Vinyl


ALTER is proud to present ‘Tendrils’, the first LP release from London based artist & musician Malvern Brume. After gathering some hushed praise from the UK underground for a couple of excellent cassette releases and strong local live performances, ‘Tendrils’ is the first definitive document of the Malvern Brume sound world. His instrumentation and sound sources would be considered familiar staples in the world of “experimental” music, but Salter does an admirable job of making them his own. Comprised of 8 pieces, this is electronic music at its core but a kind that sounds as if it’s being played through fog. Like spores growing on a damp surface. Densely composed and thick with an almost asphyxiating atmosphere – even during the record’s more minimal moments – track titles like ‘Caught In The Exhaust Trails’ and ‘Sunk Into Plastics’ only heighten the tone further. Salter was originally born in the countryside and since relocated to London, a place he finds “over stimulating in every sense”. Much of ‘Tendrils’ could be taken as a response to the city and a means of equating the two. Camberwell is listed as the location for composition, but field recordings are attributed to rural landmarks. The Rollright Stones on the Oxfordshire / Warwickshire border and Seven Sisters Cliffs by the English Channel are two in case, but despite their picturesque origins Salter renders them into abstract clatter. As if dubbed from the private tape archive of an old eccentric. In addition, synthesised electronic tones hum and buzz, occasionally giving away to strange, slurring sequences that sound like lost transmissions from the radiophonic workshop. Despite the nod to this electronic music institution, it’s lacking the sincere level of esteem that can turn one into a heritage act. There is a strangeness and distant other worldliness to the music that feels unselfconscious and keeps Malvern Brume from being easy to define by contemporary terms. Salter says the album is defined by movement and the environments that have inspired him over the years. In his own words, “each of these tracks is inspired by a journey or moving through a space, an audible A to B”. With that in mind, ‘Tendrils’ is perfect music for solitary inner-city marshland walks and urban bike rides to forgotten local suburbs.

Malvern Brume – Tendrils

The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concréte threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date.Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to “elevate the everyday,” transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition.Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone.But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, “Champagne Smoke.” A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house.

Lisa Lerkenfeldt – Collagen

Murk and mystery are the keys to Mosquitoes’ unique ability to suck the listener into a wormhole that pulses with menace. Little is known about this new-ish UK unit, but all signs point to an intriguing future. The proof resides within the grooves of Drip Water Hollow Out Stone, Mosquitoes’ 5-song 12” EP on New York City’s fearless Ever/Never Records. Yes, the record’s title functions as a concise explanation of a timeless natural process -- but it also reveals the name of each track, small gestures that gradually erode the listener’s sense of physical bearing. The murk radiates and pervades. “Drip” tosses you into the deep end and taunts you to try to swim. Strangled vocal cries and seemingly random guitar/drum patterns suggest the disorienting tactics of avant-rock legends US Maple. There is a disturbing logic afoot, even as the sounds seem to disappear into a maelstrom of their own making. “Water” quite literally buzzes with a malevolent grace as rhythms click and sounds reverberate like deep-sea sonar. “Hollow” channels the throbbing and whirring anxiety of latter-day Sightings, an all-too-rarely seen influence on contemporary noisemakers. It’s a testament to Mosquitoes’ peculiar aesthetics that they can hold their own in such rarefied company. On the flip, Mosquitoes’ put their heads down and burrow deep into into the listener’s skin. “Out” is an amorphous mass of distended sonics featuring short-circuiting guitars, unpredictable sound-swells and stuttering vocals attempting to communicate in an unspoken language. A perfect place-setting then, for the molten eruption of the final track, a fitting cap”Stone” on a mesmerizing outing from Mosquitoes, courtesy of Ever/Never Records.

