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LP
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BLACKEST 077LP
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New vinyl-only compilation from Blackest Ever Black, consisting of all-new recordings unavailable elsewhere, plus a pair of tracks -- Carla dal Forno's much-loved cover of The Kiwi Animal's "Blue Morning", and Scythe's zero gravity blues "Flower, Drop" -- appearing on this format for the first time. Jonas Tiljander (Brainbombs, Bremen) dons his solo Brainman guise for the corrosive synth-scaping of "Kilonova"; Ian Martin, whose SEER radio broadcasts were a significant early influence on the label, manifests the pure astral melancholia of "Missing Realism"; Hypnotic Sleep and associated band The Fulmars offer two iterations of bittersweet Low-German DIY pop, and Unchained a gorgeous, evergreen-dazed guitar instrumental in "Gray d'Aboukir". "Dawn Swoop", a suspenseful miniature from Jam Money (Spillage Fete), might just be one the most perfect two minutes in the label's catalog. There are contributions too from two superheroes in the BEB universe: Bobby Wratten (The Field Mice), with the gorgeous, tremulous "The Munich Post" from his current project Lightning In A Twilight Hour, and Bridget Hayden, who offer the heart-stopping, elegiac drowned-folk of "Solace".
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2LP
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BLACKEST 075LP
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Heavy-weather, beyond-good-and-evil sound system poetics, channeling raw and rootical techno, isolationist abstraction, and dub at its most turbulent and raw-nerved and space-time-warping. New worlds ahead... Equal parts tuff, tail-thrashing dancehall pressure -- see "Hell Dub" -- and art-of-darkness ambience and introspection, culminating in the slow-burning, third-eye-opening 23-minute dream weapon, "Vertigo". Part of the Young Echo crew, Ossia embodies the best tradition of Bristol underground music in that he doesn't pay much mind to tradition, just does his own thing. Yes, Devil's Dance shares DNA with those sullen masterpieces that will always be associated with the city, from blunted '90s street-soul/hip-hop to sub-loaded dubstep -- but like his forebears Ossia is ultimately a mongrel breed, drawing from his own, very contemporary and idiosyncratic well of influences: grime, jazz, steppers, dub, post-punk, and industrial abrasion, concrète minimalism... Devil's Dance could easily be not just a forbidding, but a suffocating proposition. But even at its most angst-ridden it feels lithe and aerodynamic, its darker impulses both intensified, and offset, by a pure soundboy's delight in detail and color and higher dancefloor mechanics. The music pulses with energy, a fever to communicate... and Raki Singh (violin), Jasmine (vocals), and Ollie Moore (saxophone) add vivid flesh-tone to the punishing, plasmic electronics. The record was mixed at an infamous, subterranean Bristolian recording studio, using an arsenal of spring and plate reverbs, modded pedals, tape-delays, and compressors: systems of black magic crucial to the album's intense presence and physicality and carefully modulated dread. In the end, what you're witnessing, and experiencing vicariously, is a purging, an exorcism: find the devil, dance with the devil... and then chase, chase, chase him out of the earth.
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BLACKEST 072EP
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Stuart Argabright (Ike Yard, Dominatrix, Death Comet Crew) is joined by Black Rain founder member Shinichi Shimokawa as well as more recent recruit Soren Roi and Zanias, vocalist on 2015's Dark Pool (BLACKEST 009CD/LP, 2014), making for the most group-oriented iteration of Black Rain since its earliest days. Sonically too, there is a sense of evolution but also of coming full circle: the cyberpunk techno of Argabright's celebrated William Gibson soundtracks, and extrapolations of Dark Pool's neuromantic yearning cut with glimpses of the thrash and industrial rock energies that animated Black Rain's incendiary live shows in the early '90s.
