Slovenian downtempo trio YGT (f.k.a. Your Gay Thoughts) will release their latest project, Sinking Ship, an album and short film, via Youngbloods and King Deluxe on February 15.
Following their 2016 debut, The Watercolors, the new release presents yet another striking display of pop-focused songwriting, featuring 11 tracks of kaleidoscopic, ethereal beauty. The trio have a way with fusing styles and bending genre boundaries, and on Sinking Ship they meld together left-field jazz, ambient, dub, and pop to great effect.
Matching the music’s otherworldly nature, the accompanying short film—available to stream below—by NYC-based animator and visionary Sam Mason is a multi-dimensional vision that depicts the world of Zuma, as Mason explains:
“On the foggy margins of the ancient and the new lies the world of Zuma, where the masked Truskan people, a once rich civilization, rot away, or where the forgotten Wazoh bird-men roam the desert ruins. In the mountains, deep in complex cave networks, dwell the Tholotec ape-men, and by the forests live the silent Mani, who dawn themselves in outfits made of hollow reeds that whistle as they wander. These inter-locked stories are woven in uncanny form as Kocijančič’s voice winds through the valleys, singing his warning “you’re the heir of a sinking ship.”
Ahead of the release, Youngbloods and King Deluxe have offered up “The Disciple,” an atmospheric pop cut from the album, as today’s XLR8R download, available via WeTransfer below.
The new album follows his 2016 debut, Beautiful Things You Left Us For Memories, and opens up a new sonic chapter for the Amsterdam-based artist, one that presents a deeper and more affecting sound than the soaring electronics of his debut. The tracks on the new LP are hard to categorize, falling somewhere between downtempo, dub, ambient, and avant-garde post-rock. It’s an honest portrayal of Vian’s current sonic signature, as he explains:
“I have tried to be sincere, transparent and pure. During the recording process, I avoided artificiality. I do not like the overproduction of music. I like to feel the naturalness and the essence of the beat of the instruments. I like to look inside until I find something real with which to communicate.”
In support of today’s release, Vian has offered up a full stream of album cut “Similiar Faces,” a deep and dubby slice of emotive electronics, available via the player below.
Japanese DJ-producer Powder will kick off the first instalment of Beats In Space’s new mix series, coinciding with the platform’s 20-year-anniversary.
The 74-minute mix features two new and exclusive tracks of her own, “New Tribe” and “Gift,” plus the first official reissue of Daphne’s “When You Love Someone” (Groove Instrumental), and the first ever release of Samo DJ & The Hidden Operator’s “Захват Сзади Rox.”
“New Tribe” is said to toast the global community that Powder’s connected with during her travels. “Gift” is a subtler jam, shuffling and twinkling in perfect balance.
The video for”New Tribe,” streaming below, was produced by the animation studio of Toru Adachi and Shunsuke Itakura, who created a biographical video of Powder’s evolution from 9 am-to-5 pm office worker in Tokyo to 9 pm-to-5 am DJ.
Powder in Space will be available on February 15 in mix CD and mixed/unmixed digital forms via Beats In Space Records. Powder’s two original tracks, alongside Samo DJ and Daphne’s contributions to her mix, will be available in DJ-ready forms on 12″ vinyl.
Tracklisting
01. Samo DJ & Hidden Operator “Захват Сзади Rox”
02. Tornado Wallace “Open Door” (Born Inna Tent Mix)
03. Acid Pauli “Release”
04. Don’t DJ “Southern Shore”
05. Daphne “When You Love Someone” (Groove Instrumental)
06. Vedagor “Untitled II”
07. Second Language “The Party” (Bluntman Deejay’s Mould Meditation)
08. Tiago “Roy Brooks”
09. Karamika “Ton 10”
10. The Sun God “Ancient Echoes” (Tribute To Larry Heard)
San Francisco’s Superior Viaduct has reissued Iceland, the third solo album of early electronic pioneer Richard Pinhas, on vinyl for the first time.
Originally released in 1979, Iceland further explores Pinhas’ unique arrangement of delay-ridden electric guitar, sequenced machine rhythms, and analog synthesizer layers that began with his 1977 solo LP, Rhizosphere. Iceland was his most ambient and electronically submerged album upon release, giving the world a window into what would come forth through the ’80s as he fully transitioned away from the body of work created in progressive rock band Heldon.