Mosquitoes – Drip Water Hollow Out Stone

Edition Telemark proudly presents the first vinyl LP since 1989 by Munich's long-running ensemble for experimental music, PHREN, formed in 1968 by Michael Kopfermann. Informed by the musical avant-garde at the time and especially the problems discussed by other improvisational groups, Kopfermann developed his own approach to improvisation and tone production and sought to find instruments and playing techniques that allowed him to realize what he had in mind. His thinking centered around the treatment of noise and the eschewal of a separation between noise and tone, as well as methods for overcoming the limitations of the pre-conceived tones of the tempered system. This ruled out quite a few instruments, and also electronic techniques available at the time were deemed to primitive for the tones he sought to produce. After initially experimenting with Turkish cymbals stimulated by cello bows, Kopfermann settled on a range of instruments that included traditional string instruments, e.g. viola and violoncello, and certain wind instruments like the flugelhorn and the helicon. All instruments were prepared, the string instruments with thicker gut strings and unusual tunings, the wind instruments with longer elbow pieces. The preparations, along with the development of new and uncommon playing techniques, allowed the players to create and improvise on previously unheard noisy tones that are not static and pre-conceived but substantially individual. Over time, the number of musicians in the ensemble expanded up to six and the activities under the PHREN moniker became morefold, most notably with the formation of the PHREN theatre group led by Carmen Nagel-Berninger. Still, even during the sextet years, trios and duos of varying instruments were played, often called "analytical" because they were meant to focus individual voices against the background of the larger ensemble. From early on, PHREN published about their actitives in written form and on LPs and later CDs, mostly in their own PHREN-Verlag. This new LP thus compiles recent recordings from 2010 and 2018 of the duo of Carmen Nagel-Berninger (prepared viola) and Inge Salcher (prepared flugelhorn). The duos heard here are not so much meant as analytical studies, but rather as fully valid, improvisationally generated pieces, applying the musicians' long-term experience with their music in a way that doesn't sound reduced despite the small line-up. Edition of 300 with printed inner sleeve and extensive liner notes on the history of the PHREN ensemble and its duo line-ups in German and English by Reinhard Kapp, Carmen Nagel-Berninger and Inge Salcher, as well as a detailed discography.

PHREN – Duos Auf Praparierten Instrumenten

Heavy Machinery Records is proud to present 'Expressions of Interest' the brilliant debut album from Melbourne post-punk specialists screensaver. screensaver balance frenetic energy with unsettling tonalities to create rhythmic gloom that rides the new wave to the synth-punk. Spending three years in an incubatory state, the band began as a trans-Pacific collaboration between Christopher Stephenson (Spray Paint / Exek) and Krystal Maynard (Bad Vision / Polo) in 2016. By 2019 the pair had recruited Giles Fielke (Low Tide) and James Beck (Personal Touch / Rat Columns) on bass and drums respectively to form the band as it exists now. ‘Expressions of Interest’ is the debut album from screensaver, released on Heavy Machinery (AU) and Upset the Rhythm (UK) Records. Sonically, the 10-track album is rich and detailed, and pays homage to its era of inspiration: late 70s-mid 80s post-punk and new wave. From electronic-driven krautrock, to post-punk full of tribal toms and dirge-y synths, to death-disco with touches of EDM, 'Expressions of Interest' is an album that is both fierce in attack and destined for the dance floor. Maynard’s vocal style is equal parts haunted and commanding, her lyrics exploring themes of social degradation, frustration and repetition, whilst exposing the fragility of our bodies/minds on the whole. Praise for ‘Expressions of Interest': “Though screensaver's lineup comes close to a supergroup of Australian post-punk talent, with members who have played in EXEK, Rat Columns, and other acts putting their stamp on these time-tested sounds, it's Maynard's voice that immediately distinguishes them from their peers. A vibrato-heavy alto snarl in the vein of Siouxsie Sioux or Adult's Nicola Kuperus, it's a refreshing -- and imposing -- change from the deadpan vocal style of many post-punkers in the 2020s.” – Heather Phares, All Music “E.O.I is a potent set of dark post-punk inflected with industrial, motorik prog-rock and other styles, combining angular guitars, buzzing keyboards, driving rhythms and hypnotic song hooks.” Don Yates, KEXP “Sonically, screensaver are an amalgamation of goth, synth, and post punk. On a macro level The Cure, Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees, are some of vocalist Krystal Maynard’s musical influences as a teenager. However, on a micro level you'll find Constant Mongrel and Nun, UK label mates Es, and almost anything and everything released on Nihlistic Orbs. At the same time, this band is like no other.” - Tristan Birrell, 4ZZZ “Most bands trying to do this particular sound don’t have this level of attention to detail that screensaver have, in particular I enjoy the subtle and not so subtle use of percussive synth sounds. Great lyrics, maybe not the most uplifting but indeed an accurate representation of the new dark age we live in. ‘When the well runs dry, you act surprised’. Expressions of Interest is a studied, devotional love letter to the bands that have inspired them, not merely a genre exercise.” - James Vinciguerra (Total Control/Trevor)