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LP
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BLACKEST 070LP
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Following a trio of sprawling, planet-gargling double-LPs, 2013's self-titled LP on Skrammel, and Second Launch (BLACKEST 033LP, 2015) and Eclipsed (BLACKEST 048LP, 2017) on Blackest Ever Black, Bremen -- Jonas Tiljander and Lanchy, previously best known for their contributions to Brainbombs' long rap sheet of genius-and-brutality, but latterly exponents of a rarefied cosmic melancholy -- return with Enter Silence, their most concise, and powerful, album to date. Once again, the Uppsala multi-instrumentalists combine elements of trogged-out psychedelic rock with a deadly serious Arctic minimalism and weeping modal improvisations that owe more to the outer limits of jazz and burnt-out free music from Japan. It's connoisseur's space music, grown-up and grievously honed; outwardly inclined towards the epic but studded with details that reward attention and introspection. There's always been a strong undercurrent of sadness animating Bremen's work, and that existential burden is present and correct on Enter Silence, culminating in the all-out cosmic anguish of "Palladium". Even "The Middle Section", whose ragged chords are nothing if not the sound of optimism and defiance, sounds like it's navigating some kind of unsayable trauma. But this band has always allowed plenty of room for bonehead slash-and-burn as well: see here especially the Stoogeian/39 Clocks-ish rock'n'roll of "Aimless Cruising", and the pulpy quasi-cinematic tension of "Sinister", or the brilliant "Too Cold For Your Eyes", a blast of voidal motorik that sounds like a cranked-up Clean. It's a cold, cold world out there.
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BLACKEST 071LP
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Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with Ice Exposure, their second album for Blackest Ever Black. A sequel and companion piece of sorts to 2015's Antigravity (BLACKEST 011CD/LP), its title couldn't be more apt: sonically it is both colder, and more exposed -- in the sense of rawer, more volatile, more vulnerable -- than its predecessor, capturing the combustible energy and barely suppressed violence of the trio's celebrated live performances with aspects of noir jazz, musique concrète, no wave art-rock, sound poetry, and spectral electronics all interpenetrating in unpredictable and exhilarating ways. While there are moments of great sensitivity and even a cautious romanticism, the prevailing mood is one of anxiety, paranoia, and mounting psychodrama: close your eyes and Ice Exposure feels like a dissociative Hörspiel broadcasting from the seedy backstreets of your own troubled mind. Before he picks up an instrument or opens his mouth, Berrocal's unique and compelling presence can be felt: a combination of studied, glacial cool and anarchic, in-the-moment intensity that has served him well over a long and storied career. Now in his eighth decade, it comes with an added gravitas, perhaps, but no less energy or vitality. On Ice Exposure, his lyrical, instantly recognizable trumpet playing is a key feature -- see especially the ghostly, dub-wise take on Ornette's "Lonely Woman", the dissolute exotica of "Salta Girls", and the sublime echo-chamber soliloquy "Opportunity". But more often it's his voice that commands center-stage, whether casually discharging surreal poetic monologues or moaning in animal despair -- a vocal tour de force that transcends language and culminates in the Dionysian frenzy of "Why", Berrocal's half-spoken, half-howled exclamations jostling with David Fenech's slashes of dissonant guitar, over Badalamenti-ish, panther-stalk drums. Fenech and Epplay are responsible for Ice Exposure's inspired arrangements and vivid, vertiginous sound design. He and Fenech fashion a remarkable mise-en-scene for Berrocal to inhabit, one that embraces cutting-edge electronics while also paying homage to the best traditions of outlaw jazz and libidinous rock n' roll. On "Blanche de Blanc", Berrocal's voice is framed by a groaning, ghoulish orchestra of industrial drones, while "Equivoque" evokes the most humid and hostile Fourth World landscapes and "Panic In Surabaya" lives up to its name, a hectic, pulse-quickening concrète collage that leaves you gasping for air. Ice Exposure is a triumph of a group mind, an underworld dérive as life-affirming as it is unnerving and psychologically precarious.
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BLACKEST 067LP
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2018 repress. Sleep-deprived, breakbeat driven vignettes of unclear authorship, from somewhere west of Lake Lagoda, near the Russia-Finland border. Sekundenschlaf has significant points of correspondence with contemporary European electronic music, as well as the golden age of (early) jungle and ambient techno. But its response to tradition, and to the zeitgeist, is idiosyncratic to say the least -- with an atmosphere and psycho-geography rooted in the tranquility and majesty of Western Russian nature, and the anxiety and distress of the country's post-Soviet working class. Pastoral calm meets dissonance and unease. The music has a loose, improvised feel, but its arrangements are intricate, its melodies iridescent; cascading arpeggios that stir a sense of optimism and renewal, sighing string-pads that evoke the deepest melancholy. Rhythms simultaneously hyped-up and burned-out, collapsing in on themselves as they race to destinations un-known. All bound together with field recordings of eavesdropped conversations, blurred into abstraction, a droning subliminal menace.
