Bunita Marcus, an unsung heroine of post-minimalist music, will release a new version of her 1985 “Lecture For Jo Kondo” composition on David August’s 99CHANTS.
Marcus was active within New York’s avant-garde music scene during the ’70s and ’80s, but her potential was side-lined, we’re told, in a patriarchal environment, where male musicians were allowed to easily dominate.
Because of this, Marcus’ role in the cannon of contemporary music has been overlooked in music and arts media, and omitted from the dominant narrative on key figures, which is something August hopes to address with this release.
“Lecture For Jo Kondo” is dedicated to fellow composer and friend Jo Kondo. It was originally written for Morton Feldman’s group Feldman and Soloists, to be performed in 1985, and was recorded for the 2012 release of Marcus’ Sugar Cubes. This latest version, arriving 35 years after the piece was originally written, adds Marcus’ own vocals on top of the original recordings.
Alongside the full 20-minute piece, Lecture For Jo Kondo includes a machine-based deconstruction by August himself.
Veteran hip-hop producer Kenny Segal has announced the fourth instalment of his Kenstrumentals series, scheduled for Dome of Doom next month.
Kenstrumentals is a beat-tape series launched in 2013. The latest edition, Travelog, came in 2018, reflecting on Segal’s travels through New Zealand and Taiwan.
For the fourth instalment, Segal presents the instrumentals from his recent projects with rappers Hemlock Ernst (Back at the House), Serengeti (Ajai), and R.A.P. Ferreira (Purple Moonlight Pages). There are also various alternate versions, each bringing fresh takes to the beats you thought you knew.
Rounding out the release are a few new beats, including a collaboration with his Jefferson Park Boys cohort Mike Parvizi, entitled “corduroy shorts,” as well as a remix of young piano prodigy Jamael Dean’s “Akamara.”
“The past year and a half have been non-stop with the rap album releases,” Segal says. “I’ve had so much on my plate that this instalment of Kenstrumentals is really just me catching up to get some of my favorite instrumentals off my recent works out to the world.”
01. Elaine [VIP dub] 02. Jamael Dean “Akamara” [Segal Remix] 03. NONCIPHER [dub] 04. Jueles Trunk [VIP dub] 05. Jargonne [dub] 06. Slabs [dub] 07. Collab [VIP dub] 08. North To South [VIP dub] 09. Romantic Paris [dub] 10. movienight 11. Stone Soup [VIP dub] 12. Ajai [dub] 13. Bless The Fire [dub] 14. Ajai Epilogue [dub] 15. Company Softball [dub] 16. Check Kenny [dub] 17. last days 18. Down [dub] 19. corduroy shorts 20. PINBALL [dub] 21. Addicted Youth [dub]
Kenstrumentals Vol. 4: a lot on my plate LP is scheduled for October 16 release. Meanwhile, you can stream “corduroy shorts” via the player below and pre-order here.
Justin K Broadrick will release Terminus, his first album as Jesu since 2013.
Formed in 2003 following the breakup of Godflesh, Jesu is a post-metal band named after the last song on Hymns, the final album of Godflesh’s initial run. The project’s last album, Every Day I Get Closer To The Light From Which I Came, came seven years ago.
Terminus is inspired by concepts of rejection, dependency, nostalgia, and loneliness. Musically, it explores the entire gamut of the Jesu oeuvre, which is to say dream pop, shoegaze, and electronica. It lands on Broadrick’s own Avalanche Recordings, and follows the experimental Never EP, released earlier this year.
More recently, Broadrick has been releasing music as JK Flesh, and has collaborated with Kevin Martin and Moor Mother for the Zonal project.
Tracklisting
01. When I Was Small 02. Alone 03. Terminus 04. Sleeping In 05. Consciousness 06. Disintegrating Wings 07. Don’t Wake Me Up 08. Give Up
Terminus LP is scheduled for November 13 release. Meanwhile, you can stream opener “When I Was Small” in full below.
Pontiac Streator strictly avoids the traditional means of artist-fan communication. They have no social media presence and their releases are rolled out with little promotion, if any at all. There are no interviews. All that’s known is that they form part of a tight-knit crew of producers based in Philadelphia, United States exploring the broader realms of experimental ambient. As part of virtualdemonlaxative alongside Ulla, Exael, and Special Guest DJ, they’ve ventured towards grindcore on Huerco S.’s West Mineral Ltd.
