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viewing 1 To 14 of 14 items
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LP
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LTNC 019LP
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"After a banner year that witnessed Lafawndah release her first album Ancestor Boy, the debut of her soundsystem Fara Fara, and further incursions into film, contemporary art and fashion, the ceaseless artist returns with another plot twist: The Fifth Season. Inspired by her encounter with author NK Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy, Lafawndah both pays homage to and extends further the elemental, emotionally charged myths of Jemisin's books. These are stories where a broken heart can tear apart a continent. In contrast to the precision-tuned industrial productions of Ancestor Boy, The Fifth Season breathes a different kind of volatility. Inviting a new degree of spontaneity and freedom into her process, Lafawndah's collaborators -- Theon Cross (tuba), Nathaniel Cross (trombone), Valentina Magaletti (percussions), and Nick Weiss (keyboards) -- encircle her confrontational character studies with iridescent, cinematic chamber-bass moves. These are torch songs for when it rains ash, creation ballads for when the earth turns inside out. Ghosts of Art Ensemble of Chicago and Rahsaan Roland Kirk color the air, yet Lafawndah's mastery of pop songcraft, vocal production and razor-honed clarity of purpose cut through. In addition to the Lafawndah originals, The Fifth Season features interpretations of hybrid-folk godfather Beverly Glenn Copeland's 'Don't Despair' and acid-impressionist prodigy Lili Boulanger's 'Old Buddhist Prayer.' Album highlight 'You, at the End' deploys a poem by poet-performer Kae Tempest to aching, rift-tearing ends, and French dream-trap wraith Lala &ce features on 'Le Malentendu'. The Fifth Season anchors Lafawndah as a descendent of forebearers Brigitte Fontaine and Scott Walker -- a born theatric whose acid humor warps the sub-continental undertow of her emotive storytelling. Lafawndah's elementalism on The Fifth Season finds her imagination more agile than ever, and recent live shows have evinced a drive to push these compositions further out, deeper, and more aflame."
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LP
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LTNC 018LP
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"Mohammad Reza Mortazavi is a virtuoso percussionist known for playing traditional Persian instruments such as the tombak and daf. After developing more than thirty new striking techniques and progressing to be one of the most prominent players in Iran, Mortazavi travelled to Germany, eventually settling in Berlin to record and perform regular concerts the world over. His acclaimed performances have taken in venues such as Berlin Philharmonie and Sydney Opera House. In recent years, he has been embraced by the experimental electronic music community, collaborating with Burnt Friedman, Fis and Mark Fell. Ritme Jaavdanegi is Mortazavi's sixth LP, and his first one available on vinyl. The album came together from recordings made in Berlin in June 2019, inspired by Mortazavi's vivid reminiscence about profound experiences he had listening to music as a child. As he drifted in this time-slipping reverie, the phrase 'ritme jaavdanegi' or 'rhythm of eternity' came to mind, and he found the phrase itself to match the 11/8 metre he was striving for. As such, all eight pieces on this album adhere to this time signature, which in itself harks back to the Aksak, a rhythmic pattern based on the alteration of binary and ternary quantities executed in a fast tempo, intrinsic to traditional music from Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan and the Balkans. In the same way these non-standard folk rhythms started to impact on Western music in the early 20th Century, so now you can hear an ever-increasing embrace of polyrhythms and metres that break away from the dominant 4/4 ideology. What's most striking about Ritme Jaavdanegi, perceived through a lens of modern Western experimental music, is how Mortazavi's virtuosic playing rivals the intensely programmed dynamics of electronica. His rapid, needlepoint drum hits bend their tonality in incredibly musical ways, but there is still an underlying focus on cyclical repetition that encourages the same ancient transcendental quality that so many contemporary artists strive for."
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LP
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LTNC 017LP
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"A new work by François J. Bonnet -- the director of INA GRM -- deconstructing the binarity 'smooth' and 'striated'. 'If 'smooth' is linked to 'nomos', within an open space of organic distribution, then 'striated' is associated with 'logos', as a kind of gridded enclosure. An interplay is mapped out, whereby pulsations become textures and layers, and where rhythmic elements are teased from the qualities and densities of sounds, rather than deployed as pre-determined sound objects in their own right, abstracted and frozen onto a temporal grid. 'Striation' is made audible only through the sonic landscape it inhabits, in the same way that animal camouflage comes alive in the woods and long grass, becoming redundant and inert out in the open.'"
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LP
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LTNC 016LP
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"Martina Lussi's second album fuses together disparate sound sources with a disorienting quality that reflects the modern climate of dispersion and distraction. The Lucerne, Switzerland-based sound artist released her debut album Selected Ambient on Hallow Ground in 2017, and now comes to Latency with a bold new set of themes and processes. The range of tools at her disposal spans field recordings, processed instrumentation, synthesised elements and snatches of human expression. The guitar is a recurring figure, subjected to a variety of treatments from heavy, sustained distortion to clean, pealing notes. Elsewhere the sound of sports crowds and choral singing merge, and patient beds of drones and noise melt into the sounds of industry and mechanics. The track titles manifest as a compositional game of deception complete with innuendos, empty phrases and claims -- flirtations with perfume names and ironic assertions. From the volatile geopolitical climate to the changing nature of music consumption in the face of streaming and digital access, Diffusion Is A Force is a reflection on fractured times where familiar modes and models change their meaning with the ever-quickening pace of communication."
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LP
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LTNC 015LP
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"Following his compelling comment on the modern-day culture of call centres, Disruptive Muzak -- awarded Album of the Year 2016 by Boomkat -- Sam Kidel turns his analytical artistry towards the ominous gatekeepers of online communication with a rave-inspired rebel spirit to match his scientific methodology.
