Desert Sound Colony has put himself firmly on the map of recent by pushing his own label Holding Hands with a fresh take on UK club music. He’s also previously released on Scissor and Thread and Me Me Me, and was originally known for a more slow and psychedelic sound.
His new EP for Touch From A Distance is said to be an amalgamation of all the good stuff we’ve come to expect from the London-based DJ-producer.
Opener “Zenome Archetype“ is a retro-futuristic joyride across mountainous bass and funked up syncopation. “Taking It Out For A Rip“ couples a thumping 4/4-UKG-beat with a wonky vocal sample, before “Walrus Rodeo“ slows down the tempo for a slice of dancefloor fun. “Al Gore Rhythmic,” a collaboration with Guava, closes the EP by channeling classic two-step and golden era hip-hop vibes.
Höppner, former A&R and label manager of Ostgut Ton, founded Touch From A Distance last year. This is the label’s fifth release, following EPs from Donald’s House, Brother Nebula, and Opal Sunn.
Tracklisting
A1. Zenome Archetype
A2. Taking It Out For A Rip
B1. Walrus Rodeo
B2. Al Gore Rhythmic ft. Guava
Zenome Archetype EP lands June 21 on vinyl, with clips below.
ALINE Brooklyn is a Brooklyn-based vinyl-only record label releasing hand-stamped limited edition records with a piece of art for each cover picture. It was launched in 2016 by New York-based DJ-producer Nico Laa with a white-label release called ALN001, which was followed by ALN002, produced by Maksim. Both records sold out in just a few days.
The label recently launched a new series called Original Series with an EP from Romanian artist Mihai Pol featuring a remix by Cristi Cons.
Up next is Original Series 02, an eight-track album fully composed and produced by label founder Nico Laa and producer Juan Cristiani. Ahead of the album’s mid-June release, you can stream B1 “Good Morning Brooklyn,” a warm, sophisticated house cut, via the player below.
As usual, the release lands on vinyl with a strictly limited pressing.
Mukqs is the solo moniker of Chicago-based producer Maxwell Allison, co-founder of experimental label Hausu Mountain and member of noise improv trio Good Willsmith. Mem Aleph, his first album on Jacktone Records, finds him shelving the more noise- and sound collage-focused branches of his practice to hone directly in on a strain of electronic dance music more in step with his previous beat-based releases on labels like Midwich and Doom Trip Records.
We’re told that the A-side of the album stacks moody electronic melodies over steady networks of beats as it shifts from a slow churning intro through bursts of all consuming organ pads and out into a hypnotic, minimalism-influenced finale weighted thick with orchestral MIDI tones and zig-zagging arpeggios. The B-side shifts the spotlight onto Allison’s scrolling cassette deck bank of samples.
Jacktone Records has been fostering electronic musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area and beyond since 2013. Its last release, Your Ruling Planet, came from Doc Sleep, who co-runs the label with Darren Cutlip.
Tracklisting
01. Terminal Exo
02. Mesos
03. Autolock True
04. Miracle Love Item
05. False Minoshiro
06. For Diane
Mem Aleph LP lands June 7, with pre-order here and “Autolock True” streaming below.
Experimental Housewife is the alias of Evelyn Malinowski, also known as ExHouse. The San Francisco artist has been collecting, arranging, and delivering music for over 20 years. As a producer, she showcases a style of drone as well as hypnotic ambience, releasing on Jacktone and her own Perfect Location Records, where she has also released music from gayphextin, Roche, and others.
Her latest single is called “Wasted Weather,” a blissful ambient “march through the clouds with an alliterative title,” Malinowski says.
In support of the release, out June 4 on Perfect Location, you can stream “Wasted Weather” in full via the player below.
Trentemøller has today released “Sleeper,” an atmospheric track with a mysterious message. There are no other details surrounding the work.
The Danish producer’s last appearance came last year with Harbour Boat Trips Vol. 02 Copenhagen, a DJ-mix album. His last solo production album came in 2017, named Fixion, draped in a deep and dark melancholy, but we understand that “Sleeper” is the first taste of a new long body of work, details of which will be announced soon.
The music landed with the following message:
“.. it’s been nearly three years …
now the wait is almost over …
it’s time to wake up ‘sleeper’!”
“Sleeper” is now available here, with a stream below.
Just about the greatest compliment you can give to an artist is to turn their name into an adjective. Take David Lynch for example, whose influence is so widespread that calling something “Lynchian” has become a cliché. Paul Woolford’s Bobby Peru project is named after Willem Dafoe’s character in Lynch’s “Wild At Heart.” Dean Blunt and Inga Copeland’s “Narcissist” takes its chords from Julee Cruise’s “I Float Alone,” produced by Lynch and Angelo Badalamenti. Metavari recently released an album of 11 tracks written as scores for Lynch’s short films. Most of all though it’s an aesthetic debt, owed to the director by the likes of Lana del Rey and Sky Ferreira, artists occupying the atmospheres of so-called “dark beauty” and “doomed romance” which works like Twin Peaks made popular.