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BLACKEST 069LP
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Air Lows is the debut solo album by Silvia Kastel. The Italian artist has been a fixture of the underground since her precocious teens, clocking up many miles in Control Unit with Ninni Morgia, including collaborations with the likes of Smegma, Factrix, Gary Smith, Aki Onda, and Gate (Michael Morley of The Dead C). Both solo and in her work with others, Kastel has explored the outer limits and inner workings of no wave, industrial, dub, extreme electronics, free rock, and improvisation. Air Lows is both her fullest and most refined offering to date, a work of vivid, isolationist electronics which draws deeply on her past experience but breaks new ground. Prompted by a late-flowering interest in techno and club music, Kastel sought to create something which combines a steady rhythmic pulse with the otherworldly sonorities of musique concrete, and avant-garde synth sounds inspired by Japanese minimalism and techno-pop (Haruomi Hosono's Philharmony (1982) being a particular favouite). The formal artifice of muzak/elevator music, the intros and outros of generic popular songs, the extreme light-heavy contrasts of jungle, the creative sampling of hardcore, and the very "human" synths in the jazz of Herbie Hancock's Sextant (1973) and Sun Ra: all were touchstones for Air Lows' conception and composition, and all strains of music addressing -- or complicating -- the relationship between the human and the technological. Though used sparingly, Kastel's voice remains her key instrument, whether subject to dissociative digital manipulations as on "Bruell", delivering matter-of-fact spoken monologues, or providing splashes of pure tonal color. Recorded between her expansive Italy studio and a more compact, ersatz set-up in Berlin, Air Lows gradually takes on some of the character of the German capital: you can hear the wide streets and uninhabited spaces, the seep-age of never-ending nightlife, the loneliness. Air Lows is The Wizard of Oz in reverse: the glorious technicolor J-pop deconstructions of its first half leading inexorably to the icy noir of "Spiderwebs" and "Concrete Void". These later tracks are reminiscent of 2015's magnificent 39 12", Kastel in the role of numbed, nihilistic chanteuse stalking dank, murky tunnels of reverb and sub-bass. But in fact there is contradiction and emotional ambiguity to Air Lows from the outset, and throughout -- a sense of both infinite space and acute claustrophobia; energy and inertia; fluency and restraint.
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BLACKEST 016LP
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LP version. Blackest Ever Black presents Sleep Heavy, the debut album of broken-hearted, downtempo R&B/street-soul and supremely atmospheric, introspective electronics from Jabu: a trio comprised of vocalist/lyricists Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt, and producer Amos Childs. The group was born out of Bristol's Young Echo collective: an ecosystem unto itself which has birthed and nurtured a number of other notable soundsystem-rooted projects and artists to date, including Kahn & Neek, Sam Kidel, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Asda, Chester Giles, and Killing Sound (Childs with Kidel and Vessel). Jabu's previous 7" singles, though arresting, barely hinted at the level of accomplishment and emotional heft that Sleep Heavy delivers. It's a future Bristol classic with a universal resonance, with songs that are highly personal but deeply relatable, and a tripped-out, time-dissolving sound design that both haunts and consoles. It is, first and foremost, a meditation on grief, loss, making sense of separation, and death; but it also looks forward to what might come after the aftermath: healing, acceptance, the chance to begin again. Childs is one of the most gifted producers of his generation and his work here, grounded in hip-hop but floating free, is a thing of sustained wonder: crepuscular, melancholic, subtly psychedelic, and heavily dubwise, but always concise and purposeful. Stitched together from deep-dug and beautifully repurposed samples, it draws on influences from US R&B to Japanese art-pop minimalism -- Mariah to Mariah Carey, if you will -- and a rich seam of underground UK soul, boogie, DIY/post-punk, library music, and lovers rock. There is also of course a distant connection to the Bristol blues of Smith & Mighty and the sultry urban gothic of Protection-era Massive Attack (1994), but Jabu's orchestration of womb-like ambiences, cold synth tones, and brittle beats feel entirely sui generis. They provide the perfect setting for Rendall's wounded, imploring and carefully weighted vocals, which are no less extraordinary: nodding to giants like Teddy Pendergrass and The Temptations in terms of phrasing and front-and-center vulnerability, with something of The Associates' Billy MacKenzie in there too; defeated but defiant. Meanwhile, Jas's heavenly interventions, sometimes leading but more often parsed and layered into tremulous, gossamer abstraction, draw a line between the Catholic choral harmonies of her childhood and the ethereal, oceanic sweep of Cocteau Twins. By its end, Sleep Heavy's world-weariness is intact and scarcely diminished, but some light has been admitted, and is visible from the sea-floor.
