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LP
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WEILO 002LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 9/19/2025
Arriving two years after the first chapter, Absurd Matter 2 isn't just a sequel, it's an evolution, redrawing the boundaries established by its acclaimed predecessor. The Berlin-based Italian producer tempers his confrontational sonics with rare moments of introspection, shifting seamlessly between blown-out noise, warped hip-hop, mutant club experimentation, and weightless ambience. It's a poetic, layered response to Nino Pedone's changing physical reality: the gradual hearing loss and perceptual renegotiation triggered by Ménière's disease, which struck him in 2022. At first, the experience felt like betrayal, a brutal disconnection from the very sense that had shaped his life. But over time, the disorientation turned into a strange kind of focus. The silence between sounds became as expressive as the sounds themselves. The first Absurd Matter (WEILO 001LP) was a visceral reaction to trauma; the second is more reflective -- an ambiguous chronicle of sensory recalibration. Pedone doesn't represent his altered inner reality through extremes, but through depth, zooming in on illusory distortions, tense rhythmic fluctuations, and fragmented sonics. Dense, immersive, and mystical, the album mirrors Pedone's evolving relationship with perception itself. Tinnitus-like feedback wails and noir-ish strings introduce "Repeater," making it immediately clear that Pedone is painting a more delicately finessed image this time around. Fleshed out by raps from cult MCs billy woods and E L U C I D, the track is marked by subtle, sophisticated contrasts: the blurred, inverted rhythms that couch Armand Hammer's haunted back-and-forth, and the glitchy interference that offsets the lavish orchestral phrases. Backwoodz associate Fatboi Sharif lends his Lynchian drawl to "Bandage Chipped Wings," grounding Pedone's lysergic rhythmic distortions with syrupy, horror-inspired couplets. Pedone also invites discomfort into "Crash Landing", with droning, metallic tones that contradict South Central rapper ICECOLDBISHOP's elastic flow. Working alongside London's Loraine James on production, Pedone reunites with Moor Mother on "I Saw The Light," blending James' soft-focus atmospherics with soundsystem-damaging, overdriven bass hits and rusted percussive snips. On "Splintered", he reunites with Kenyan prodigy Slikback, mangling neon-lit trance arpeggios with dissociated trap rhythms. Perhaps the album's most surprising moment arrives with "Viel", which features vocals from Los Angeles-based composer Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith. Together, Pedone and Smith chance upon their notion of dub techno, fogging synth stabs and ghostly vocal traces into eerie harmonic distortions. Absurd Matter 2 doesn't simply document a process; it enacts one. It doesn't offer clarity; it invites disorientation. It's not a map of the labyrinth, but a foghorn piercing the darkness.
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LP
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WEILO 001LP
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Absurd Matter is a labyrinthine sonic conundrum that spirals around the two poles of extreme noise and hip-hop. It's Berlin-based Italian producer Shapednoise's first album in four years and confidently advances his narrative into the next chapter, building on the groundwork of his prior abstractions to emerge with a coherent genre-warped fusion of urgent rap, crushing bass weight and idiosyncratic sound design. After spending years scrupulously deconstructing club music, Nino Pedone has rebuilt it brick by brick in his image. The album arrives after a period of severe anxiety for the producer when he unexpectedly lost his hearing. Absurd Matter tells a critical narrative that's cut with visceral pain and panic, from the unsettling intro that features David Lynch's longtime collaborator Dean Hurley, through the cautious cacophony of the unstable "Swash" all the way to the album's isolated but dizzying conclusion. The album is the first release on Pedone's brand new imprint Weight Looming, a multidisciplinary label platform that's set to explore the depths of bass music, textured noise and abrasive transcendence. It follows a slew of acclaimed releases for Numbers, Opal Tapes, Type, and his own Cosmo Rhythmatic label, and forward-thinking collaborations with Kenyan beat alchemist Slikback and Hyperdub-signed Angolan producer, Nazar. Pedone's most ambitious project to date, Absurd Matter taps into kinetic energy from a hand-picked selection of collaborators, including New York rap duo Armand Hammer, French DJ/producer Brodinski, Bruiser Brigade's ZelooperZ, and vanguard Philly poet, musician, and activist Moor Mother. On "Family", billy woods and Elucid weave a dismal, apocalyptic landscape with their razor-sharp anecdotes. The duo's macabre imagery is given artificial life by Pedone's industrial scrapes and rattles that curl around their worlds like thick smoke. It's still rap, just about, but lodges itself in the back room of a factory, machines running themselves to an early death. Pairing with techno-rap trailblazer Brodinski, Pedone edges further towards the sound system, spatializing rhythms in four dimensions around Detroit rapper ZelooperZ's playful expressions. This is the Italian producer's sci-fi tinged liquefaction of radio echoes, a way to fire familiarity into the void and sublime the human voice into weightless mist. When Moor Mother arrives shouting "me me me" on the aptly-titled "Poetry", it sounds as if all of Pedone's loose threads are being tightened into a knot. His misshapen neo-grime beats sound like a broken jet engine, but smartly cede power to Moor Mother's resonant rhymes.
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