'Chamber music meets free-party-scene warehouse-invasion'
First exhibited at EBM(T) in Tokyo, 'Live @ Google Data Center' trespasses in Google's data center in Council Bluffs, Iowa to perform electronic music amongst the humming banks of servers and endless cable runs, without actually breaking in. In a process he describes as 'mimetic hacking', Kidel used architectural plans based on photos of the data center to acoustically model the sonic qualities of the space. The resulting acoustics on 'Live @ Google Data Center' simulate the sound of Kidel's algorithmically-generated notes, rhythms and melodies reverberating through the space, as though a bold illegal party was being held in the maximum-security location. Kidel's manipulation of his generative direction of the music, all inspired by images of the data center.
'Music that deafens the silicon ear'
The generative audio patch Kidel used to make 'Voice Recognition DoS Attack' seeks to disable the functionality of voice recognition software by triggering phonemes (the smallest units of language). The project, first developed for the Eavesdropping series of events in Melbourne, exploits a weakness in voice recognition that cannot distinguish between individual voices. When you speak while the patch is playing, the cascading shards of human expression mask your speech and thus protect you from automated surveillance, questioning our vulnerability in the face of global data giants. In amongst these displaced sounds, Kidel fed additional musical elements into his patch to create the version of the project heard on this release."
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LP
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LTNC 014LP
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2019 repress. "What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled. Laurel Halo presents six instrumental pieces that form a meditative, cinematic listening experience. Inspired by recent film score work for Metahaven and Ursula Le Guin's translation of the Tao Te Ching. Featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler. Working in abstraction leads to a deeper longing for touch and closeness. The tactile sensation of struck organ keys and bowed strings, wood and felt on drum heads. Smoke and dirt and stone. Febrile and tactile, hairy and hissy. A clover of highway onramps, a continuous flow, like old leaves melting on their way down a stream at the back of a house. Constant contradiction, the truth's nowhere."
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2LP
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LTNC 013LP
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"Following up Drawn With Shadow Pens on Spectrum Spools, Belgian sound artist Yves De Mey returns with Bleak Comfort, his third solo full-length. Geared towards serving up an intense musical experience, the album deconstructs regular club music to highlight some of its key elements in a transformative way. An album about absence, malfunction and disorientation, Bleak Comfort is equally packed with floor-functional material and left-of-center electronics. By turn sizzling and spherical, convulsive and atmospheric, Yves De Mey ushers his listener in a hypnotic kaleidoscope of sounds, providing a fascinating picture of his ever dynamic grammar at variable scales and tempos."
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12"
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LTNC 012EP
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"Floating, immersive tape loops and improvised analogue electronics by the Milanese duo of Giuseppe Ielasi and Nicola Ratti. Enigmatic melodies, subtle sound textures and rumbling sub-bass pulses..."
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12"
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LTNC 011EP
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Repressed. Two swinging, hypnotic excursions by the Brooklynite (aka Lichens). Ethereal and melancholic, 'Magnamite' ponders 'the relationship of machine and human'; whilst the wilder pulsations of 'Heart Of Sogguth' bear witness to a 'unified human machine wherein the voice becomes the rhythm -- all become one instrument'."
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LP
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LTNC 010LP
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"Latency's tenth release is a journey through Nonplace mastermind Burnt Friedman's elusive repertoire, recorded between 1993 and 2011. Brilliant and pioneering, this is percussive, dubbed-out, minimal, electro-acoustic music. With guest appearances by Hayden Chisholm and Takeshi Nishimoto."
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12"
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LTNC 006EP
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Repress. In stamped paper sleeves, this time; and cheaper. "A stone scorcher of an EP to put alongside his classic Aquaplanos with Donato Dozzy, from nearly ten years ago. Four contrasting, deeply atmospheric stages in longing -- swingeing and propulsive to blissed-out and bittersweet. Terse but charged; hypnotic, never bludgeoning; soulful and warmly crafted, never mechanical. Says Nuel -- 'Unveiled consists of live recordings made on the same great day: 03/10/2015. The inspiration comes from a woman, the record is my reaction to something she unveiled. The record is about really strong feelings, relationships and mental projections... a sexy record for me. After that recording session I found these tracks so appealing that I decided to keep them in that form, a document of that day.' . . . Another killer from the redoubtable Latency."
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12"
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LTNC 009EP
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"Latency 009, from Tokyo: four eerie, multi-rhythmic, bass-heavy excursions, with roots in abstract hip-hop and the classic d&b of Photek and Source Direct."
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12"
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LTNC 008EP
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"Seething, thrilling, hypnotic dance music, in the mighty tradition of Carl Craig's 'Bug In The Bass Bin'. Two constantly shifting blends of Belfi's richly rhythmic snare-work with stately drones and shimmering electronica. Themes and traces constantly loom and recede, underpinned by a deep, pulsating bass drum, and tautened by a widescreen sense of drama (with Morricone in mind). ('Cera persa', in Italian; 'casa perdue', in French: 'lost-wax' or 'investment' casting, by which a sculpture is duplicated.)"
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12"
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LTNC 007EP
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"Whoompf. Another knockout record from Latency. Five grippingly widescreen, warmly immersive, dubwise soundscapes - propulsively roiling, droning and ticking, smudging the limits of their own coherence. 'I'd been thinking a lot about this idea of skewed club tracks that constantly shift in and out of time like they're on the precipice of dissolving or collapse,' says the producer, from Melbourne. 'Straining against whatever holds them together but maintaining that tension. Tarkovsky calls it 'space frozen in a dynamic equilibrium'. 'I'd also been listening to a lot of Steve Reich, Monoton and Arthur Russell, particularly how their work can induce this meditative trance-like state through drifting repetition in rhythm and melody.' Another lovely, inkily silk-screened cover, too - freshly evacuated, awed, anxious - like a still from Force Majeure."
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