Flamagra, the sixth studio album from Steven Ellison (a.k.a Flying Lotus), pulsates with Lynchian influence. For starters: a story, of sorts, that Ellison overheard Lynch telling at a party was eventually used for a song, the hellishly brilliant “Fire is Coming.” The story is spoken by Lynch over a trademark bed of FlyLo unease, denoting a striking compatibility between the artistic outlooks of both involved. From “The Man from Another Place” to “Dance of the Pseudo Nymph,” the vocabulary from the two artists’ back catalogs is almost interchangeable. Enjoying their work is a similar experience too, often based on a feeling of not knowing W.T.actualF you’re seeing or hearing, just knowing you can’t possibly turn it off—what you might call an obfuscation aesthetic.
Actually, “aesthetic,” a word I’ve used twice already here, three times now—feels like a bit of a cliché as well, something we all accept because it sounds cool rather than bothering to think about what it means. Such faux-pas—clichés, that is—are hard to avoid when describing Flying Lotus. Flamagra is concerned with death and the cosmos, even more psychedelic and dreamlike than anything he’s done before: to anyone playing FlyLo cliché bingo, there’s four points already.
In search of an original critique, the main difference between Flamagra and any other FlyLo album is length: at nearly 70 minutes, it’s 20 minutes longer than anything else he’s done, and all the better for it, as some FlyLo albums seem to end rather too quickly. By contrast, Flamagra is wonderfully un-rushed, including somewhat ponderous, in-between tracks (like “Heroes in a Half Shell,” “Debbie is Depressed” and “FF4”) which might have been cut in a harsher edit, but which lend the album a spacey freedom, the mark of a producer now supremely confident of holding a listener’s attention.
He does so most unerringly in the album’s latter half, beginning with “Fire is Coming,” which acts as Flamagra’s smouldering centrepiece. From then on, Ellison lifts us skywards, marching us up double-time basslines like crumbling spiral staircases, winding escalators to the stars where gravity seems to disintegrate along with any memory of the real world. The album’s longest sequence without the sound of a human voice, five tracks beginning with “Andromeda,” is its deepest dive down the FlyLo rabbit hole, a tumbling trip taking in the weightless “Remind U,” the bizarrely baroque “Say Something,” and finally the sombre “Find Your Own Way Home,” a tribute to the late Mac Miller.
The rapper’s death is one of many real-world events to have occurred in the five years since Ellison’s last album, You’re Dead!—not that the real world has much impact on FlyLo. I’d be hesitant to call his music escapist, because that would imply a direct escape route, between this planet and the FlyLo universe. Instead, Flamagra is completely removed from our world, our dimension even, a fantasy accessible only through a combination of space travel and psychedelic drugs.
“Yellow Belly,” for instance, is only escapist in the way the Saw films are: Tierra Whack, who features on the track, is like a character in a horror film, trapped inside FlyLo’s through-the-looking-glass vision. The currently red-hot rapper plays a mad hatter, tripping on DMT and helium while jabbering on about spies, visas, diarrhoea, Aaliyah, tiddies, and condoms. As far as I can tell, it’s gibberish (or um, mumbo jumbo), harder to make sense of than “Mulholland Drive,” but it’s also maddeningly addictive—one of the best verses of the year.
Ellison’s ability to cast A-list actors in his visions is another skill he shares with Lynch. Flamagra’s two best pop tracks, “More” and “Spontaneous,” featuring Anderson .Paak and Little Dragon’s Yukimi Nagano respectively, turn their attendant vocalists into goggle-eyed characters in FlyLo’s elaborate fantasy. Paak rides every bassline on the cracking point of his husky voice, flitting constantly between singing and rapping. Nagano, who has experience inhabiting made-up worlds, is equally brilliant, her VHS voice flickering in and out of FlyLo’s frequency. Neither are quite as dazzling as You’re Dead!’s “Never Catch Me”, featuring Kendrick Lamar (then again neither are many songs this decade), but they’re not far off.
Yet the album as a whole is at least as good as anything we’ve heard from Ellison (I’ll stop short of “best yet,” as FlyLo albums tend to grow on you like the lizard baby in “Eraserhead”). Even more than a Lynchian album, Flamagra is nothing if not a FlyLo album. As usual he lends himself to superlatives and clichés, the sign of a singular artist (there’s another) about whom there just aren’t that many descriptors. The best I can give is that well, it sounds like a Flying Lotus album. That’s not to say it’s predictable—if it was I’d have written it myself. Instead, it’s sort of predictably unpredictable, twisting and turning in a way that’s unmistakably FlyLo. And that is the greatest compliment of all.
