Category Archives: UPDATE

EXPO 70 – ‘Alive in 2010’ CS/CD (SM075)
Two live sets from Expo ’70’s 2010 Fall US tour six days apart from one-another. First set in Kansas City, MO at Halcyon (R.I.P.), a second hand store for collectable toys, magazines, vinyl, music instruments and more. Second set at Dunes in Portland, OR local dive bar with Hellraiser playing before the set started. Expo ’70 was a one man show during this tour, manning guitar, analog drum machine and synth creating a continuous set of cosmic consciousness in the tradition of great German Kosmische pioneers Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. Justin Wright would sit with his back to the audience an immerse himself in the sound, playing along with colored lights melting into the backdrop while manipulating an array of pedals and switching from instruments, building layers of cascading drones and rhythms fading in and out of each other on the fly live. 30+ minutes each set. Limited Edition CS/CD edition on Sonic Meditations: 100 Cassettes with Riso printed covers on French Kraft stock; 50 Vinyl Etched CDs in screen printed Arigato kraft CD cases. – SECOND PRESSING – 50 Vinyl Etched CDs in screen printed Arigato kraft CD cases.

WEBSITE

Das Os – ‘Data Divinarum’
jean-marcel busson is controlling 6 altered/mistreated mac SE . performative installation, organic technology, acoustic persistence, electrical ceremony, computer spectra. 6 mac SE are controlling jean-marcel busson. co-produced w/ a1000p & suara papua. recorded, edited & mixed by mim.

WEBSITE

Anne-F Jacques, Ryoko Akama, Takamitsu Ohta – ‘The Magic City’ $9
The Magic City documented a collaboration of three international composers working with found objects and mundane artifacts. The trio of Anne-F Jacques (CA), Ryoko Akama (JP/GB) and Takamitsu Ohta (JP) created slow intensifications using installations of modified devices and movements. An investigation of intermingling whirs and clangs, sometimes soft and tiny, raised from glass bottles, rocks, newspaper, pvc pipes, matches, electronics or dried leaves, begging the listeners to decipher what provoked every incidents. The Magic City provides a showcase of motions, a narration on process, a phenomena through forces, an ode to Kosugi. Edition of 100. Hand-stamped pro-dubbed C42 NAC super-ferric cassette tape with recto/verso printed silver card. Made & duped in USA. Printed in Indonesia. Including download code of high quality digital version.

Will Guthrie – ‘Some Nasty’ $9
The France-based Australian Will Guthrie might be one of the most exciting exponent from the latest generation of experimental percussionists. For this edition, the distinctive drummer rendered some materials from things he is currently working on—from cut up of field recordings to some challenging electronics amplifications and live improvisation passages, to several tussles with a couple of Indonesian percussions such as gamelan, saron and gong. All cooked into two sagacious sides of tape that mongrelized free jazz tradition with delicate electroacoustic style. Both sides remain untitled, enticing for some adventurous expectations. Edition of 100. Hand-stamped pro-dubbed C30 NAC super-ferric cassette tape with recto/verso printed golden card. Made & duped in USA. Printed in Indonesia. Including download code of high quality digital version.

WEBSITE

TAKAHIRO MUKAI – ‘Paraponera Clavata’
With this his 41st release since his debut in 2014, there’s no denying that Osaka based synthesist Takahiro Mukai is prolific. On this – his debut for CN – Mukai pushes the boundaries of glitchy abstract techno with skittering fragmented rhythms and acidic modulations that bite and sting. A bit like the giant New World ant that inspires the album title and adorns it’s cover. Limited edition of 50.

COMICIDE – ‘Moral Improvement live 1984CE’
COMICIDE were Stephen Ãh Burroughs and Eric Jurenovskis pre- Head of David. A short lived project totaling two live performances and four tracks ( heard on this tape ). One recording includes vocals the other not. The appearances were as support to the legendary power-electronics act, CON-DOM at the Star Club, Birmingham, a socialist establishment and Eve Hill Afro-Caribbean Club in Dudley, two typically enterprising venues arranged by Mike Dando (CON-DOM). The signs of HoD were there, spot the riff which appeared on a later HoD track. The recordings are raw, very much complimenting the magickal and political anarchy of the era. Limited edition of 60.