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BLACKEST 016CD
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Blackest Ever Black presents Sleep Heavy, the debut album of broken-hearted, downtempo R&B/street-soul and supremely atmospheric, introspective electronics from Jabu: a trio comprised of vocalist/lyricists Alex Rendall and Jasmine Butt, and producer Amos Childs. The group was born out of Bristol's Young Echo collective: an ecosystem unto itself which has birthed and nurtured a number of other notable soundsystem-rooted projects and artists to date, including Kahn & Neek, Sam Kidel, Ishan Sound, Ossia, Asda, Chester Giles, and Killing Sound (Childs with Kidel and Vessel). Jabu's previous 7" singles, though arresting, barely hinted at the level of accomplishment and emotional heft that Sleep Heavy delivers. It's a future Bristol classic with a universal resonance, with songs that are highly personal but deeply relatable, and a tripped-out, time-dissolving sound design that both haunts and consoles. It is, first and foremost, a meditation on grief, loss, making sense of separation, and death; but it also looks forward to what might come after the aftermath: healing, acceptance, the chance to begin again. Childs is one of the most gifted producers of his generation and his work here, grounded in hip-hop but floating free, is a thing of sustained wonder: crepuscular, melancholic, subtly psychedelic, and heavily dubwise, but always concise and purposeful. Stitched together from deep-dug and beautifully repurposed samples, it draws on influences from US R&B to Japanese art-pop minimalism -- Mariah to Mariah Carey, if you will -- and a rich seam of underground UK soul, boogie, DIY/post-punk, library music, and lovers rock. There is also of course a distant connection to the Bristol blues of Smith & Mighty and the sultry urban gothic of Protection-era Massive Attack (1994), but Jabu's orchestration of womb-like ambiences, cold synth tones, and brittle beats feel entirely sui generis. They provide the perfect setting for Rendall's wounded, imploring and carefully weighted vocals, which are no less extraordinary: nodding to giants like Teddy Pendergrass and The Temptations in terms of phrasing and front-and-center vulnerability, with something of The Associates' Billy MacKenzie in there too; defeated but defiant. Meanwhile, Jas's heavenly interventions, sometimes leading but more often parsed and layered into tremulous, gossamer abstraction, draw a line between the Catholic choral harmonies of her childhood and the ethereal, oceanic sweep of Cocteau Twins. By its end, Sleep Heavy's world-weariness is intact and scarcely diminished, but some light has been admitted, and is visible from the sea-floor.
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BLACKEST 059LP
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This is Amateur Childbirth's "Christian Rock" album. The previous LP from Ivan Matthew Hick's solo project, 2013's Pripyat, concerned itself with the blighted belief systems of UFO worshippers. Your Afterlife Is Cancelled expands this compelling solo project's field of enquiry to look at a wider array of "religious anomalies": cults, for want of a better word. Each song is about a different such anomaly. To call Hicks's vision apocalyptic would be to underplay its cruelty. The Bible's rampant sadism pales in comparison. This is a world where faith -- in a god or gods, in astrology, morality, or any meaning whatsoever -- is merely a prelude to punishment. His lyrics are vivid glossaries of pain, abjection and indignity; the songs' protagonists swim in blood, piss, shit, and ejaculate. Eschatology and scatology are indivisible here. Drugs are rampantly abused, albeit to little benefit. There are scalpel-flashes of humor in David's wordplay, rhyming and dour Brisbane diction -- but this offers scant consolation for the songs' embattled subjects, who wait, in vein, for salvation, while crows peck out their eyes, blood pours from their ears, and psoriasis ravages their skin. These words, for all their pessimism and body-horror, are cradled in minimalist, folk-rock arrangements that are quite dazzling in their beauty and grievously earned simplicity: Hicks's monochord strum embellished with subtle violin, synthesizer, and percussion shading. Amateur Childbirth's caustic end-times worldview inevitably prompts comparisons with Current 93, but also a wider (non-)tradition of caustic and disturbed loner psych that includes Simon Finn, Patrik Fitzgerald, Robyn Hitchcock, Peter Jefferies, and Roy Harper. Your Afterlife Is Cancelled is a depressive tour de force from one of the most crushingly eloquent voices in the Australian underground.
