Tupperwear (Mladen Kurajica and Dani Tupper). Diving deep into various phantom island mythologies (the elusive St. Brendan's island being a recurring motif) Lagoss borrow from the exotica playbook of ideas and twist it inside out into a bubbling melting pot of sounds, shapes, and patterns that eventually confuse, wonder, and (occasionally) scare the inattentive listener. Built like a schizophrenic booklet of moods, with 30+ vignettes describing the various habitats and moods of the local (imaginary) archipelago, Imaginary Island Music Vol. 1 offers grand visions of brave new old worlds, independent from the obvious, atypical lines of thought. There's no such thing as a break from mother nature here, fauna and flora take it all, a constant buzz of local predators, big and small, preying on everyone and anyone, constantly -- humans are just temporary guests here. A nautical almanac of remote notions from a forsaken land, built and rebuilt upon layer and layer of green and blue death -- forget Martin Denny, no armchair xylophone grooves here. All music by Lagoss. Artwork by Evan Crankshaw. Mastered by Rashad Becker. One-off vinyl edition of 500; printed inner sleeve.
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CREP 080LP
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Gritty, Odd & Good is a new weird, pseudo-music compilation curated by avant-garde experimental composer and audio artist Francisco López. As far as creation itself is concerned, big cities do not manifest anymore as the catalytic cultural centers they used to be. Their iconic status as hip locations seem more symbolic than real. The combined mighty forces of neocapitalist gentrification and telecommunication/information decentralization might have generated a substantially different landscape of geographical cultural distribution. And so unlikely places are also sources of physically-isolated, but culturally-interconnected, new creation. This is just but one more example of the larger phenomenon of techno-cultural atomization (not to be confused with the more restricted so-called "democratization") that allows millions of people to create and share, pre- and post-internet. The amateur is the new potential master; and that is decided by the crowd in the circus and the stadium, not at the academy. With all of this comes the potential for new aesthetics, or at least the open-ended evolution of the previous ones -- far better than the current confusion between ethics and aesthetics -- from the uninformed and the unknown. Atomization of this kind also brings for some the desire and the right to anonymity. And so it is for the unknown obscure artists of this compilation of weird experimental music -- "gritty, odd & good", with drones, glitches, cut-ups and more -- who won't reveal anything beyond their unlikely locations: San Marino, French Guiana, Philippines, Lesotho, Oman, Faroe Islands, Tuvalu, Liechtenstein, Kyrgyzstan. An innovative compilation presenting a world of unusual experimental de-constructed and recombined music casting a strong and exciting light into the unusual corners of our world. Dive in. Compiled and mastered by Francisco López. Vinyl mastered by Rashad Becker. Features Giuseppe Moretti, Daryana Jean, James Ocampo, Thabiso Makhetha, Rashid Al Balushi, Lív Jacobsen, Eteroa Apinelu, Zzodiakk, and Alima Akmatova.
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CREP 077LP
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After his debut album for Discrepant, Papillon (CREP 009LP, 2013), and a couple of tapes for Dinzu Artefacts (Aqueducts, 2017) and Sucata Tapes (Cercueill Flottant, 2019 (SUC 022CS)), Papillon aka Gonçalo F. Cardoso returns to the wax treatment for one last hurrah into the depths of tropical disquiet. Taking liberties from Henri Charriere's book sequel of the same name, Banco (1972), the audio reader here dives straight up/down into a world of random dream logic. The same themes of nightmare vs. paradisiac dreams are present here yet with more nuance than the first volume. The adventure here is more subdued, less spiritual as most of it is lived outdoors, free from the state's shackles of abuse. A lighter tone then, for what will probably be the last Papillon adventure. As with the first volume the album counts with contributions from fellow label artists, Mike Cooper, Cédric Stevens, David Daan, and Yannick Dauby all feature in a way or another, raw or cooked into a boiling pot of irreverence. All tracks were composed and edited by Gonçalo F Cardoso in the island of La Gomera, Lisbon and London between 2017-2019. Mastered by Rashad Becker. Edition of 300.
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CREP 072LP
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Over the last decade, multi-instrumentalist Tomás Tello has been developing his own personal music style based around an exploration of the guitar and his intense personal investigation of traditional Peruvian music -- in particular Andean culture which he grew up with. Now operating out of Tavira, Tomás has been functioning like a psychic musician, a well-tuned antenna picking a unique sound universe where, among others, sounds of native instruments (quenas, drums, charangos) and experimental electronics (field recordings, loops, circuit bending, small synths, and effects pedals) merge in mystic harmony. Tomás delivers meditative compositions, sonic illuminations which seem to be the result of a direct act of contemplation, of glaring at the immensity of a landscape, a river or the proximity of strange wild animals, a vision calling that, with the aid of medicinal plants, offers a state of consciousness in tune with the early works of envisioned artists such as Arturo Ruiz del Pozo, Jorge Reyes, or Walter Maioli. Tomás Tello's music is an invitation to listen to nature from a new place. It's timeless music, which enraptures those who have the joy of entering it. Artwork by Evan Crankshaw and Raleigh Gardiner. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.
