ECSTATIC - Forced Exposure

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Primitive World mines obscure and vibrant paths on this strong new LP for Ecstatic, inspired once again by the forgotten sci-fi novels of Lawrence Durrell and finding a curious lane somewhere between Alva Noto and cubist UK funky rhythms. Throwing himself into bouts of taut, fractious, and probing electronics on his sophomore LP, The Revolt Of Aphrodite, Sam Wills uses the same palette as found on his White On White (ELP 033LP, 2018) -- PPG Wave, Kurzweil K250, Emulator 4, and Lexicon 224 -- albeit with a finer manipulation of form. Oscillating between the Alva Noto/Anne-James Chaton-esque minimalism of "All This Vulgar Data", to the cubist UK funky rhythms in "Iolanthe Dances" and Dego-like broken beats in "Skins Plastered With White Lead", you end up in the curdled electronic sensuality on "The Foetus Of a Love Song" which gives the album a deftly imaginative and playful dimension that stands in contrast to the homogeneity of much of modern electronic music's all-too-often blinkered dreams. Following a similar process that was applied to the visual cues of overlooked British constructivist Marlow Moss in his 2018 debut, and recent lysergic rescoring of Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket (1987), Sam Willis employs a strategy of in/direct references to Durrell's seminal '60s sci-fi diptych The Revolt of Aphrodite -- comprising the novels Tunc and Nunquam -- in an absorbing re-imagining of its scenes, rendered in a mix of electronic shrapnel, craftily disrupted UK club rhythms, and stuttering vocaloids. The original books' themes of "Nietzschean psycho-sexual satire", and their acerbic, bawdy, densely allusive text, serve to push Primitive World toward more complex drum programming/editing and a finer spectrum of timbres in order to best transpose the stories into music. Set against a backdrop of the May 1968 general strike in Paris, the books address notions of multiplicity and contingency, and a preoccupation with structure and "cause and effect" that Primitive World reflects in the music's mazy narration and his poetic embrace of literary/musical license. Where modern electronic music too often arrives at the same aesthetic conclusions inspired by iconic work from William Gibson or Asimov, Durrell's influence provides something altogether new to the absorbingly otherworldly. RIYL: Alva Noto, Dego, Russel Haswell. Cover painting by Daniel John Willis; Photo by Sam Willis, design by Alessio Natalizia. Cut at Dubplates & Matering, Berlin. Edition of 300.

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Transdisciplinary NYC artist Gavilán Rayna Russom beautifully comes into her own with a distinguished solo debut album statement including the voice of Cosey Fanni Tutti and brass arrangements by downtown legend Peter Zummo. After decades exploring her sonic personality through here deep immersion in NYC's club and avant-garde scenes, Rayna uses The Envoy as a vessel to firm up and convey her personal conclusions on intersections of gender and electronic music. Enriched with complex human experience and key influence from sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) -- a book with descriptions of an alien race with multiple sexual characteristics -- the album is intended to realign misconceptions of Russom's prescient early work such as 2005's The Days of Mars LP for DFA, which arguably foreshadowed a rise of beat-less and more ambiguous urges commonplace in contemporary dance music. With The Envoy, Russom returns to a 2019 music scene that's better prepared with the politics of an emerging new world. Entwining Russom's perspectives on gender, the occult, and spirituality, and how they relate to the body and music's healing properties, The Envoy expresses the artist's concerns in nine interrelated parts. Practically devoid of percussion, but full of body-moving polyrhythmic pattern, the pieces spill out of the lines of any typically imposed "grid". Within this loose context, porous to the chaos of noise, Russom smudges a blend of analog and digital synths to connote an elusive sense of self. Employing the fluid potential of electronic music at its most fundamental in a way that loops right back to the gliding suspense of her prized early work, literally incorporating elements of solo recordings made in the late '90s in the wake of Russom's psych/noise band, Soma. Unanchored by kicks, yet pulsing in its own ways, the album flows with an underlying elegance from Cosey Fanni Tutti's spellbinding recital of Russom's text in "Kemmer", set to an organic, orgiastic writhe of arps and stressed noise, and on thru the free-floating organ scape of "Envoy", to acknowledge more industrial impulses with "Strength Out of the Dark" and a towering highlight of the album in "Discipline of Presence", where Russom's throbbing mass is hauntingly illuminated by plangent brass arrangement from Peter Zummo (key Arthur Russell collaborator). The ten-minute "Winter" then wraps it all up under a titular reference to Ursula K Le Guin's novel, placing Russom as a filament of solo piano-playing light within the cold expanse of NYC. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 300.

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Not Waving makes his anti-fascist feelings clear with two banging tracks that trust dancefloor irony is not dead and leftist solidarity is alive in 2019. Closing out a banner year with a club-ready boot up the ass, Not Waving's Alessio Natalizia follows his divergent 2019 outings beside Jim O'Rourke, Mark Lanegan, and Jay Glass Dubs with a wildly driven lunge for the strobes. Balancing pure escapism with a reminder to dance and laugh at the populist peckers that dominate the news and global politics, this 12" is exactly the kind of statement that should be heard more often in underground music's naturally left-leaning network of inter-linked, fringe and minority communities. The A-side's Belgian new beat-styled détournement "Tremendous" makes ironic use of a foamy-mouthed but blithe Tr*mp speech about the Paris attacks, sliced and jacked into a strapping mix of jagged EBM arps and Italo/Detroit chromatics with a naggingly playful aesthetic that harks back to Belgian new beat and UK rave's mix of pop-politics and subversive escapism. His B-side "S.M" then opens with a rabble-rousing recording of Italian students chanting "Salvini, merda" against Matteo Salvini -- Italy's immigrant-hating far-right former deputy Prime Minister -- over a bucking, pulsing electro groove that sounds like CoH jamming Ro Maron. Acts of subversive defiance such as this, encouraging dissent and ridicule of pompous right wing blowhards -- and no matter how small in the wider scheme of things -- have never been so vitally required in the modern day. Political dance anthems in a new beat/new beta-style. Orange vinyl; mastered and cut at 45rpm by Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin; edition of 300.