The new vinyl reissue includes the previously unreleased “Wintermusic,” an immersive 25-minute ambient piece of radiant synthesizer recorded in 1983 that sits perfectly with the sonic aesthetic of Iceland.
The 2LP reissue of Iceland is available now via Superior Viaduct.
The seven-track LP is the Los Angeles artist’s 15th release. It was recorded in June of 2018 over three nights at Los Angeles’ Blue Whale. Studio sessions were also completed later at Hollywood’s NRG Studios, rooted in modern electronics and an array of jazz forms. Features include Carlos Niño, Teodross Avery, Josh Johnson, Brandon Eugene Owens, and Brandon Combs.
Heritage opens a two-part series exploring Mark de Clive-Lowe’s cultural heritage as half Japanese and half New Zealander. “Heritage is the idea of transmitting from the past to the future,” he explains. “Knowing more about who we are and where we’re going by understanding where we come from. It’s about identity and one’s place in the world.” Heritage II is scheduled to follow in April.
The first glimpse of music from Heritage comes with “Memories of Nanzenji,” with its complex interweavings of colorful percussion and lavish harmonies.
Physical pressings of Heritage include translucent red vinyl and CD. Pre-order a copy here ahead of the album’s February 8 release.
Kalabrese will release a new EP in April, titled Let Me Be Your Princess.
The three-track release is the Swiss artist’s first since 2017’s Bananenräuber, and his debut on Zukunft Recordings, the label arm of Zurich’s Club Zukunft. It will be the Swiss label’s seventh release, and sees the Perlon affiliate and Rumpelmusig head, real name Sacha Winkler, in a period of self-reflection. This led to “Let Me Be Your Princess,” which features the vocals of Lara Stoll, and then two later tracks.
The label explains that it’s “full of groove, rumpel, and message.”
Prepared piano composer/producer Hauschka has signed to Sony Classical for his latest album, A Different Forest, out on February 8.
The album see the Oscar-nominated composer and pianist, real name Volker Bertelmann, do away with his customary instrumental preparations to return to the pure piano. This is reflected in the first album singles “Curious” and “Dew and Spiderwebs,” both of which herald the central themes of the album: the experience of nature as the basis for Hauschka’s understanding of life and the composition of music.
The album is also said to be a plea for us to protect and preserve our natural world.
Hauschka has worked on numerous projects throughout the last decade, most notably in the fields of theatre, dance, and classical ensemble works. In recent years, he has also built a prolific career writing scores for films, coming to international prominence in this field through his soundtrack for the hit film “Lion” in 2016. His other recent soundtrack work includes the films “Hotel Mumbai,””Adrift,” and “In Dubious Battle.”
“In A Different Forest, I’m focusing on the forest as a natural environment and contrast to the urban everyday life; to my surroundings. Where do I want to live and work? What surroundings do I need in order to feel fulfilled? By examining these questions I always come back to nature.” —Volker Bertelmann
Tracklisting
01.Hike
02.Dew and Spiderwebs
03.Talking to my father
04.Urban Forest
05.Hands in the Anthill
06.Curious
07.Ghosts
08.Bark and Moss
09.Skating through the woods
10.Daybreak over Covent Garden
11.Everyone sleeps
12.Woodworkers
13.Another Hike
A Different Forest LP lands February 8, with “Curious” and “Dew and Spiderwebs” streaming below.
Late last month, Local Talk released Magic Touch, a reworks EP by Crackazat.
Magic Touch is the latest in Local Talk’s edit series, which enlists an artist to choose and rework a selection of the label’s back catalog, this time featuring reworks of cuts from HNNY, DJ Spinna, Terrence Parker, Lay-Far, Art Of Tones, Deymare, Jaxx Madicine, and Anthony Bias. Taking some of Local Talk’s classic tracks, Crackazat delivers a set of sun-drenched grooves full of uplifting jazzy chords and chunky, swinging grooves. Each rework provides an inspired take on the already brilliant tunes, giving lovers of the originals a chance to rediscover them in a different context, or newcomers a look into Local Talk’s history.
In support of the release, which can be picked up here, Crackazat has offered up a full stream of his rework of Art Of Tones’ “The Rainbow Song,” available via the player below.