The project’s history is easy to map. It begins in 2018, when Pontiac Streator surfaced on 180’s Choice, delivering six immersive environments with soft atmospherics and dashes of nostalgic melody. A year later, they teamed up with Ulla Straus for two outings on West Mineral Ltd., before resorting to solo work this year. Triz, with nine cloudy, ambient stunners, arrived in July, brewing with vivid sound design and vaguely organic textures. Preceded by Select Works . vol I, a collection of tracks recorded during 2018 and 2019, the record’s genre feels as intentionally obscure as the identity of its creator.
Pontiac Streator’s XLR8R podcast, recorded this month, casts the same spell as their production work. Its textures make it feel alive, as it moves through a heady concoction of dub and downtempo psychedelia. There are some collaborations and much of the material is unreleased, which makes it the first peek of upcoming work from Pontiac Streator and his Philadelphia cohorts.
01. What have you been up to recently?
Camping in the mountains around Philadelphia and upstate New York and making tracks with Iggy.
02. When and where did you record the mix?
Last week at Itsnotamacy’s in Philadelphia.
03. How did you choose the records that you included?
The mix includes a lot of forthcoming material from the family and many tracks friends have been kind of working on during quarantine.
04. What can we expect with it?
Some like mangy cursed energy. There’s a lot of collaborations.
05. What’s up next?
More collaborations, and hopefully a West Mineral Ltd. tour once the coronavirus is out of here.
XLR8R has now joined Mixcloud Select, meaning that to hear the podcast offline you will need to subscribe to our Select channel, or subscribe to XLR8R+ to download the file. The move to Mixcloud Select will ensure that all the producers with music featured in our mixes get paid. You can read more about it here.
Full XLR8R+ Members can download the podcast here.
Joe Seaton (a.k.a. Call Super) has announced a new album, Every Mouth Teeth Missing, arriving on the Incienso label.
The forthcoming LP will be Seaton’s first on Anthony Naples and Jesse Slattery’s New York label. His first two full-length efforts, 2017’s Arpo and 2014’sSuzi Ecto, landed on Houndstooth.
There are no further details announced other than the tracklisting and a note from the label, which states that the album’s composition has been a “strange constant rain” in Seaton’s life, “replenishing over the last three years in which it has been made.”
01. An Unstable Music 02. Every Mouth Teeth Missing 03. Pleasure For Pleasure 04. Opperton Swim 05. Mouth Bank Bed 06. Sleep All Night With Open Eye 07. Pay As U Glow 08. Ekkles 09. Welcome New People 10. Milkweed
Every Mouth Teeth Missing will drop on October 23 on vinyl and digital formats and can be pre-ordered here. Meanwhile, you can stream “Every Mouth Teeth Missing” below.
Bas Bron will release Spontaneous Order, his first album as Fatima Yamaha in five years.
Having worked under numerous aliases for over two decades, across intersections of electro-funk, electro-pop, and house, Bron and his Fatima Yamaha moniker became one of the most sought-after names in electronic music in 2015 in the wake of “What’s A Girl To Do?” The track cemented itself as a set staple worldwide that summer, 11 years after its initial release on D1 Records.
In the period since, Bron has chosen not to capitalize on the project’s success, he says. Spontaneous Order is the first full-length LP under the name since Imaginary Lines, released as Bron broke through five years ago.
It’s an album of electronic music and funk, we’re told, with virtuoso synths lines, anthemic melodies, and razor-sharp electro. There are also mellower moments, and it’s all influenced by Bron’s love for Japanese video game soundtracks.
Alongside the announcement, Bron has shared lead single “Day We Met,” which sees him at his most poppy, playful best, working around infectious hooks and bouncing along with a joyful energy.
Tracklisting
01. Drops In The Ocean 02. Day We Met 03. Bar Bodega “That’s It!” 04. Monderman 05. Happy Hour At Hayek’s 06. Spontaneous Order 07. Unwashed 08. Daio (Alternate History) 09. Master Zhuang 10. We Are Drops
Spontaneous Order LP is scheduled for November 13 release on Magnetron Music. Meanwhile, you can stream lead single “Day We Met” in full below.
ke thu, the Detroit duo made of multi-instrumentalists Tim Barrett and Steven Stavropoulos, first landed on XLR8R‘s radar when they submitted “Every Aspect,” their latest single at the time, via the XLR8R+ submissions portal. The duo’s brand of emotive techno caught our ear and was subsequently featured in the April submission roundup. Now, the duo return with their first release since “Every Aspect,” the five-track Bound Apart EP.