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Visionary synthesist Abul Mogard renders a darkly sublime soundtrack for Duncan Whitley's Kimberlin, an experimental film about the Isle of Portland on the English south coast, which coincidentally doubles up as metaphor for the mood of an increasingly inward-looking UK. Taking its name from the local word for an outsider or "foreigner", the short film Kimberlin was filmed on location during the months following the advisory referendum of 2016 which lead to the current, purgatory state of "Brexit". Combining mostly wordless, lingering shots of the Isle of Portland's bleak and rugged landscape with Abul Mogard's washed-out but richly evocative music, made with manipulated field recordings, modular synth and layered Farfisa organ, the project came to reflect a sense of (be)longing, loneliness, and outsiderness that also perhaps uncannily mirrors the putative collective feeling since that darkly historic vote, over three years ago. Taking cues from the evocative poetry of lifelong islander, stonemason and poet Cecil "Skylark" Durston (1910-1996), as well as a news report on the discovery of a mysterious cinema found interred by foliage in the Isle's cave systems, the merging of image and sound speak to their subject in an organic, impressionistic manner that leaves billowing room for imagination. Mogard's soundtrack opens out with a slow-burning, greyscale iridescence, tenderly manipulating the sound of fog horns and bird calls in briny modular spray and gloaming Farfisa organ swells that, when combined with song titles such as "Flooding Tide" and "Playing On The Stones", serve to evocatively connote the film's subject matter. The results can be heard as echoes in the digital future of an England that's now difficult to grasp, most hauntingly transposing the meaning of Cecil "Skylark" Durston's description of the Isle of Portland as a place where "quarry bells no longer ring, except in old men's dreams" to the ever-present, never-ending riddle of Brexit and its generationally devastating bleakness. RIYL: Thomas Köner, My Bloody Valentine, William Basinski. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.

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Iona Fortune crystallizes and convects enchanting thoughts on the legendary I Ching in a keenly awaited second volume of Tao of I, following from her resoundingly acclaimed 2017 debut for Optimo Music (OM 010LP), where lustrous synthetic subbass met traditional Chinese strings with sublimely spirited and timeless effect. Issued by Ecstatic as the second of eight albums by Iona exploring hexagrams of the I Ching, or "The Book of Changes" -- a 2,500-year-old Chinese divination text referenced extensively in religion, art, philosophy, psychoanalysis, science, and mathematics. Tao Of I Volume 2 sees the Glasgow-raised, Zurich-based artist refer to millennia of human experience through an electro-acoustic prism of Synthi AKS, guzheng, and Gamelan, newly expanded with erhu, kim, yanqin, zhong, and bawu. The wider scope of her palette allows a greater detail of airy calligraphic expression to her multi-dimensional microcosmos, channeling a wondrous energy in a fluidly melodic narration of mystic ideas made musically tangible. In eight parts Iona acts as conduit for extraordinary, invisible, and arcane forces. Inspired by the I Ching's fundamental principles, her music resonates with a visceral and cosmic conception of human essence, infusing minimalist frameworks with finely tempered but lush emotive cues that bring to life the I Ching's conviction that "music has the power to ease tension within the heart and to loosen the grip of obscure emotions." Iona's music most beautifully manifests this idea in concisely exacting forms and to contemplative ends, creating a slow, serene and harmonious music that coolly commands relaxed states of reception, best for mulling over life, and stuff. At once as light as a fleeting thought but permanent as an organism passing on its code, the music conjures mindsets comparable to Coil at their uncanniest, the post-erotica 4th world sensations generated by Jon Hassell, or the dark energy expressed in David Lynch films and their soundtracks. Most crucially Iona achieves this through a synthesis of self-exploration and instrumental actualization, employing an unusual composition strategy of inner cultivation and empathic performance to divine and realize a spellbinding, penetrative otherness. RIYL: Coil, Laraaji, Jon Hassell, David Lynch & Angelo Badalamenti. Mastered and cut by Dubplates & Mastering.

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2020 repress on white vinyl. Following Not Waving's stellar recent recordings with Jim O'Rourke, Colin Potter, and Jay Glass Dubs, Downwelling finds him in a striking Pas de deux with alt. rock god Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, QOTSA). It's one of those rare link-ups that truly transcends the sum of its parts, with Not Waving's rolling range of nuanced electronics acting as backdrops for Lanegan's smoky baritone storytelling. Delivered in a husky but pliable voice that has come to define the American alternative rock scene since the early '90s, Lanegan inhabits the songs with a reserved presence that has served him well for decades, but which has never been heard in quite this context. Pairing music recorded by Alessio Natalizia between London, Italy, and Paris over the past five years, with vocals recorded by Lanegan in LA, the duo arrives at dreamy non-place that's not defined by geography or time. Instead the album offers a timeless insight into human behavior, as reflected in the sleeve art details from the "Lights Of Canopus", a Persian version of the ancient Indian book of animal fables, the "Panchatantra". Thanks to Lanegan's classically dusty tone -- famously described as being "scratchy as a three-day beard yet as supple as moccasin leather" -- and the breadth of Not Waving's production, the results draw listeners deep into the artists' shared plane of world-weary but quietly hopeful conception, emphasizing the power of closeness and empathy. Their songs come on like waves lapping a shore that's ever-shifting, ever the same. This cycle is epitomized on the opener, "Signifying The End" with Lanegan's raspy tone met by honeyed synths, before scaling the nocturnal heights of "City Of Sin" and coolly channeling Suicide in "Burn Out Babylon". The waters calm again for "Persimmon Tree" suitably set to harp-like arps, while the deathly croon and impending throb of "Murder In Fugue" comes to rest in the serene resolution of "The Broken Man" in a manner that's entirely modernist but speaks to eons of human emotion. Echoing everything from latter-days Scott Walker to David Sylvian at his most strung out, and even the odd energy of Moebius, Conny Plank & Mayo Thompson's Ludwig's Law album (1998), or the arcane creak of John Duncan's Bitter Earth (2016), Natalizia and Lanegan's efforts will realign listeners presumptions of both artists and place them in a category all of their own. Mastered and cut by Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