WEBSITE

HAWN – ‘For A Ride’ C33
HAWN’s third release, For A Ride, takes us into new territory, perhaps somewhere between no-wave and synth noise. Lee’s soulful, agitated vocals chronicle hyper-realistic, darkly-funny narratives which unfold over Craun’s heavy, glitched-out synth landscapes – sputtering digital slabs, unexpected zaps and an ever-shifting stereo field – which heighten the sense of disorientation embedded in the lyrics. The conjured atmospheres are somehow both familiar and unsettling, a feeling like trying to return to normalcy in the aftermath of some tragic, inexplicable, and possibly absurd event. While described in the past as a folk band, HAWN pull traditional songwriting ideas to deformed extremes, and in the process, create a crumbling, frightening, beautiful world. HAWN is two people: John Craun, who plays synth and produces, and Michael Jeffrey Lee, who dances and sings. “For A Ride” was recorded at Thank Tank in New Orleans, LA. All songs Craun/Lee concoctions. The album is dedicated to Alex Chilton, who, in the last decade of his life, would occasionally appear at the Thai restaurant where Craun and Lee worked to order a Pad Thai, with beef.

moduS ponY & VLK split C30
Senior figures at the Strategic Tape Reserve are thought to be very pleased upon the public dissemination of the organization’s 24th music release: a shared cassette between long-time STR contributors, the California-based moduS ponY, and Cologne’s VLK. Early on the the composition process the co-creators of the music on this cassette exchanged digital folders containing audio files – guitar melodies, baselines, synth drones, field samples and other miscellaneous sound items. These sound-seeds instigated the tracks which you can now hear – providing, if nothing else, a common framework linking the two halves of the release. When the white side of the cassette is facing outward from a standard tape player, listeners will experience moduS ponY’s playful, multi-instrumentalist, genre-defying compositions. Turn over the cassette to the red side and now the stereo will play VLK’s post-vaporous synth noise and mutated-sample sounds. In the spirit of Adriatic ports, gymnastic displays of groinal flexibility and low-temperature banana confections, we hope you enjoy this evenly-divided, two-person cassette.

WEBSITE

Amma Ateria – ‘Vague Pure Affection’
Bimodal Press is happy to announce Vague Pure Affection, a limited edition cassette release of 100 for Amma Ateria. With Vague Pure Affection, Amma Ateria externalizes a daydream futurism, investigating the physical interior polarity sparked from childhood experiences of close-ranged aircrafts from rooftops adjacent to Hong Kong’s airport. Vielä explores the coexistence of softness and violence, entering states of stillness from overwhelming air pressure in meshes with binaural beats. Lightly breaks into an alarm state, while underlying orchestral screams in 1882 refers to the women of the 2nd dimension going to church in novella ‘Flatland’. The rhythmic patterns of industrial machines in Kone, realized during her time of isolation in Finland, expands the mechanical theme. Departures is a minimalistic farewell with depictions of flight and ambient continuity carrying one and other, as the notion of being lifted translates to a sense of grounding in Gravitations. Vague Pure Affection is an intimate portrait of longing, reflections, and the notion of time, composed through transforming the deafening of noise into meditative stance, revealed through elements of movement, reconstruction, restraint, and the physicality of memory. Amma Ateria (Jeanie Aprille Tang) is a sound artist and electroacoustic composer, born in Hong Kong, based in California. Her practice in sound examines the coexistence of polarity in the sonic spectrum. With an immediacy of tension and release through spatialization, her performance consist an intention to expand physicality in the human experience, navigated by cross-modal synesthetic influences from the contemporary moment. Thus the movements in sound expose her body’s visceral resonance in polar opposites, examining boundaries and brinks of sonic breakage via saturated transitions of stark polarities. With memories of condensed cities, she gravitates to frequencies of close-ranged airplanes, inaudible conversations, out of body experiences, sustained harmonics intersected with musique concrète, and synthesized speed of air with various colours of noise.