Tracklisting:
01. Art Of Tones “The Rainbow Song” (Crackazat Rework)
02. DJ Spinna “Tie It Up” (Crackazat Rework)
03. Deymare “1990” (Crackazat Rework)
04. Jaxx Madicine “Fly High” (Crackazat Rework)
05. Anthony Bois “Electric Piano on the Run” (Crackazat Rework)
Tomorrow, February 1, French producer Leon Inc. will return with his sophomore album, Warranty Void If Removed.
The new LP follows on from 2017’s Insert Disc album with eight new tracks “manufactured for a post-apocalyptic world.” Possibly due to its subject nature, the tracks on the album reach far and wide across genres, pulling together a range of eclectic styles, textures, and sound design elements that touch on everything from dubbed-out jazz to rolling techno, searing experimental ambient, and heavy dubstep. The album’s chaotic sounds are depicted and represented via its cover art, which features the 1895 Gare Montparnasse derailment in Paris, and intriguing visual components such as the album’s first music video, which takes us into what he describes as “an unsolved puzzle lying between Christmas 2030 & 2018.”
Ahead of tomorrow’s release, Leon Inc. has shared a full stream of the album’s opening cut, “Nul Si Découvert,” an immersive slice of dubbed-out jazz, available via the player below.
Lazare Hoche—real name Charlie Naffah—is one of French house music’s most revered talents. Born and raised in Paris, he discovered electronic music through his older brother, a professional pianist and singer who kept synthesisers at his home. Aged 18, Hoche began collecting house and techno music, and then attempting to produce it using samplers, a small mixer, and synths, having learned the tropes by those artists in his immediate orbit. He started his own Lazare Hoche Records in 2011 as a student project, and released I Don’t Sync So Part 1., a collaboration with friend Malin Genie, real name Nick Putman, that quickly sold out. (“Oh Snap!” is a Zip favourite.)”When you have your first release out on your own label and it’s sold out, you then realise you want to continue,” Hoche recalls.
Fast-forward eight years and the 29-year-old has amassed a bulging discography of the classy, slick house that sounds so simple but so few can execute properly. In there you’ll find modern classics including “Pressure Baby” and “String Theory,” plus his collaborative work, including that with Putman and Samuel André Madsen (a.k.a S.A.M) as Mandar. Together they run the Oscillat Music label through which they’ve shared a string of EPs and a debut self-titled album in 2017. You’d have to look hard to find a more refined collection of rolling, groovy house, and for a producer better skilled in making it. Up next for Hoche is the Time Guard EP, a two-track EP landing February 18. In support of the release, Hoche offered to talk us through the key pieces of studio gear behind it.
The Lazare Racks
Let’s begin with a look at the Lazare racks.
Here we have the Schippmann Ebbe und Flut, which is my favorite filter. It’s way more than a simple two-filters box. It has a life on its own; compression, a distortion, a LFO, a VCA, a sample & hold, and two dual envelopes. It’s the bread and butter of my studio; the sound and the frequency range are insane, too. It’s a semi-modular synthesizer actually, brace yourself in the 68-page manual: not everything is intuitive, to be honest, but once you master it, you are the boss! Each filter has 12 characteristics, from LPF to every kind of “pass” you can imagine. The CV input and all sorts of modular routing on the rear panel make this unit very useful and it’s impossible that you will get tired of it. You can hear the Ebbe und Flut in my forthcoming Lazare Hoche “Maths,” as well as in a lot of Mandar material. I use it mostly to create an evolving sub-bass frequency sound; it has a marvelous way of reaching very low sub-bass frequencies.
Above we have the Ensoniq DP4, my favorite multi-effect device by far. I’m a big fan of the Ensoniq sound, especially the converter. Since I saw videos with Timbaland or Alan Braxe jamming the Ensoniq ASR10, finding this particular sound obsessed me. It’s a parallel processor, just like in your computer. You have four inputs and four outputs; you can process up to four sources at the same time. The phaser and flangers are nuts, very Daft Punk before you ask. The reverb is out of this world, and the combination of all the possibilities is insane. Check Mandar’s “Poisoned Words” track, everything is processed in the DP4, every single drum hits individually, with different presets.