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Lisbon-based Bruno Silva enacts pure voodoo with extended, restless LinnDrum workouts that take Prince's distinctive LM-1 signatures as a starting point for loose-limbed tribal jams that flow with the color of the Brazilian carnival and the rhythmic psychedelia of hardcore jungle. The title Parada cannily nods both to Prince's Parade (1986) and the percussion of carnival parades, speaking to a plurality of polyrhythms in a tradition of fusion music that seeks to meld myriad forms of communal, ritualistic and ecstatic music -- not a million miles from the bare carnival funk of Parade's "New Position." In six parts ranging from extended runs of drumkit-falling-down-stairs to nimble junglist mutations and rapid, darting concisions, Serpente spells out a heavily intoxicating and intuitive sort of rhythmic psychedelia that lives up to a broad palette of influences ranging from Haitian voodoo ceremonies and central African drum circles, through to the Sun Ra Arkestra and Alan Silva's Celestial Communion Orchestra, via Keith Hudson's dub transcendence, and the rude modernism of UK rave and virulent styles currently coming from Lisbon ghettos on the Príncipe label. In attempting to untie and unite these worldly references, an asymmetric percussive friction and hypnotically unresolved tension naturally emerges from Serpente's flux of machine-made patterns. It's there in the restlessly gnashing, swinging brilliance of "Nivel de Chama" and the exceptional mix of detuned Linn drums and reticulated jungle breaks in "Trama," while the B-side probes this idea in three subtly agitated, but more spaced-out "Símbolo" parts, and finally with a sublime tension between his twitchy percussive saccades and celestial synth pads in "Nivel de Cinza." Parada is pure body music in a minimalist/maximalist way that acknowledges both physical and spiritual needs, and requires a dancing or thinking body in order to properly unlock its purple magic.

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Not Glass is the debut collaboration between Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) and his longtime correspondent Dimitris Papadatos (Jay Glass Dubs), paying tribute to Latin and Greek authors Ovid and Heraclitus in a suite of dramatic electronics and cryptic rhythms comparable to a theatrical soundtrack. Knowingly, ironically pretentious, yet serious with it, Forma is the result of years of daily Facebook chats between the London and Athens-based artists where they cemented the album's concept around key quotes by the legendary poet/philosophers, who hail from their respective homelands of Italy and Greece. The results are in effect a spellbinding attempt to transmute those notions within the collaborative, contemporary framework of their music, using patented palettes of hardware, vocals, and FX to render and reflect core classical mythological and philosophical ideas about drama, love, metaphysics, cosmology and the "unity of opposites". On this timeless plane, Natalizia and Papadatos both step outside of themselves to find "what opposes unites", spaciously consolidating their typical, yet contrasting, rhythm-driven approaches in a reverberant, often beatless sphere of exploration. Removed from their usual handrails, the artists operate at their most open-ended and subtly suggestive, amorphously shapeshifting from gloaming shadow plays of synth and keys to investigate arcane percussive impulses and iridescent ambient whorls. The result is a perfect, finely shaded marriage of their mutually esoteric, outsider Southern European energies, which intuitively acknowledges and inhabits the paradoxes of their respective styles. The illusively static yet mercurial ebb-and-flow of the atmospheric intro "Fallite Fallentes" sets the scene, where "Dum Loquor, Hora Fugit" invokes a viscous but brittle tangle of wide bass and pointillist rhythms beside a stately cello vignette "Ludicrum" that recalls aspects of Scott Walker's mystic charm "Soused". The rapid arps and slow moving, glassy pads of "Pauper Ubique Iacet" conjure a sublime tension that becomes diffused into the cavernous, hollow dub dread of "Ut Ameris, Amabilis Esto", possessed with its throaty, processed vocal, and the lonely strings and plasmic electronics of "Forma Bonum Fragile Est" connotes a psychedelic coming-to-terms with their artistic/philosophic duality. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.

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Futuro is Not Waving's sublime synth/ambient soundtrack to one of the world's most intense art/theatre experiences: Sean Rogg's radical immersive artwork The Waldorf Project -- fusing choreography, spatial design, music, and performance into a cohesive experience. Drawn from more than 20 hours of material made for the project between 2013-2018, Futuro finds Alessio Natalizia exploring a style of tonal and spatial minimalism that works as a fine palette cleanser from much of what you've heard from him in the past. While not a new solo album, per se, the long form, Eno-like results of Futuro demonstrate the full wingspan of Not Waving's obsessive knowledge and emotive feel for electronic composition, making it in some senses one of the more substantial and unusual releases in his catalog to date. Natalizia's site-specific work ranges from highly emotive synth meditations thru to bittersweet kosmische intuitions, and milky, Eno-esque beauties. But if any part sums up the widescreen scope of Not Waving's music in Futuro, it's the final side's 17 minutes of awning, gently curdled synth pads -- originally used in a performance to 4000 people in Thailand laid in pitch black, with bodies formed in triangles while dancers caressed their faces. It ends the album with such memorable effect as to make it something of a modern day environmental/ambient classic -- and perhaps our favorite Not Waving release in an already enviably deep catalog. Limited edition vinyl; full color insert featuring photographs by Lee Arucci. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. RIYL: Laurie Spiegel, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Shuttle 358.