In support of XLR8R+ and independent music, we’re compiling 10 of our favorite Discogs gems into an easy-to-digest list each month; all submissions come from independent labels. You’ll perhaps know some but you’re unlikely to know them all—but these are some of the tracks that are on repeat week after week in the XLR8R offices. For this months edition, we’ve kept the theme of XLR8R+’s latest offering, “The Art of the Groove”.
XLR8R+ is a monthly subscription service to complement the main XLR8R site. By subscribing, you’re helping to allow us to continue doing what we’ve been doing for over 25 years: finding, curating, and serving the best electronic music out there, without paid influence. Each month, we share three unreleased tracks from three different artists that we feel are pushing the scene forward in inspiring ways. These tracks will be available for download in high-quality WAV format for the duration of one month; subscribers for that particular month will have them. They will not be available anywhere else. Join our movement to keep independent journalism alive. You can find information on the latest edition of here. XLR8R+ 011 features cuts from Kate Simko, Traumer, and Pola, with art by Siko Tatour and mastering by Kamran Sadeghi.
Helium was made up of Mon ‘S Jegers and Rob Verboven, with “Out There” being released in 1993 on The Works EP via Belgian trance and house label, Round And Round. Trance has gained an unfair reputation In recent years, which doesn’t correlate with the foundation it was built on; a foundation that showcased a constant groove that is unrecognizable with modern trance. This is evident in “Out There” with its emotive, meandering pads and house groove. Astonishingly, this track is 26 years old and it sounds fresher than ever.
Slaves Incorporated (a.k.a Paul Rayner) is a UK producer who honed his craft in Leicester working with DJ SS and his label Formations Records. He has a host of different aliases and produces everything from house to garage, speed garage, trance, jungle, and drum & bass. “Baby” was one of the first garage tunes Rayner created and it was released on To Groove To Records (a sub-label of Formations) in 1996 on the Step EP. Made on Atari 1040 st (1meg Ram) and Akai S3000 Samplers and a Roland Juno 106 synth it rolls with thumping bass and a beautiful garage drop—a track perfect for the dance floor. Rayner is set to release new material this year and stated to me: “I was 50 the other day and didn’t imagine I’d still be a slave to the rhythm.”
One of the masters of soul, jazz, and funk, and a lyrical genius, Gil Scott-Heron collaborated with composer and producer Brian Jackson on the album Bridges in 1977. “We Almost Lost Detroit” might not initially instill a reaction you would associate with the “art of the groove,” however, it has a smoothness to it which shows how a low tempo track can still provide a groove that you feel within. The song is a tale of the decline of industry in Detroit and the effect this had on people’s livelihoods with lines that are still relevant today, such as “when it comes to people’s safety, money wins every time.” A powerful and timeless classic from a legend.
Kate Simko’s sound is melodic, driving, jacking, and funky, influenced by her Chicago roots and training in piano and jazz music. For “Polyrhythmic Theme” she teamed up with DJ and producer Tevo Howard, also from the US. “Polyrhythmic Theme” was released on Last Night on Earth, the London-based label founded by Sasha. Simko has also released an exclusive track with XLR8R+ this month in the form of “Spirit Release,” a driving techno roller with a tribal feel. Subscribe to XLR8R+here to download it and listen to the snippet below.
Originally from London, Greg Stainer produced “Turbo” in 1997 for the iconic UK Garage label V.I.P. The track was released on the Original Flava EP and co-produced by non-other than MJ Cole—it’s becoming a recurring theme finding an amazing garage track and seeing his name in the small print. Going through every one of V.I.P’s releases is time well spent and “Turbo” is one of those garage gems which you can chill to or lose yourself in the rave.
Gemini (a.k.a. Spencer Kincy) is one of house music’s unsung legends. He released over 200 tracks from 1994 to 1999 and was innovative with the sounds and samples he experimented with. “At That Cafe” was initially released on the In My Head EP in 1998 on Classic, a London-based label run by Derrick Carter and Luke Solomon. It was later released on the 1999 Gemini album, The Music Hall, where it can be found for a lot cheaper on Discogs than on the EP. It also featured in the first ever Fabric Mix by Craig Richards.
Pola (a.k.a Norbert Dunai) is a Hungarian DJ and producer. He began performing across a small network of clubs on home soil and then became Pola upon moving to Transylvania, Romania in 2007, where he embedded himself in the country’s bustling minimal-leaning music scene. He has a love for trippy melodies and rolling groove as demonstrated on “Reunion,” released on US label Finale Sessions in 2017. Pola also features on the latest edition of XLR8R+ with “Selection,” which you can hear below and download by subscribing here.