WEBSITE

Whirling Hall Of Knives – ‘Knukke’
Beginning the 9th LP from Whirling Hall Of Knives, Knukke’s title track opens with strands of shifting drum patterns from long-time WHOK collaborator Bryan O’Connell – unsettlingly crude edits and loops of which overlap and weave over ominous cooing and what sounds like a robotic feline in distress. The opening screeching and grinding of Skarper/Apprehe develops into a passage of the most bleak and despairingly gnarled electro, which in turn gets swallowed by yet another amorphous and distorted migraine. Sumer Love is a more bliss-ridden meditation – a brief respite from the chaos that has passed and a welcome pause before the total collapse to come. Celestial vocal washes struggle to break out from behind an arid rhythmic throb. Side B brings the side-long Single-Use Earth – the first half of which erupts into a bleak, monotonous, extended cacophony that eventually gives way to some fluttering, time-stretched memories, bobbing on a series of polluted waves lapping against the radioactive shore. Limited edition of 100.

Modern Technology – ‘Modern Technology EP’
Introducing the self-released debut EP of East London two-piece Modern Technology. Modern Technology formed through a shared frustration of a post-truth society and political unrest that is currently suffocating our global conscious. Chris Clarke (bass & vocals) and Owen Gildersleeve (drums) confront these issues head-on, tackling themes of political injustice, social anxiety, austerity and inequality. All profits from the release will be shared between housing and homelessness charity Shelter and mental-health charity Mind. Limited edition of 50.

KIndred Spirits presents – ‘Various Patients Hearing Voices’
‘Various Patients Hearing Voices’ features a disturbing collection of recordings exploring the destabilising phenomena referred to by medicine as auditory hallucination. Often cited as affecting those suffering from some form of mental disorder, notably schizophrenia, research in recent years has unearthed scientific evidence that hearing voices also afflicts both children and healthy people. Seven such research studies are gathered for further investigation on this rather disturbing set, the collection put together by Aetheric head honcho Alistair Thaw, here working under his more macabre alter ego, Kindred Spirits. Set to a chilling and minimalist drone whirr, think of a remotely detuned and alien sounding Radiophonic Workshop score, which in truth serves to edge up both the tension and the primitivism, ‘various patients hearing voices’ shines a very shadowy light on the arcane, almost medieval treatment of these ‘patients’, the recounting tales creep with twisted and disturbed fascination, their insular freeze wayward and hatched from a ice haunted clinical crude that loosely touches base with early Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle and the Mount Vernon Arts Lab. (Mark Barton, The Sunday Experience). Limited edition of 40.

WEBSITE

Curved Light – ‘Flow and Return’
Description: A visceral psychedelic journey, the album is perhaps more densely layered than his previous efforts, but here laced with a fresh batch of memorable melodies and a neon under- current of 21st century dread.

Chris Otchy – ‘Subterranean Landscapes’
Description: A vivid exploration of the natural world, the album weaves together a tapestry of serene synth compositions juxtaposed with denser, more industrial material that stops just short of techno.

Jordan Christoff – ‘Enveloped’
Description: Jordan paints sonic landscapes with synth experimentations, no computer screens, but a full acoustic world that draws from contemporary ambient sonic landscapes, a sound that is also committed to honouring the roots, clearly inspired by composers like Eduard Artemyev and the sounds of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares.

Rose – ‘Night Places’
Description: Night Places is the latest project from Reuben Sawyer, whose been an illustrator & musician for over a decade. Sawyer has various aliases, and his Rose persona comes off as hypnotic, focused, and beyond freezing.