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Ecstatic presents a reissue of The Cop Killers' self-titled album, originally issued in 1982. A genuine holy grail of Italian post-industrial music, The Cop Killers' sole, eponymous tape is remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time via Alessio Natalizia's Ecstatic label. Fetching triple figures on the second hand market (there's a copy on Discogs presently for £300) this is an indispensable slice of '80s Europe's underground experimental rhizome. An important release for Ecstatic and one very close to their heart, The Cop Killers was originally released on the legendary Trax label and features the industrial power trio of Trax co-founder Vittore Baroni and label regular Daniele Ciullini assisted by UK's Mark A. Phillips (Five Times of Dust) in supposing a sci-fi narrative set in a not-so-distant future society. While clearly drawing influence and literary license from classic sci-fi by Orwell, Ray Bradbury, and William Burroughs, the trio also take cues from the not-so-distant history of Italian fascism to offer a subtly coded and subversive warning against right-wing ideologies. In the process The Cop Killers distinguished themselves by preferring to plants seeds of hope amid the rubble of their peers nihilistic/apocalyptic visions, implicitly turning the album into a sort of "pacifist parable". The political aspect wouldn't be half as crucial without the music, though. A coarse blend of Italian-accented English vox with backing tracks ranging from jaunty synth figures to cloven drum machine malfunctions and noisier wig-outs, it was mixed on a dual cassette deck and mixer from numerous tapes in just over 90 minutes, and successfully carries the narrative and its message to the point it's become such a sought-after classic - not just for its obscurity, but also its charged energy, a condensation of candescent anger focused into a pointedly oblique yet smartly allegorical condemnation of fascism. Baroni: "As a music journalist and fan of radical and avant-garde audio researches, at the start of the '80s I was becoming increasingly bored by the mannerism of so many industrial and noise bands, and also annoyed by their gratuitous and stereotyped use of images of death, Nazism, war, with titles and texts soaked in right-wing ideologies. I wanted to produce an antibody to this depressive trend, with seeds of hope well concealed under a nihilistic-apocalyptic "industrial" camouflage." Mastered by Matt Colton.

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Jay Glass Dubs sublimates Athenian distress and ennui into plasmic dub ether on Plegnic, his lushly evolved first collection of new material for Ecstatic, following from on from Dubs (ELP 032LP, 2017). Where Dubs was a set of his earliest, hard-to-find tape releases, deconstructing and rebuilding Jamaican dub with Musique Concrete production methods and a lingering air of inspiration from classic 4AD, new age and laïko, or Greek popular music, on Plegnic Jay Glass Dubs fascinatingly evolves his sound with richer melodic and harmonic arrangements in a concerted effort to expand the nostalgic, esoteric and dance floor dimensions of his unique sound world. Plegnic is an extinct word meaning "to strike like a hammer", and offers a palpable sense of nostalgia. In this archaic context, JGD uses vintage machines and obsolete samples in conjunction with vocals from Yorgia Karydi -- former beau of his childhood neighbor, and Andreas Kassapis, one of his oldest friends, who provides the cover art -- to conjure a mutated take on classic and well-trodden styles, metaphorically and anachronistically renewing their purpose while connoting his newfound dance floor drive in the process. Recording took place at his mother's house in the Athens suburbs, with Fugazi's Steady Diet Of Nothing on repeat. It was here that he dug out an old Juno, a Yamaha RX5 drum computer, and some "crappier equipment" that provides the structural scaffold to his array of nostalgic, melancholic Laïka samples, which could be considered the diffused soul of this superb five part-crop. On the A-side he sets out to spook with the desiccated, stepper's motion of "Temple Dub" featuring heavily processed vocals by Karidi, but heady nostalgia takes over with a sublime tactility in the vaulted chorales and reverb tails of "Umbro Dub", and again in the aching sehnsucht of "Mouthless Dub", where traces of Laïka's bouzouki melodies glimmer. However, the B-side is far more upfront and up-for-it, putting weight behind the cranky skank of "Dry Dub" with its hexagonal drums and acidic bass squirm, then in the super-squashed swagger of "Fearless Dub", the near-ten-minute pinnacle of his dance floor output to date. Ultimately, Jay Glass Dubs's music is riddled with the kind of nostalgia that can make an unfamiliar piece of music feel like an intense déjà entendu, like you've heard it before in a dream or some altered state; that's a rare and precious thing. Limited to 500.

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2019 repress. Above All Dreams is Abul Mogard's beautifully absorbing new album for Ecstatic -- his first since the Circular Forms (ELP 013LP, 2015) and his popular Works compilation (ELP 020LP, 2016). Counting six original pieces in its 66-minute wingspan, there's no mistaking that Above All Dreams is the most expansive solo release by Mogard to date. Taking into account its intangible divinity and cinematic quality -- the result of no less than three years diligent work -- it is arguably elevated to the level of his master opus; presenting a modular distillation of Mogard's most intoxicating strain of hauntology. Consistent with Mogard's music since the sought-after VCO tapes, c. 2012-2013, the allure to Above All Dreams lies in his ability to evoke and render feelings which are perhaps purposefully avoided in more academic echelons of drone music. Rather than a purist expression of physics through maths and geometry, Mogard voices his soul, improvising on modular synth for hours, days, months, and years in the same way a more conventional "band" develops group intuition. While hands-on, the intuitive evolution of process locates a newfound freedom in his music that implies a recognition of the metaphysical or post-physical, while Mogard explicitly points to influence from the Brazilian music of Tom Zé, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and Chico Buarque, whose approach to shape and density, or perceptions of light and delicacy, also go some way to explaining the ephemeral intangibility of Above All Dreams. The results are best considered as the ephemera of non-verbal communications. From the gaseous bloom of "Quiet Dreams" to the opiated depth of "Where Not Even" to the starlit awn of "Upon The Smallish Circulation", and through the B side's keeling, 16 minute+ panoramas of "Above All Dreams" and "The Roof Falls", the power of Abul Mogard's dreams above all transcends sound, feeling, and physics in a truly remarkable way that evades words or concrete notation. RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, early Oneohtrix Point Never, Coil, Brian Eno. Master and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

