58TH MUSIC SELECTION

Want to stay up to date with the most recent music, for instance for your DJing?
Here’s what you should currently not miss 🫶

MYSTERY RELEASE


[Click on the keyhole to access the review]

FULL REVIEW

A fabulous EP is waiting for you if you jump through the keyhole, reviewed by our deep writer Tina Camilleri. She knows the author personally, which gives her privileged access to his creative process, and us a deeper review. We invite you to spend some minutes in her musical company and come back here 🙂👋

AH&N – Hushed Voices [Secuencias Temporales, 2023-05-15]


ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO

Deep with a pictorial amplitude, a well-mastered “crystal clear” sound: no doubt, we are in Secuencias Temporales‘ territories. The label “does it again”, achieving one top-class release after another with outrageous consistency. In charge of the present EP: AH&N (“Attention. Here & Now.”) from France, founder of the collective Exocet, which groups artists such as Sanjib, Solarythm, Vardae, Porunñ and Amadeus: they form together a “fellowship of the hypnotic ring” and it is certain that you are in safe hands to get lost in their music…

Alex Tomb – Blossom of the Super Nonpareille [Capparis Spinosa Music, 2023-05-18]


Alex Tomb is also a great DJ, as seen in his MNMT Live Stream, teasing Emotions Festival’s 2022 first edition:

EXPERIMENTAL

“What is the purpose of writing music? One is, of course, not dealing with purposes but dealing with sounds. Or the answer must take the form of a paradox: a purposeful purposelessness or a purposeless play.” (John Cash, 1957).

Cypriot artist Alex Tomb, atop more than a decade of productions, is what you call “a dreamer having fun with the music tools”. After a personal Big Bang, his production world emerged with “approximative” remixes of famous artists, such as Plastikman, Björk and Depeche Mode, before following up on solid labels, including on Maeve and on Claudio PRC’s 012. Some of his tracks have eloquent titles: “Kids will be kids“, “Paradisaea“, while we see him exactly like that: “a kid playing around in his paradise of sounds”. On the present EP, he’s accompanied by another vivid comrade, our dear Polygonia, and together, they offer us a great “purposeless play”, fun and mischievous.

Aedi Records – Lichen [Aedi Records, 2023-05-05]


“Aedi” refers to “Temple” in Latin, a name suggested by Hypnus artist Rambadu. If you’re a producer, you’d better join it 👇🙂

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Warm welcome to the world’s most democratic label, Aedi, from the creative mind of our dear Michel Iseneld from Hypnus

Like Dumbledore in Hogwarts, Michel is the headmaster of a deep techno wizarding school, whose hundreds of students form a close community. Technical, cultural and philosophical contents are taught through posts, discussions and coaching, giving a great overview of the art world to our dear “Harrypnotic Potters”. It’s very efficient, as we noticed some being signed by major labels down the road, thinking for instance of Inskape on Edit Select and Circular Limited, Einerlei on Norite and Diffused Signal on Lowless.

Aedi is basically the label of the school, managed by the students themselves, who vote anonymously on various topics, from the music to be released to the titles and artworks. Tracks are posted and collectively evaluated, sometimes in the context of a fun challenge.

In “Lichen” for instance, the recruits were invited to form random duos and in this experience, four pieces have been selected among 13.

For us, some tracks present an obvious symbiosis between the artists, some slightly less: we let you judge… Yet we think that it’s an overall successful challenge and we love the concept.

Norite – Noritian Hands [Norite, 2023-05-17]


Norite is based in Brussels…

VARIOUS ARTISTS

Talking about Norite, things are getting more serious with the works of four well-established maestros.

With releases on Affin, Annulled and Silent Season, our dear genius Toki Fuko opens the EP with mental shimmering grooves building up to one of the best integrations of hi-hats ever heard, after the break starting at around 4:00.

Then, Hypnus‘ spearhead BLNDR follows up with a funky interlude, dialoguing pretty well with his 2018 EP on Intervision.

On his side, Mown, whom we “venerated” on his previous self-released EP, opens up the chakras, while Josef Gaard closes the journey with an impactful cinematic fixation, persistent long time after the listening…

Nikos – Metaturnal EP [Flippen Disks, 2023-05-17]


TRIBAL TECHNO

A very important – vital – question before commenting: Do you need socks? If yes, the wacky Dutch label Flippen Disks, representing mainly local artists, sells some on its Bandcamp page… No doubt that we are in a casual environment and Nikos, well-established in the DJ world, releases his first solo EP. Various influences can be instantly sensed in the percussive melting pot, from bass music to psytrance, and we visit the multi-vitamin release with certain joy and exhilaration. A must-have to boost the day without cocaine.

BMS – EP Three [Self-released, 2023-05-05]


DUB TECHNO

Let us end our selection in the pure tradition of the old Shinobi martial art: with a smoke screen… You can sense it in the dense atmospheres of both the music and the artwork of the present EP. BMS soberly named it “Three” (after “One” and “Two“), titled the tracks just with numbers and is unfindable online. Only one question remains: is he “real”? Yet the sound is what matters and the EP, foggy, original and consistent, is for us highly hypnotic.

SPECIAL GUEST

Diving underneath the sea feels like flying in a dense atmosphere over a psychedelic floor, made of intriguing reefs and multi-coloured fauna, or like living inside of a womb, with muffled sounds and slippery walls, holding nothing, not even the past… If a Japanese forest is at the heart of Dozzy’s music, our guest today has made the hypnotic Big Blue his artistic kingdom, mainly symbolised by three vast oceans: Hypnus, Outis and Non Series. Our guest also sails the seas with emblematic nautic symphonies; Kracken, which made us discover the genre, and the Deep Blue album series. Of course, he is a lot more than that, and we are honoured to have a glimpse of his infinite passion in his honest words below…

LUIGI TOZZI PRESENTS
DJ AND PRODUCER


Rambadu – EN VIRON [Self-released, 2023-05-19]


Below: Rambadu caught playing improbable traditional instruments, such as the Doeng…

ATMOSPHERIC TECHNO

Luigi Tozzi: I picked Rambadu’s En Viron because besides being a very solid EP, it has a few characteristics that I think are worth pointing out when talking about deep techno nowadays.

Each piece has clichés that define the genre such as field recording, lush pads and synth basses/drones which drive the tracks. But even if the record is built around sounds that are often too commonly used in this genre, what I really appreciate here is the effort in achieving originality in the mixing and arrangement process. Especially in the tracks “En Viron” and “Ruutan”, the work Rambadu does with spatialisation gives a feeling of pure immersion that makes his long arrangements flow very naturally.

Finding this kind of ‘technical identity’ is crucial for me when listening to new records and I feel it’s something that is too often missing nowadays: putting together sounds to make a very standard deep techno track is quite easy, while on the other hand, giving it charisma and identity is something else, and it makes the difference.

* Page’s cover picture: Oye Kreuzkoelln in Berlin, a record shop from a member of our community.

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54TH MUSIC SELECTION