Bound Apart was recorded in early spring during the first stages of lockdown, with the duo sending ideas back and forth while isolated in their respective studios, before meeting in person this summer to finalize the recordings. In recording the atmospheric collection, the duo utilized a variety of soft synths and guitar samples to form an immersive bed for their fractured and broken rhythmic structures. Although the EP loosely sits under the techno banner, the tracks never hit a 4×4 structure and instead explore the genre’s more tender pastures.
To celebrate the release of the EP, ke thu have shared a live performance of a hybrid version of EP tracks “Plain View” and “Jungo” on Detroit’s Belle Isle on August 30. You can watch the performance in full via the player below.
Bound Apart is available now and can be picked up via Bandcamp, with the tracklisting and a stream below.
Tracklisting:
01. Salis 02. Melty Boy 03. Plain View 04. Dissolve: Into 05. Jungo
Emerging Los Angeles artist TWEAKS has shared the first single from their upcoming beat tape, Videl.
The track, “Peeping Thom,” a sub-heavy breakbeat cut with processed field recordings, was influenced by “Black America’s rich history of underground techno,” TWEAKS explains. It forms part of an upcoming beat-tape titled Videl that was produced during quarantine through a practice they dubbed “demo a day,” in which TWEAKS would create a new piece of music daily. The process of recording the tape was a cathartic experience and “realized through a period of intense loss and transformation,” they explain.
The nine-track Videl tape showcases TWEAKS’ range as a producer, presenting warped spoken-word ambient, left-field house, breaks, and broken-beat material. It will be their first long-form release, following various self-released singles.
“Peeping Thom” is available now and can be picked up here, with the full stream and mixtape tracklisting below. Videl will be released independently on October 23.
Magic Oneohtrix Point Never, the name a reference to a misheard play on words of Boston’s Magic 106.7, is a nostalgic body of work that collages maximalist pop with atmospheric glitter, we’re told. Across 17 tracks, Oneohtrix Point Never, real name Daniel Lopatin, synthesizes elements of his previous material to craft a cohesive humanistic work, the British label says.
The album’s structure loosely summons the broadcasting logic of radio day parts, starting in the morning and ending overnight, latticed together with kaleidoscopic, twitchy transformations.
Across the album, Lopatin even collages archival recordings of various American FM stations’ “format flips,” in which DJ sign-offs collide with advertisements and self-help mantras to form darkly humorous reflections on American music culture.
Accompanying the announcement, Lopatin has shared the Drive Time Suite of “Cross Talk I,” “Auto & Allo,” and “Long Road Home,” which includes vocals by Caroline Polachek.
At the end of 2019, Lopatin soundtracked the Safdie Brothers’ noir thriller “Uncut Gems.” His last studio album, Age Of, came out on Warp in 2018.
Tracklisting
01. Cross Talk I 02. Auto & Allo 03. Long Road Home 04. Cross Talk II 05. I Don’t Love Me Anymore 06. Bow Ecco 07. The Whether Channel 08. No Nightmares 09. Cross Talk III 10. Tales From The Trash Stratum 11. Answering Machine 12. Imago 13. Cross Talk IV / Radio Lonelys 14. Lost But Never Alone 15. Shifting 16. Wave Idea 17. Nothing’s Special
Magic Oneohtrix Point Never LP is scheduled for October 30 release. Meanwhile, you can pre-order here and stream “Cross Talk I,” “Auto & Allo,” and “Long Road Home” below.
CoOp Presents will release a various artist compilation called Plug One.
CoOp Presents is a record label founded by IG Culture and Alex Phountzi, focusing on the wealth of talent that exists within the London bruk movement. It launched in 2017.
Plug One features a plethora of global talent from in and around the world of broken beat, some already established and others upcoming. It’s an acknowledgment of a continually evolving sound from the label, and its tracks range from the cosmic psych-jazz of LCSM to the classic UK garage tweaks of Groove Chronicles. We’ll add more details on the compilation as it becomes available.
Influenced by his father, a Mauritian percussionist, and by the hip-hop scene in Bristol and Bath where he grew up, Reginald relocated to Peckham in the early ’00s. He has been releasing music for almost a decade, with singles, albums, and EPs on labels Five Easy Pieces and 22a. In May 2019, he released Where We Going?, his latest album.
The digital single of “400 Years” includes two remixes courtesy of Gonzi and label boss IG Culture.
For more information on IG Culture, check out his thrilling XLR8R podcast here.
Tracklisting
01. 400 Years 02. 400 Years (IG Culture Remix) 03. 400 Years (Gonz Remix) 04. 400 Years (Instrumental) 05. 400 Years (IG Culture Instrumental)
400 Years is available now, with the full album set to drop in November. A full stream of the single can be found below.