WEBSITE

Jackson-Pratt – ‘Semi Good Lookin’ C30 $6
A potent blast of saturation and crunch, the second tape from this NYC-based project wastes no time in establishing itself — hard panned stereo layers of junk metal intersect with consistently engaging, full spectrum textures from start to finish; clear as crystal, never thin or muddy. Paired with an equally engaging live performance, Jackson-Pratt is at the forefront of contemporary American Harsh Noise, and deserves your immediate attention. Edition of 100, professionally duplicated, with full color covers and labels.

Vasculae – ‘New Orthodoxy’ C34 $6
The first completed material in over a year following a long battle with various creative blocks introduces a dark ambient element to the ongoing focus of placing harsh noise in different contextual environments. Voice recordings are filtered beyond recognition in the hope that their original intent transfers to the listener, while the overall compositional approach harkens back to the early years of PD’s extreme dynamic contrast. Edition of 100, professionally duplicated, smoky tapes and cases with full color covers and labels.

WEBSITE

Mirrored Lips – ‘Сексуальность неуместна (Sexuality Is Inappropriate)’ £5
Recorded in Gateshead, whilst touring the UK earlier this year, “Сексуальность неуместна” (Sexuality Is Inappropriate) is rumoured to be Mirrored Lips final album and (for me) their best to date. Across 8 tracks, Mark Wood has managed to harness the blistering intensity of the Russian noise punk’s live experience, with their genre-defying sturm und drang rattling through flat-out Pop Group style funk workouts to advant-rock improvs ala early Sonic Youth; all with a bit of pop-sensibility thrown in. Limited edition of 100 pro-produced tapes (+ download).

Workin’ Man Noise Unit – ‘It’s Not Nothin” £5
Reading noise-punks, Workin’ Man Noise Unit finally return with their second album, the eagerly awaited follow up to ‘Play Loud’ which was released in 2015 to great acclaim. “It’s Not Nothin'” is an agitated blistercore of pounding drums, mind-bending noise, thundering bass, full-on beaming riffs and vocal anthems. This is sound, energy, bad jokes and the smell of stale beer on sticky floors. Like Fugazi, Karp, Torche, Fu Manchu, Kyuss, Henry Blacker, The Jesus Lizard, Shellac, in one big Buckfast-fuelled gang-bang. Limited edition of 100 pro-produced tapes (+ download).

Leo Lobrev & Jelena Glazova – ‘Die Ursprünge’ £5
“Die Ursprünge” is a collaborative semi-improvisational album for electronics and prepared piano created by composer-pianist Leonids Lobrevs and sound-artist Jelena Glzova. The concept of the album is referring to an essay written by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. In “The Origin of the Work of Art” (German: “Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes”) Heidegger is trying to find an answer to the question on the origin of creative impulse, while eventually coming up with a round definition, a sort of “Möbius strip” answer, hence the origin of creativity still remains unidentified. Unapprehensiveness of the topic makes it especially attractive, so both authors envisaged this subject with a special vigor. “Die Ursprünge” is a story about the tension between the premeditated idea and a realised one. Creative impulse is envisaged as a premonition while facing that difference which is stated when the work of art is finished. The whole piece is a journey of creative impulse, its confrontation with the intuition and collision with the abyss of the unknown and the final realisation. Limited edition of 50 pro-produced tapes (+ download).

Territorial Gobbing – ‘Gubbins’ £5
Once again failing at any attempt at consistency here’s another radically different chunder-soaked document of improvisational daft ambience from Territorial Gobbing (the “most disappointing” member of both Thank and Gloomy Planets). Gnawed and nibbled contact mics, ancient hip hop tapes and misbehaving wave generators abound as weedy industrial beats eventually succumb to atonal waves of trash. FFO: Aaron Dilloway, John Weise, Black Dice and all that mid-2000s US noise stuff. Limited edition of 50 pro-produced tapes (+ download).

WEBSITE