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CREP 071LP
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"In this 24-minute composition, released here in its original name for the first time, Raed Yassin encapsulates and condenses the aural and sonic landscapes experienced by those who bore witness to the war. In the 1980s, while the Lebanese Civil War, which ravaged the country between 1975 and 1990, was raging, television but particularly transistor radios were the only means through which people heard the news during interminable periods of power cuts or waiting in basement shelters. The audio material was collected by Yassin on his regular trips to the dispersed and neglected archives of militias and political parties, radio, and TV stations, and record shops across Lebanon. Built from over 300 hours of material, Yassin has woven together a composition using political speeches; radio and television commercials; news flashes and jingles; local '80s pop music; dubbed Japanese anime songs; propaganda, resistance, and revolutionary party songs; snippets from Ziad Rahbani plays, and many more. The recordings in CW Tapes are the sonic equivalents of Proust's madeleines to any individual who was old enough to remember the war and its immediate aftermath. Commercials, songs, and speeches collide and intertwine as if Yassin had plugged a radio tuner into his mind, sounding out a deeply personal sonic terrain that echoes the hidden sonic memories of his contemporaries. Beside the diversity of its sounds, what is most striking in this record is the minute attention to the musicality of the different recordings Yassin uses, whether they are propaganda pieces, vocal patterns or news jingles. What you hear in the beginning of the CW Tapes, for example, is Raed Yassin's fascination for the different political and musical figures that populated the Lebanese media landscape across the 1980s. In this bewildering introduction, he highlights the absurdity of the war by lacing together a political speech given by Bachir Gemayel with a frivolous and upbeat pop song by Lebanese pop singer Sammy Clark whose tunes are heard at different moments in the piece. The composition unfurls an array of overlapping tonalities and textures as well as a glossolalia made of processed voices that inhabited the archaic technologies of the time . . . In his continuous efforts to mine and work through the sonic archives of Lebanon's recent past, the CW Tapes is possibly Yassin's most personal output to date." --Rayya Badran, Beirut, January 2019 Mastered and Cut by Rashad Becker
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CREP 069LP
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Previously released on CD accompanied by Gone, Gone Beyond, The Mirror is the dreamy soundtrack of an A/V project from collage artist extraordinaire Vicki Bennett aka People Like Us. With The Mirror Bennett continues her eternal disassembling of popular music by exploring how the narrative of familiar sounds/songs can change dramatically under a new context, with that context always changing, in a never-ending flow. Each song is singular. And each song is a collage of an undefined number of other songs from other artists. It sounds familiar because that has been the modus operandi of People Like Us since the early 1990s. But The Mirror plays with the notion of the familiar, driving around a collection of famous pop songs/artists, messing around with the memory of the listener and, of course, one's unique comprehension of those specific songs applied in a new context. Because of the use of familiar pop sounds, The Mirror is often grandiose, like an epic film with only highs, never letting the listener down or letting them doubt the power of pop. Even, of course, when the coordinates are twisted, mixed, over or underrepresented. Each moment feels like something that could only happen in a parallel universe. Although that may sound naïve, it's just a lost thought of reaction to the beautiful collages of People Like Us in The Mirror. This mirror doesn't reflect an image of ourselves or an image of pop. But an image on the way memories drift and are being constant rebuilt. An unfinished collage. Mastered by Mark Gergis; vinyl cut by Rashad Becker.
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CREP 070LP
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Maybe it's too much to ask for a moment of your attention. As you grow older and keep diving into this era of information, disinformation, fake news, and all that, you might also tend to take a step back and listen to the intents of those social media adverts that tell us to slow down, breathe in, breathe out, enjoy everything around you a little bit. So, if it's not too much to ask, you can press play and start enjoying D-A-D. If you're doing that, you can even stop reading this, because you don't need further instructions. It's the second time in less than two years that Discrepant has released music from London based Greek musician Tasos Stamou (Athens, 1978). The wordplay of Musique Con Crète (CREP 054LP, 2018) was a backdoor to an adventurous and "concrete" experience with sound. D-A-D follows up on that. Recorded between 2015-2018 as an homage to both his Dad and the more commonly used tuning on the Greek Bouzouki, D-A-D, Stamou delivers 40 minutes of music that explores ancient and modern languages, while crossing his unique instrumentation with celebrations of new/old folk, field recordings, and electronics. In his music, there's a constant flow of ideas that defy standard tonalities and the conception of "traditional". Improvisation was the starting point for the creation of some of the nine pieces Tasos Stamou wrote for D-A-D. The electronics often serve to interact with field recordings that are wisely manipulated, while acoustic instruments, like a Bouzouki, build up the connection with the tradition and the necessity to slow down. With his unique atmospheres, Tasos is whispering some life hacks to build a better life. Nowadays, it's quite rare for a record to organize the way the listener wants to listen to music, to sounds. D-A-D creates a beautiful systematization between old and new, folk/traditional music and the technology in sound. All songs by Tasos Stamou. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.
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