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Pye Corner Audio morphs into Head Technician mode for the project's brooding second sojourn with Ecstatic. Taking inspiration from his fascination with Brutalist construction, Martin Jenkins exclusively uses Roland TR-606, MC-202, and TB-303 boxes plus the Roland System 100 modular synth to sketch out a slow, murky sound in furtive pursuit of the vibes on Zones (2017), but this time the results are even darker and obscure. Echoes of early Detroit and UK bleep and bass infiltrate the stark corridors of Profane Architecture as much as the hauntological spirits of Boards of Canada, combining to make a sound that revels in nostalgia yet yearns for the future. It's not a new idea, but it is one that Jenkins executes with such classic style and unique character that can only lead to comparisons with acid maestros such as early Plastikman or the Analord, Richard J. James. For moody dancers, Profane Architecture is perfect; from the oozing elan of opener "First Pour" through the spheric momentum of "Béton Brut" and the mind-weaving acid of "Formwork" he establishes a slickly hypnotic sound that works its magick with more funk on the flipped, generating the tactile form of "Second Pour" and the ruggedly hewn groove of "The New Brutalism", then closing out with the exquisite darkness of "Demolition" -- a real highlight in his extensive and highly collectible catalog. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering.

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Juan Mendez, aka Silent Servant, finds his ideal EBM vocal foil in Ori Ofir under their Sterile Hand moniker. The duo's first vinyl round for Not Waving's Ecstatic label is a dark and sleazy run of deviant industrial techno and pugilistic EBM cuts made over the last year. Following Silent Servant's killer split 12" with Not Waving and Pye Corner Audio in 2017, and two fierce 12"s with Marcel Dettmann and Phase Fatale in 2018, the L.A.-based artist behind Sandwell District and Jealous God is at the apex of his game right now, combining EBM and techno in faithful but inventive new ways. If there was anything previously missing from Silent Servant's music, it's only become apparent through the seamless and natural incorporation of Ori Ofir's classic-styled but unique vocals. The two L.A.-based artists push each other down tightening alleys of EBM and industrial techno, with Ofir's stark, blunted declamations haunting and highlighting the most fetid corners of Mendez's rolled-steel productions. It's a style that works to cryptic, head-turning effect in the Voigt Kampff-like probe of "Personality Test", then with increasing dancefloor force in the Nitzer Ebb-esquer flow of "The Hunter" and the punishing, gnashing bite of "Security", whereas "Listen For Water" and the creeping figures of "Untitled" explore the esoteric powers and parameters of Sterile Hand in mesmerising psychoactive detail.

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After stranding listeners in deep space with Schleißen 4 in 2015, Colin Potter, Alessio Natalizia, and Guido Zen regroup along the percussive vectors of Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out for the Ecstatic label. Three years in the making, taking cues from German synth rock, cosmic disco, abstract EBM, and obscure library sounds, the trio head for seductive new horizons of pulsing rhythms and floating ambient dub tones. The six hands control the mission with masterful skill and sleight of hand, prompting routes for the user rather than signposting the way with cliché. Of course, it's hard to escape some sense of homage or reverence for the original forms, but they do so with such sensitivity to the material and "the journey" that the results simply transcends that heritage, to arrive somewhere, timelessly, out there. In a starfield littered with long-abandoned shuttles and criss-crossed by previously attempted missions, they chart a steady course, slowly melting from cryogenic stasis to map out free-floating space in "Articulated", then holding their course despite the gravitational pull from massive objects in "Rhythm Did Not Change", and under pressure of slow disco G-forces in the pulsing beauty of "Linda", leading to the interception of panicked bleeps in "Chaosmosis". Over on the B side "When Time Stops Moving" the mission becomes very Tarkovsky-esque and surreal, with Zen's lysergic drones really coming into their own, before the upside-down tonal sculpting of "Unsystematic Waves" re-aligns the user's brain functions in preparation for the stunning dynamic proprioception of "Che Osmosi", where the route ahead becomes scrambled in a delirious tangle of nagging arpeggio melodies and pill-belly pulses, emulating pretty much how you'd feel, lost but happy to be zillions of light years from terra firma. RIYL: Eduard Artemiev, Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, John Carpenter. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