Then we continue with the AKAI S-612, one of the first Akai samplers from what I heard. It appeared on the market in 1985, so I’ll let you guys figure out the memory it can hold: eight seconds max with the lowest sample rate—amazing! Apart from these ancient specifications, it’s indeed my favorite sampler. The 12-bit madness is real with the S-612, and believe me, it’s a fun and simple machine to operate. Everything is in the front panel, LFO, filter, looping, start, and slice faders, and it even has a mic input, so you can directly sample your voice to make it tonal and then play with it on a keyboard. A lot of happy accidents happened to me with this sampler. If you guys like the Herbert-style of production, and a real lo-fi mood, you won’t be disappointed.
Yamaha DX100 + Baby Fender Rhodes Mk II 54
Here I would like to present a combination rather than a just one piece of gear. The DX100 is a small bomb—for me, it’s the best FM synth I’ve ever touched. At first look, you can think it’s toy-ish, but the sound is not. Juggling the four FM operators while scrolling through the presets will already send you close to an ‘80s heaven.
Green Velvet’s “Preacherman” is one of those tracks that took its substance from the DX. Not to mention Kerri Chandler’s bass signature preset “Solid Bass.” You can also use it as a talkbox like Roger Troutman.
In almost all the live footage from the ‘80s, you can see a DX synth being played—for example, Michael Jackson’s BAD tour ‘88 or Serge Gainsbourg’s Casino de Paris ‘86. While the whole trend was analog gear, I always had a nag for early digital synths. It fits the mix like nothing else, although the knob feeling is missing; it’s menu time! This little keyboard rocked my world.
The Baby Fender Rhodes is a smaller and more affordable version of the classic Fender Rhodes Stage. It saw the light of day in 1980, all-wooden 54 keys, and it covers the middle range of a piano register, so you can’t do bass or higher range frequencies, but it’s perfect for chords and melodic content. I love to have a chorus pedal behind it to have a nice stereo feeling; it’s super inspiring to manipulate a Rhodes keyboard, even intuitively. It gives an organic feeling; you can hear it a lot on the track Lazare Hoche & S.A.M. “Beyond Synthesis.”
Make Noise Shared System
I got into modular around 2013. I checked it out in some synth showrooms in Paris with my headphones, and the sonic capabilities drove me nuts.
With this particular unit I’m more interested in sounds than music. I heard, back then, that Make Noise was a freaky brand doing some very funky and good-sounding modules. I saw that they were releasing a “road-ready” case system, and I went for it.
The Make Noise Shared System is an absolute bomb. I’ve recorded numerous hours of jams and improvisations with it. The sonic experience is out of this world; the delay unit “Echophon” is a crazy versatile module, the VCFA “Optomix” is perfect for those plucky percussive module sounds or what they call low pass gate, which is very effective in modern techno or house productions. The “Maths” envelope generator is also bread and butter for every kind of modular use, I saw that Ricardo Villalobos has some of it in his studio actually, which is always a good sign. The sequencer called “René,” just like Celine Dion’s husband or the French philosopher René Descartes, is a gem, a three-dimensional prism of composition. It’s a total matrix by itself, a new approach of synth sequencing.
Lazare’s Delay Chain
This picture is of three delays units I like to use together. They are rough, they are tough, and they are not necessarily versatile, but it’s not what I asked for when I got them—I wanted them to do one thing and to do it good: dub delay. Let’s go.
Everyone knows the Roland Space Echo series, namely the 201, produced from the mid-’70s to the early-’90s. It’s a tape echo delay that records incoming audio to a loop of magnetic tape, then replays the continuous loop over the playback head before it’s erased again by the new incoming audio. It’s warm, gritty, and unpredictable. It has been used in almost all of my productions, sometimes for a synth stab and sometimes just for one hi-hat. It all depends on the feeling. I love to place a phaser right after to phase the delays differently. It’s simply beautiful.
The Roland Space Echo 501 is using the same principle but adding the chorus effect to this beauty (so it’s now delay, reverb, and chorus). It has a lot cleaner output, with a more ‘80s feel than ‘70s. It’s a different flavor and I like to use it on synthesizers a lot. Sometimes I route the two units together to go in this infinite tape loop stuff—make sure to watch out for the feedback as you can create a huge backfire that will blow up your speakers!
The Space Cat Circuit Bent Digital Delay is a small batch company but this unit is an extra large digital delay with three rate controls, brightness, lo-fi, punch, distortion, HPF, two degeneration, dub-back, and three fast lo-fi glitch. This thing is not clean for sure, but it’s wild and warm, and that’s all I ask for in a delay.
Time Guard EP lands February 18 via his own Lazare Hoche France label.