Screensaver – Expressions Of Interest LP

Lake From The Louvers is a new solo work for concrete sounds, electronics and instruments from Australian composer-performer James Rushford, who has spent the last fifteen years honing his singular approach to composition and performance through solo works and collaborations with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Graham Lambkin and Klaus Lang.Created primarily during a stay at the La Becque, an artist residency on the shores of Lake Geneva, Lake From The Louvers draws inspiration from the play of shadow and light on both the surface of the lake and the window through which Rushford viewed this lacustrine landscape. While the lake is itself at times directly audible in the form of field recordings, the image suggested by the record’s title is less directly represented than translated into sonic structures inspired, as Rushford explains, by ‘the passing of shadow through a fixed space’. The movement of light across these two flat surfaces, lake and window, finds its sonic equivalent in these eleven pieces, in which fragments and particles of sound – highly amplified crunches, synthesized squawks and pings, harp notes – ripple across the length of each track. Fixed sets of elements define each piece, often moulded into ephemeral ensembles in which individual voices consistently fade away and reappear.Rushford’s performances on various keyboards provide the unstable, wavering foundations of many of these pieces, with microtonal tunings adding a woozy, seasick edge to his stately, often stunningly beautiful playing. Each side of the LP ends with an extended keyboard work: the first for groaning, sighing church organ, the second for a psychedelic cloud of detuned synthesizer tones in which harmonic fragments sink into their own melancholic recollection. Elsewhere the record makes use of elements as varied as microtonal harp, skittering drum machines and synthetic marimba, establishing a sound palette remarkable for its breadth, as well as its sparkling, glittering quality. Where many of Rushford’s solo projects have taken the form of long works with a sombre cast, Lake From The Louvers is strikingly bright and accessible, a series of sonic glimpses in which, like a late Monet, the shimmer of light undoes the distinction between image and reflection, foreground and background, surface and depth.

James Rushford – Lake From The Louvers

Since the early 1980s the Eureka, California based duo Psyclones freak out in music. As one of the most long-standing DIY duos, Brian Ladd and Julie Frith created a body of work, that flirts with Ambient, experimental industrial sounds, New Wave, Post-Punk, Synth-Pop, and all that electric jazz. Besides a few hard-to-find vinyl releases, they published their music regularly via cassette tapes on labels like their own imprint Ladd-Frith or other famed 1980's underground tape labels like Cause And Effect from Indianapolis, legendary San Francisco based Subterranean Records, Sound of Pig from New York, Insane Music from Belgium or the Spanish label Auxilio De Cientos to name but a few.Now, Notte Brigante is dropping “Tape Music 1980 – 1984” – a detailed compiled sampler on Psyclones early output, that was scattered over diverse tape releases. A nine tracks long trip into the work of a highly underrated band, that never lost their drive to explore new avenues in sound. “Tape Music 1980 – 1984” displays their artistic impulse with a strong, minimal leaning post-punk feeling, spreading the early magic of a once new genre, that liberated rock music briefly from its bombastic male driven professionalism. Psyclones liberated large, while adding the repetitive patterns of drum machines, witchy female singing, cool male chanting, Tuxedomoon-ish weirdness, darkish synth sounds and dubby big city Angst to their cocktail of music. All balancing between icy wave coolness and nonchalant neon funk. Insane Music for sane people, smokers, rain lovers, midnight movers and all those cats, that can’t cope with the pre-written consumer life reality. If you chose to eat “Tape Music 1980 – 1984”, make sure to wear shoulder pads, bring an ashtray and turn your inner fog machine on.Music recorded on cassette by Julie Frith and Brian Ladd between 1980 and 1984. LP mastered today from the original recordings.

Psyclones – Tape Music 1980-1984