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White On White is an absorbingly dynamic, multi-layered album of improvisations made on the seminal PPG Wave synth, inspired by the work, life, and theories of the great, if forgotten, British constructivist artist Marlow Moss (1889-1958): a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art who was a then-contemporary influence on Piet Mondrian, with whom she worked alongside from the late 1920s as part of the Abstraction-Creation artists association in Paris, until the Nazi's forced her from mainland Europe back to England, where she settled in the far west of Cornwall. White On White forms a follow-up of sorts to Sam Willis's Ascention tape (2015), and perhaps more aptly, leads on from his and Alessio Natalizia's reworks of Daphne Oram -- arguably another overlooked, British female pioneer of her field - which are collected on their Walls album, Sound Houses (ELP 005LP, 2014). There's little doubt that this is some of Willis's strongest solo work, which can be attributed to the fecund inspiration of Moss's work, life, and theories, as well as his access to a prized arsenal of rare vintage synths. Titled after the Moss piece which adorns the LP's front cover, White On White forms a welcome first introduction for many to Moss through a combination of visual representations -- photographs of the artist and her work -- with text by Lucy Howarth, curator of Moss's recent exhibitions at Museum Haus Konstruktiv exhibition (2017), the touring Tate display (2013-15), and of course the music itself, which seeks to describe Moss's mathematically sound geometries and evocative aesthetics through its lattice of unique, free-floating timbres and spatialized rhythm patterns. White On White is thus a direct result of the artist immersing himself in Moss's oeuvre, or what is left of it (most of her pre-WWII output was destroyed in the war), with results strongly reflective of the austere clarity and modernist structure of her works, from her syncopated line drawings modeled in the helixes of "Double Line", to the rotating perspectives of her 2D-into-3D metal sculpture manifest in the illusive, Peder Mannerfelt-like designs of "Matrix Of The Visible", whereas the closing nine minutes of perilous abstraction recalling Wendy Carlos's Clockwork Orange OST in "Man Guessed At A Spiritual Meaning And Imposed A Moral System" both literally and metaphorically serves a sort of unsentimentally elegiac, enigmatic lament for the artist's neglected status. RIYL: Oneohtrix Point Never's Good Time OST, Peder Mannerfelt's brut ambient, Rashad Becker's lysergic sound designs.

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One of the boldest new producers to broach the dub sphere in recent times, Jay Glass Dubs is subject of Dubs, a prime "early years" survey of his work, compiled by Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) for his Ecstatic label, and released quick at the heels of their ace Trax Test set (ELP 030LP) and Novoline album (ELP 029LP). Written during what Dimitris Papadatos, aka Jay Glass Dubs, describes as "an adventurous and bold period", and holding material variously issued by Hylé Tapes, THRHNDRDSVNTNN, and Seagrave between 2015-2016, the Dubs compilation frames a singular, stripped-down take on classic dub forms, wherein Jay Glass Dubs perceptibly retains the sound's heavy function and mystic qualities, but subtly updates its palette with a range of nods to shoegaze, darkwave synth styles, and weightless dynamics. The results form a sort of ghostly, filleted subtraction of classic dub architecture, all plasmic tones and diaphanous, boneless structures buoyed by an often overwhelming, yet somehow intangible bass presence. Beyond the obvious, thematic ligature that connects the material, which was all recorded within a very short period of time, the artist also suggests there is an underlying, encrypted similarity to the material which is "merely apparent to me", and awaits much closer investigation from keen ears. From Jay's eponymous 2015 debut for Hylé tapes, listeners will encounter the heaving smudge of "Definition Dub", the serpentine, Coil-like digital delays of "Grumpy Dub", and a grime drone drill "Depression Dub". Off the II tape for THRHNDRDSVNTNN (2016) comes the darkwave synths and militant step of "Magazine Dub" recalling a gauzier Equiknoxx production, next to the bass-less scudder, "Detrimental Dub" and the shoegazing bloom of "Daria Dub", while his III tape (2016) tees-up some abyssal highlights in the vertiginous "Hilton Dub", the melancholy, Basic Channel-scoped scale of "Sieben Dub", and the HTRK-eaque starkness of "Everlasting Dub". Exclusive to the set is "Perfumed Dub", recorded in 2017 and pointing to vast, layered, atmospheric directions for a timeless project which is only just hitting its stride. Recorded in Athens, Berlin and Paris between 2015-2017. First time on vinyl for all the material included. Cut by CGB at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

$22.00 IN STOCK

Novo Line reprises the meter-messing genius of his Movements album (ELP 024LP, 2016) with the Dyad mini-LP. Exclusively using the tools of '88/'89 professional recording set-ups, namely the Atari ST, but with a slight algorithmic alteration. While it's increasingly hard to find new tricks in old gear, especially with the resurgence of hardware fetishism and the ubiquity of DAWs, that's exactly what Nat Fowler has been doing for the best part of a decade as Novo Line. By, in his own words, "misusing one algorithmic composition program (not, by a longshot, a professional music production tool of any epoch) contained in 208kb of data on a 3.5" floppy disk," he generates and explores new permutations of old music which, ironically enough, sounds more innovative than a lot of new music in circulation. Inputting ever-changing parameters of melody, and 29-year old algorithms, the machine's voice is live-mixed and presented un-rendered as maxed-out waveforms via 1MB RAM, resulting in a severely compressed and combusting effect that leave mastering and sound engineers the world over scratching their heads in puzzlement. However, the effect is equally enthralling to anyone whose ears have become overly accustomed to contemporary emulations of "space" in electronic music, and genuinely sound unique in relief of the contemporary field. The release poses a playful question: can a record be ambivalent as to which speed it should be played? Celebrating vinyl and futhermore physical media, the listener is encouraged to find their exact speed of preference with the RPM toggle and pitch slider, that nearly forgotten joy in modifying speed in real time without a CPU mediating between the listener and sound; some tracks stumble heavily at 33rpm like boulders in the tumble dry, while others flash by at 45. In the taut, recoiling thud of "Monad", through the frenetic pop edit of "Ennead" to the 'floor-curdling prong of "Dyad Marcia" on the front, to the forceful new beat mutation "Tetrad", and the mind-bending "Melpomenean Dyad" which closes the LP, the album's heavily challenging, but deeply satisfying gear seriously, yet playfully, messes with convention. Essentially, Novo Line is reveling in the pure spirit of computer music and the sonification of dance music as we know it -- born in the '88/'89 phenomenon of techno-house music, including its industrial/EBM precedents, and its new beat/euro house offshoots. RIYL: Aphex Twin, V/Vm, Not Waving, Powell. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.

