Browse by Label: SUBTEXT (UK)

Artist:	EMPTYSET
Title:	Demiurge
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.50
Catalog #:	SUB 001CD

Emptyset, the pioneering project from Multiverse boss James Ginzburg aka Ginz and the DJ and curator Paul Purgas, return with their second album Demiurge. Following their recent collaborative release with Underground Resistance vocalist Cornelius Harris, the album continues directly on from where their 2009 Caravan Recordings eponymous debut long player left off, pursuing the duo's exploration of the legacy of sound system culture and the possibilities for experimental bass-driven music. Heavily inspired by Bristol's lineage of dub and system-shaking sonics, Demiurge continues the project's deconstruction of the club experience and the magnification of the unplanned and unexpected textures that emerge from amplified sound. The resulting album is born from this investigative metamorphic process, the spine of rhythm scraped and exposed to extreme sonic pressure, bass music squeezed to its limits. Demiurge takes the form of a tyrannical force, an uncontainable creature of extremes, scouring the earth with shuddering footsteps.

Artist:	PORTER, ROLY
Title:	Aftertime
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$16.50
Catalog #:	SUB 002CD

Continuing the re-emergence of Bristol's Subtext label, former Vex'd artist Roly Porter presents his debut solo album Aftertime, which fuses his background in bleeding edge British sound system music with experimental compositional strategies and a forensic attention to detailed sound design. The results explore the terrain of an emerging industrial classical aesthetic, connecting new approaches to digital manipulation and processing with the instrumentation of chamber music in an immersive examination of texture and tonality. Aftertime connects the dots between the legacy of dubstep and seminal jungle labels such as Metalheadz and Full Cycle while absorbing aspects of noise, drone and contemporary classical. Haunting angular assaults crafted across the 11 tracks create a logical post script to Porter's roots in Vex'd, the seminal dubstep project launched in 2004, that adopted the tropes of bass production and sonic detailing inherent in sound system culture and translated them into a highly atmospheric dark ambient progression. Aftertime radiates a central narrative tension between themes of nature and technology, the ancient and modern, and the real and synthetic, revealing a compulsive cinematic netherworld, like a communiqué from an earth ravaged by science. The use of instrumentation, in particular the haunting tones of the Ondes Martenot (performed here by Cynthia Millar) reflects Porter's fascination with rare and dying technologies, the Martenot being playable by only a remaining handful of performers. Placing this rare instrument's eerie aesthetics alongside muscular sheets of noise and heavily machined tones, the album maps out a compositional territory that chronicles a dying sonic language while ushering in the dawning of the new. At the outer edges of this map, Aftertime stands as a re-imagined present -- an apparition of a mythologized past and an unreachable future.

Artist:	EMPTYSET
Title:	Medium
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	CD
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	SUB 003CD

Following their second album Demiurge (SUB 001CD), Medium arrives as the first non-studio-based production by Emptyset, recorded on location in the remote Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire. The collection of tracks explores the duo's preoccupations with the elemental properties of sound and bare, rhythmic structures and overlays it onto the textural possibilities of space and material. The project marks their first act of adapting their analog-based studio system into an architectural intervention, pushing extreme bass and feedback into the irregular spaces of the unfinished building. The rural mansion, which remains an incomplete remnant of the Gothic revival and a place studied by both architectural researchers and psychic investigators, provides a rich source of texture as the sparse palette of sine waves and noise is adorned with the intricate details of the space. Medium emerges as an act of translation, remodeling the house through sonic impulses into a state of audio, a fluid, transformative gesture and a process mirroring the sonar impulses of the bats residing within Woodchester's rooftop sanctuary. The project, supported by the Woodchester Mansion Trust, was provided technical support by the renowned Bristol-based sound engineer Mat Sampson, who managed the array of vintage microphones and preamps distributed within the building along with the central monophonic sound system. Approx. 21 minutes total playing time.

Artist:	PORTER, ROLY
Title:	Aftertime
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	LP
Price:	$19.50
Catalog #:	SUB 004LP

LP version. Continuing the re-emergence of Bristol's Subtext label, former Vex'd artist Roly Porter presents his debut solo album Aftertime, which fuses his background in bleeding edge British sound system music with experimental compositional strategies and a forensic attention to detailed sound design. The results explore the terrain of an emerging industrial classical aesthetic, connecting new approaches to digital manipulation and processing with the instrumentation of chamber music in an immersive examination of texture and tonality. Aftertime connects the dots between the legacy of dubstep and seminal jungle labels such as Metalheadz and Full Cycle while absorbing aspects of noise, drone and contemporary classical. Haunting angular assaults crafted across the 11 tracks create a logical post script to Porter's roots in Vex'd, the seminal dubstep project launched in 2004, that adopted the tropes of bass production and sonic detailing inherent in sound system culture and translated them into a highly atmospheric dark ambient progression. Aftertime radiates a central narrative tension between themes of nature and technology, the ancient and modern, and the real and synthetic, revealing a compulsive cinematic netherworld, like a communiqué from an earth ravaged by science. The use of instrumentation, in particular the haunting tones of the Ondes Martenot (performed here by Cynthia Millar) reflects Porter's fascination with rare and dying technologies, the Martenot being playable by only a remaining handful of performers. Placing this rare instrument's eerie aesthetics alongside muscular sheets of noise and heavily machined tones, the album maps out a compositional territory that chronicles a dying sonic language while ushering in the dawning of the new. At the outer edges of this map, Aftertime stands as a re-imagined present -- an apparition of a mythologized past and an unreachable future.

Artist:	EMPTYSET
Title:	Medium
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	LP
Price:	$12.00
Catalog #:	SUB 005LP

A five-song EP following their second album Demiurge (SUB 001CD), Medium is the first non-studio-based production by Emptyset, recorded on location in the remote Woodchester Mansion in Gloucestershire. The collection of tracks explores the duo's preoccupations with the elemental properties of sound and bare, rhythmic structures and overlays it onto the textural possibilities of space and material. The project marks their first act of adapting their analog-based studio system into an architectural intervention, pushing extreme bass and feedback into the irregular spaces of the unfinished building. The rural mansion, which remains an incomplete remnant of the Gothic revival and a place studied by both architectural researchers and psychic investigators, provides a rich source of texture as the sparse palette of sine waves and noise is adorned with the intricate details of the space. Medium emerges as an act of translation, remodeling the house through sonic impulses into a state of audio, a fluid, transformative gesture and a process mirroring the sonar impulses of the bats residing within Woodchester's rooftop sanctuary. The project, supported by the Woodchester Mansion Trust, was provided technical support by the renowned Bristol-based sound engineer Mat Sampson, who managed the array of vintage microphones and preamps distributed within the building along with the central monophonic sound system.

Artist:	EMPTYSET
Title:	Demiurge
Label:	SUBTEXT (UK)
Format:	12"
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	SUBTEXT 003EP

Emptyset is the pioneering project from Multiverse boss James Ginzburg aka Ginz, and the DJ and curator Paul Purgas. Heavily inspired by Bristol's lineage of dub and system-shaking sonics, Demiurge continues the project's deconstruction of the club experience and the magnification of the unplanned and unexpected textures that emerge from amplified sound. The resulting music is born from this investigative metamorphic process, the spine of rhythm scraped and exposed to extreme sonic pressure -- bass music squeezed to its limits.

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