Browse by Artist: ISAN

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Salamander
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	MORR 003CD

1999 release. ISAN's equipment must be inhabited by proper salamanders, pattering constantly over circuits, stumbling over wires. Robin and Toe, the two mates operating this "Integrated Services Analogue Network" (ISAN), appreciate the salamander's help and dedicated this whole album to their little friend. A couple of years ago, they both met in Leicester, discovered a common interest in "using dodgy old keyboards to make a dodgy old noise" and started recording together. Mixing the simple beauty of melodies generated with analog keyboards and the bumpy, quirky rhythms old drum machines create when you switch them on, ISAN produce some of the most irresistible pop anthems the whole family can hum along to.

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Lucky Cat
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	MORR 022CD

Released in 2001. ISAN love old analog electronic devices to make music, instruments from a time when synthesizers were developed in attics in air-conditioned offices, where hundreds of coding-slaves would program new organ-presets, were still an unknown phenomena. Equipment you not only need screwdrivers for, but also furniture polish. Synthesizers and drum-boxes, which were affordable even when they were manufactured and which rock bands with mellotrons and modular walls laughed at. Robin and Antony prove that these machines are capable of great things, too. With numerous releases -- preferably on 7" of course -- they managed to book reservations for front row seats in our record racks. Little melodies appear, dragging you along on their journey towards dawn, slowly unveiling their real inner-self, and banishing evil ghosts. Everything sounds more self-evident, lighter, more familiar, more personal and especially more lovable and adorable. It almost sounds like the happy studio cat.

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Clockwork Menagerie
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$11.00
Catalog #:	MORR 028CD

Repressed. This compilation of early material coming from long-out-of-print singles and compilations was a long time coming. Mostly because there should be many more people out there who should be able to listen to these tracks than those lucky few who were able to get the original copies in the short while they were available. These tunes seem to come from a different era when small labels like Earworm, Liquefaction Empire, Bad Jazz or Wurlitzer Jukebox were continually presenting interesting and exciting new bands, mostly on neatly packaged limited edition 7"s. The music ranges, depending on from out of whose vintage analog equipment it comes, between simple melodies on swinging, feather-weight beats and rhythmically complex and transparent sound installations. May this be the right balance between pop and art. Maybe like an unlikely mixture of Plone and Seefeel.

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Plans Drawn in Pencil
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.00
Catalog #:	MORR 068CD

The pencil is the softest of all writing implements, it is always close to vanishing, to being wiped or erased. Maybe this album, if it were a painting would not be oil on canvas but rather a pencil drawing. White on grey. Reduced and open at first sight. Rich in details and playful on closer examination. A lot happens within seclusion. Antony Ryan and Robin Saville layered soundtracks on top of the other, activated filters, went through synthesizers and systems (analog and digital ones), looking for sounds. Two artists and their machines.

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Glow In The Dark Safari Set
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	CD
Price:	$14.50
Catalog #:	MORR 099CD

Robin Saville and Antony Ryan, two English gentlemen who create music together under the nom de plume Isan, return with their sixth full-length album for their spiritual home of Morr Music. It's been a few years since Isan's previous outing, the delectable electronic esoterica of Plans Drawn In Pencil (MORR 068CD/LP), but the results, in time-honored Isan tradition, are certainly worth the wait. Opener, "Channel Ten," with its Autobahn-assured poise, appropriately prefigures a body of work that is Isan's finest to-date. Inspiration for this came from "emancipation" as Robin elaborates: "It was an attempt to jettison the weight of our back catalog and get back to the fun of making music. This entailed playing with ancient Casios, mangled tape loops and squidgy noises. Very hands-on. Most of the tracks on the album started life away from the laptop." This giddy sense of enjoyment suffuses the album -- from the glistening rush of "Merman Sound" which segues into the soft-focus sound-world of its own coda seamlessly to the cinematic, tech-y strut of "Grissette" or the calmly oscillating and cascading melodies of "Greencracked," which evoke images of a retro-futurist utopia. Isan have always excelled at fashioning a quietly awe-inspiring music and Glow... is no exception. Even the title suggests a sense of wide-eyed-wonder "We were playing with lots of ideas around fire, embers, bioluminescence and the title popped into my head one day. It seemed to sum up a lot of the things we like -- I like to imagine sitting in a darkened room looking at the gentle green glow of 1970s VU meters, then they all come to life and start crawling up the wall." says Antony. Such is the album's celestial, hot-wired circuit-board wizardry; Glow In The Dark Safari Set positively throbs, ebbs and flows with electronically refracted ideas and melodies -- a digital tone poem sitting somewhere betwixt the cozy experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the exotic sonic emissions of a top-secret D�sseldorf studio circa 1975.

Artist:	ISAN
Title:	Glow In The Dark Safari Set
Label:	MORR MUSIC (GERMANY)
Format:	LP + 7"
Price:	$19.50
Catalog #:	MORR 099LP

LP version with bonus 7" and download coupon. Robin Saville and Antony Ryan, two English gentlemen who create music together under the nom de plume Isan, return with their sixth full-length album for their spiritual home of Morr Music. It's been a few years since Isan's previous outing, the delectable electronic esoterica of Plans Drawn In Pencil (MORR 068CD/LP), but the results, in time-honored Isan tradition, are certainly worth the wait. Opener, "Channel Ten," with its Autobahn-assured poise, appropriately prefigures a body of work that is Isan's finest to-date. Inspiration for this came from "emancipation" as Robin elaborates: "It was an attempt to jettison the weight of our back catalog and get back to the fun of making music. This entailed playing with ancient Casios, mangled tape loops and squidgy noises. Very hands-on. Most of the tracks on the album started life away from the laptop." This giddy sense of enjoyment suffuses the album -- from the glistening rush of "Merman Sound" which segues into the soft-focus sound-world of its own coda seamlessly to the cinematic, tech-y strut of "Grissette" or the calmly oscillating and cascading melodies of "Greencracked," which evoke images of a retro-futurist utopia. Isan have always excelled at fashioning a quietly awe-inspiring music and Glow... is no exception. Even the title suggests a sense of wide-eyed-wonder "We were playing with lots of ideas around fire, embers, bioluminescence and the title popped into my head one day. It seemed to sum up a lot of the things we like -- I like to imagine sitting in a darkened room looking at the gentle green glow of 1970s VU meters, then they all come to life and start crawling up the wall." says Antony. Such is the album's celestial, hot-wired circuit-board wizardry; Glow In The Dark Safari Set positively throbs, ebbs and flows with electronically refracted ideas and melodies -- a digital tone poem sitting somewhere betwixt the cozy experimentation of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the exotic sonic emissions of a top-secret D�sseldorf studio circa 1975.

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