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Trax Test is the first ever survey of Italy's pioneering, visionary, and influential label and mail art collective Trax, which ran from 1981-1987 as a network for the creation of collaborative projects. The collective included a pre-NWW Colin Potter and some of the earliest work from Masami Akita, aka Merzbow, but also had deep connections with the art world; a few Trax members went on to become famous designers and artists -- Ettore Sottsass of hugely influential Memphis Group even guests on vocals on the last track of the compilation. The whole selection here is rare as heck and sorely in-demand by collectors, much of it now making its vinyl premiere some 30-odd years after the fact. With credit due to compilers Vittore Baroni of Trax and Ecstatic's avowed wave fiend, Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) -- who was also behind the Mutazione (Italian Electronic & New Wave Underground 1980-1988) compilation (2013) -- Trax Test is a portal to the international scene which laid the grassroots for a proliferation of electronic music over the proceeding decades -- a pioneering part of the infrastructure for independent music distribution which could be said to pre-echo the myriad social networks and platforms today. As Frans De Waard astutely points out in the 16-page booklet, there were no "templates" for this thing back then, meaning artists did everything DIY: from cutting, pasting, and Xeroxing their artwork to experimenting with recording techniques and disseminating their work; all resulting in a wonderfully daring and freeform mosaic of ideas which valued the virtues of ostensibly "unfinished" or open-ended work. Traces of disco, cosmic krautrock, jazz, electro-pop, and industrial noise are all tessellated across the compilation's 25 tracks, with a number of artists and the same equipment -- cheap drum machines, synths, FX and tape -- cropping up in various, mutant formations. This set is right up there with the best compilations from Vinyl On Demand, Light Sounds Dark, or Minimal Wave. Features: Cancer, M.A.Phillips, Nausea, Amok, Mecanique Vegetale, Daniele Ciullini, E-Coli, The Cop Killers, Peter Mayer, Rod Summers, Robin Crozier, Capitalist Pig, Biagio D'egidio, Piermario Ciani, Vittore Baroni, Nocturnal Emissions, De Rezke, Ado Scaini, Enrico Piva, Giancarlo Martina, B Sides, Colin Potter, Naif Orchestra, Merzbow (Vacation Of Merzbow Lowest Music & Arts), Monty Cantsin, Die Form, Utopia Production, Spirocheta Pergoli, Nostalgia, Ptose, Ddaa, Zone Verte, and I Nipoti Del Faraone. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

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Ecstatic's stunning split release between Maurizio Bianchi, godfather of the Italian industrial noise scene, and Abul Mogard, the much loved and hyperstitious synthesist, conjures a spellbinding testament to the transcendent and transportive energies of electronic music. Although appearing to starkly contrast on the surface, both artists' work patently shares a lust for the suggestive abstraction of raw current and its pareidolia-like capacity to generate rich and uncanny emotional responses from the end user. On the A-side, Maurizio Bianchi serves the obfuscated, coruscating atmosphere of "Nervous Hydra"; a 17-minute piece of sunken, desiccated harmonic structures and warped greyscale tones rinsed with ET radio signals and distant percussion that recall the sound of embers landing on tinfoil or snow. It evokes the experience of being caught in a quietly raging whiteout with only a dying fire for company, or equally a sense of subaquatic, amniotic serenity prior to being evacuated into a much colder world. Listeners can trust that the Italian artist's first new work in several years is faithful to his ever-uncompromising oeuvre, but there's also a tantalizingly elusive sense of redemption buried deep in there which marks it out from the rest of his canon and close to the work of his antecedents such as Kevin Drumm and Jim Haynes. In that piece's tempestuous wake, Abul Mogard brings a sense of soothing, glacial calm with "All This Has Passed Forever" on the B-side. For 16 blissed minutes, Mogard spells out a nostalgic fantasy in creamy strokes of Farfisa organ and Serge modular synthesizer recorded at EMS studios, Stockholm, and later combined with field recordings to elicit a wistfully widescreen paean to his days on the workshop floor accompanied by the harmonious drones and cacophony of heavy machinery. No matter the piece's provenance, though; it's simply a sublime example of Abul Mogard's gift for illusive, suspenseful ambient music which has seen his previous releases sky-rocket in second hand value since their earliest, sold-out editions. Over 30 minutes of ostensibly contrasting yet subtly, similarly spirited pieces that speak to the mystery and enigma of electronic music's tortured, searching and romantic soul in equal measure. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering; Edition of 500.

$20.00 IN STOCK

L/F/D/M squeezes off a volley of misshapen bangers and atonal wormholes in Music Without Discipline, making a mutant follow-up to his M Is a Shape LP (ELP 008LP, 2015) and Crocodiles in the Ceiling EP (ELP 019EP, 2016) for Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) and Sam Willis's Ecstatic label. For his third solo LP proper as L/F/D/M, the London-based producer/artist/designer Richard Smith jams, layers, and hacks a clutch of new hardware toys, the Akai VX90 and Yamaha TX81Z in particular, into 11 variants of what is essentially a style of no wave or new beta techno. Pursuing his taste for unique, visceral and affective electronic tones into odder integers of the club, L/F/D/M establishes a jagged line that runs from original '80s industrialists thru Larry Heard's legendary Gherkin Jerks and the scenius of Downwards's brummie radge packets to a place right between the eyes of 2017. DJs and dancers will find full fat, wonky weapons ranging from the cranky-assed jacker "Dance, You Awful Cunt", through to a sludgy turn called "Birds", a super-tangy Chicago percolator "Texan Flower Girl", and the throaty acid gargle of "Living Without Gain". But it's the way in which Richard Smith is just as happy to follow his nose into sparkling vignettes such as "After R Version II" and "Ballet", and into the grubby pits of "Pinx" that really gives this record its shape and asserts its messed-up character. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering.