Digitek Intelligence Assassins was made up of Julian Shamou, Avonx, and Code Name: Atlantis and released via Julain’s Detroit-based label Motor City Electro Company. They only collaborated on one EP, Batteries Not Included, which is where this track, “Shock 2 The System,” comes from. It’s the definition of an electro banger and it’s no surprise this track has its roots in Detroit. Recently featuring in DJ Stingray’s BBC Radio 1 Essential Mix, this is well worthy of “gem” status.
Romain Reynaud is the man behind Traumer. Born and raised in France and now a resident of Paris, he has been releasing records since 2011. His sound was initially more along the lines of heavy-hitting techno but he has since moved to a more intricate, groovy, and hypnotic aesthetic. This is when he launched Gettraum, a platform for these new sounds, and the first release is where “Classroom” is from. He is known for his incredible use of percussion and on “Classroom” he displays this with tribal drums that are interwoven with Persian sounds. He has recently released an exclusive, rolling minimal house track “Transit”—one of the most requested tracks of his recent sets—for XLR8R+. Subscribe here to download it.
US duo Jason Vasilas (a.k.a JV) and Scott Canfield (a.k.a Red Eye) released “Already Mine” on the appropriately named UK label Groove Pleasure in 2003. With 11 releases from 2002 to 2006 from a host of iconic names such as Nathan Coles, Terry Francis, Andy Panayi, and more, the label has gained cult status over the years. “Already Mine” is a beautiful mixture of deep tech house, a term that you don’t normally hear but JV & Redeye have used tech house elements in a more emotive and lowkey way creating a track that is relaxing and uplifting, ideal for any time in the day—an excellent record.
The Cause will host its one-year anniversary party this Saturday, May 26.
The day and night party, coined ‘XXX,’ will be spread across the club’s five areas, two outdoor and three indoor, kicking off at 8 a.m. on Saturday, May 26. The line-up will feature residents from the club’s key parties, including Adonis, Tribes, Syzygy, and The Model. 12 artists have been booked and are currently billed as XXX, with only one announced headliner, Amsterdam duo Spokenn (a.k.a. Ferro and Reiss).
The Cause’s co-founder Eugene Wild spoke about the elusive nature of keeping the artists unannounced, stating “there’s a whole load of reasons as to why we’ve kept this under wraps. Primarily we’re 100% DIY. We do most things ourselves at the club, with a very small team. Dealing with the logistics of flights, hotels, and ground transport on our birthday isn’t ideal, we’d rather be on the dancefloor with our phones off, lost in the moment of what we have built, celebrating our birthday, on our terms. Keeping headliners under wraps also gives us flexibility. We are a small independent venue and there is no way we can afford to stack the line-up like we have if they were announced.”
We’ve seen the full line-up here at XLR8R and we can tell you this is not one to be missed!
The Cause has become one of London’s best venues due to its unique layout, classy bookings, and a high-quality sound system. The main room, the garage, the barbershop, and the two outside areas create a journey of sound which rewards exploration. The club is set in an industrial estate in London and prides itself in its support of underground artists and promoters.
After launching 12 months ago, The Cause pledged to raise over £25,000 for its mental health-based charity partners CALM and MIND in Haringey. Having raised £20,000 so far they plan on exceeding that target within the next few months. Having proved to the wider community that running a club that gives back is possible, The Cause has now been granted a license extension to January 2020.
Relaunched back in February, Sydney-based startup Sound Shelter uses machine-learning technology to help users with real-time record searching. The platform currently has audio clips for around 120,000 records and links to Juno, Hardwax, HHV, Deejay, and a few smaller stores. Once a user has selected a record they want, Sound Shelter checks stores and offers a list of stores currently stocking that particular record.
The platform also offers SMS notifications, personalized music recommendations, DJ charts, and the ability to follow your favorite label and/or artists. Sound Shelter currently boasts a global community of about 6000 users, including a number of world-class DJs, and features chart contributions from artists such as Kai Alce, Patrice Scott, Levon Vincent, Lakuti and others.
Ryuichi Sakamoto has provided the score for Black Mirror episode “Smithereens.”
The episode is about a disgruntled driver, played by Andrew Scott, who suffers a meltdown while working for a taxi company. Netflix describes it as this:“A cab driver with an agenda becomes the centre of attention on a day that rapidly spirals out of control.” It’s part of the Netflix show’s upcoming fifth series, which begins on June 5. The trailer is available below.
The score will also be released as a 19-track record on digital and vinyl through Milan, the Los Angeles-based soundtrack label that also released put out Sakamoto’s async LP and its remix series.
“Smithereens” airs on June 5, with the soundtrack following on June 7. Meanwhile, stream “this is my last day 2” below.