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Not Waving consolidates the myriad stripes of his acclaimed Animals album (DIAG 025CD/LP, 2016) in four extended peak-time hammers on Populist. "Too Many Freaks" is an anthem in waiting, harnessing a barely-hinged sense of chaos between its careening synth lead, acid squabble and velvet-clad kicks, before the dry-rutting jag and plaintive vox of "Vibe Killer" takes a dog-grip. "Control Myself" holds its fizzy line into a fetid crevice of what sounds Russell Haswell ramping with Powell, whereas the crooked clamp-jaw groove of "Ur Lucky Ur Still Alive" pivots around a sample a lone raver at Atonal, Berlin.

$18.00 IN STOCK

Following a limited tape release for Ecstatic, Berlin's Nat Fowler renders his meticulous Novo Line alias for its second full-length release, a killer marriage of automated EBM and unexpected MIDI disruptions, continuing a life-long quest for esoteric knowledge and a love of archaic computer hardware. Modeled on re-appropriated software, run on two separate Atari ST's, Movements is the compelling result of obtuse production technique and painstaking trial and error; basically experimentation at the service of discovering a sound that really sounds unlike anything else out there. As he explains: "I like the idea of using restrictions in order to find and push boundaries, from limiting which octaves I use to how many notes at a time. I use the only PC capable of MIDI that had no multitasking, so communication is immediate, a direct mechanical communication from my fingers to the sounds is created. I feel lucky because technology has accelerated so fast since the first digital synthesizers and PCs that nothing since the early 1980s has been really pushed to its limits." In that sense, he can be placed in a small category of operators - including The Automatics Group, Dave Noyze, Lorenzo Senni and V/VM among them - who persistently gnaw at the boundary between dance-pop and avant-electronics, and with all of whom he shares a capacity for hearing the poetry of singular frequencies, unique pitch combinations and the strange electronic timbres just waiting to be born from overlooked, outmoded equipment. Whilst at times it may recall the saltiest digital tone and gait of early Chicago house and Belgian new-beat, there's a futuristic funk and idiosyncratic ambiguity to Movements that entirely belongs to Novo Line; whether bubbling up the mutant dembow lacquer of opener, "The Movement 1", radiating form the tightly-bound, curdled funk of "Hot Piece", or jabbing like a bag of cyborg slow house cats in "The Movement 2", it really does make for one of the year's finest and most addictive dancefloor mutations, bar none. 2016's most meticulous album of algorithmic body music. Inspired by F.M. Alexander, G.I. Gurdjieff and Pythagoras. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.

$22.00 LOW STOCK LEVEL

With the first vinyl edition of Not Waving's absorbingly raw sophomore solo LP Redacted (2013), Alessio Natalizia reminds fans of his nascent psychedelic side in light of his lucid, "schizo" deviations on the Animals album for Diagonal (DIAG 025CD/LP, 2016). While there's a mutual sense of technoid momentum to both albums, Redacted is a far gauzier, free-form and sensual beast; one richly steeped in proto/post-club atmospheres and allowing his imagination to run away with itself. Conceptually, Redacted pursues the "classified" themes of his remote viewing-inspired Umwelt LP (2013) into even murkier departments, drawing subtle parallels between the cold war atmospheres that birthed original post punk, industrial and proto-techno, and the current pallor of socio-political unrest. Omitting the original tape's expansive closer for the sake of a single LP cut, this vinyl version plays out like an alternative soundtrack to scenes in the overgrown, radioactive zones of Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), using an anachronistic palette of analog machinery to emphasize a sense of fluid, shimmering motion and out-of-place-and-timelessness that genuinely goes straight to the head with trippy effect. Swampy, slow techno horror themes vacillate with decayed pastoral panoramas and windows of synthetic optimism, both lush and disquietingly needling, using dissonance and sweeps of hazy noise to ultimately spell out a foreboding but dreamlike sort of electronic subterfuge and suspense that resonates with the nostalgic Stranger Things (2016) score as much as Leyland Kirby's Intrigue & Stuff series. Redacted was originally issued in edition of 100 gold tapes in 2013. Newly remastered for vinyl by Matt Colton at Alchemy. RIYL: Pye Corner Audio, John Carpenter, Edward Artemiev. Edition of 500.

$25.50 NOT IN STOCK

2019 repress. Ecstatic offer a deeply arresting and definitive collection of Works by erstwhile Serbian factory worker-turned-synthesist Abul Mogard; containing selections from two cassettes released in 2012 and 2013 on Steve Moore and Anthony Paterra's VCO Recordings, as well as a cassette only release on Ecstatic, never before available on vinyl. Abul Mogard's relatively unusual path to releasing music is well documented, but bears repeating here. Upon taking retirement from a job at a factory which he held for decades, Mogard craved the mechanical noise and complex harmonics of the industrial workplace, and found that the best way to fulfil that need was through electronic music - using a limited set-up of Farfisa organs, voices, samplers and a self-built modular system to realize a peaceful yet haunting, sweetly coruscating sound that resonates uncommonly with music from Leyland Kirby to Alessandro Cortini, or Fennesz and Tim Hecker. The nine tracks on Works are soused in an emotional richness that's hard to forget once experienced. Broad daubs of distorted bass and naturally glorious harmonic progressions paint panoramas of wide open, grey-scaled skies whilst equally conveying the intimate feel of a person with their nose to the machine, toiling for a sound or feeling that really means something to them, and by turns, us. The fact that Mogard hails from an area hardly well-known for its synth music, and that he's of an age where most people take up gardening or lawn bowls, rather than synth music, only helps to aid the enigma and magic surrounding this remarkable artist and his layered, emotional music. RIYL: Alessandro Cortini, The Caretaker, Fennesz, Tangerine Dream, Brain Eno, Tim Hecker.