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BLACKEST 065LP
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Recorded in Melbourne and Berlin between 2015-17 by Samuel Karmel, Carla dal Forno and Tarquin Manek, Awkwardly Blissing Out's title is instructive... the spiky eldritch song-spells of F ingers' previous album Hide Before Dinner (BLACKEST 044LP, 2015) have become more dubwise, immersive, and potently psychedelic; Euphoric even, but paranoid and laden with self-doubt. Projecting onto strangers, watching not participating, turning ever inwards. The cosmos explored from behind closed doors, under the bedclothes, alone. Whereas Hide Before Dinner evoked the thrill, and casual cruelty, of unsupervised childhood summers -- a suburban gothic of grazed knees, hide-and-seek, nettle-stings -- Awkwardly Blissing Out is an album of more adult anxieties and metamorphoses. The ghouls in your neighbor's garden are still there, but have come to represent something else, something more mundane and empirically real, but no less terrifying. Struggles with time, distance, isolation, communication, and commitment; your memories have a heaviness now. You can hear aspects of ferric post-punk and hauntological/DIY electronics in Awkwardly Blissing Out's musical make-up... Flying Lizards' Secret Dub Life (1995) or Brigitte Fontaine's Comme À La Radio (1969)... not to mention two generations of Oz/NZ underground experimentation, introspection, and dereliction. Now, more than ever, F ingers' highly evolved, but naturalistic sound-world is difficult to precisely place or unpick: a mildew-y drug-dazed dub-scape, teeming but minimalism, framed by lonesome guitar strums, Manek's supple percussive reverberating basslines, and Karmel's painterly synth washes, over which dal Forno exploits her voice for its pure tonal character -- whether diffracting light across the loping, uncanny techno rhythms of "All Rolled Up" and the waterlogged psych-folk of "Off Silently", or sliced and looped into disorienting patterns of abstract glossolalia on "Time Passes" and the time-dilating nine-minute title track. Awkwardly Blissing Out is a landmark recording from one of the Southern hemisphere's most extraordinary, visionary freak units; a deep and sensuous trip that nonetheless prompts some uncomfortable -- or at any rate, bittersweet -- reflection on what we are, what we were, and what we might have been.
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BLACKEST 017CD
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With his ice-cold debut album, Pessimist delivers a defining work which represents the culmination of nearly a decade of collective research and development in underground drum'n'bass. It is hard to think of any producer, past or present, who has so skillfully and successfully bridged the sonics and sensibilities of d'n'b and techno. In fact, Pessimist makes drum'n'bass work as techno: combining the monotone, infinite-horizon quality of the latter with the rhythmic swerve and soundsystem heft of the former. Cutting edge techno-d'n'b hybrids form the backbone of this, his first LP, but there's more to it than that. Out of its relentlessly noir, paranoid, smoked-out dubscape, emerge fierce, Babylon-shall-fall jungle tear-outs ("Through The Fog"); zoned, acidic rave ("Peter Hitchens"); downtempo breakbeat excursions ("Glued"); sleek and rude "Balaklava"-esque steppers ("Spirals"); and passages of bleak, bombed-out industrial ambience. At times it feels like the missing link between British Murder Boys and Source Direct, or what might have happened if late '90s UK jungle-ists had listened more closely to Chain Reaction. The ruthless minimalism, and the tension which comes of that restraint; the swing and propulsion of the drum programming; the abyssal reverbs and long trails of delay; the deep and body-numbing sub-bass; the uncompromising palette of blacks and blues. Features Loop Faction and Overlook.
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BLACKEST 061LP
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Locks On Our Doors Not On Our Hearts utilizes EMS VCS3, Oberheim OB-Xa, and ARP 2600, in combination with cheap, contemporary consumer electronics. It is, in all intents and purposes, a short, cautionary story about love. It is also a folk-tale, a science fiction, a suicide note. Unusually for a long-form spoken word piece, it is immediate in its impact, and lasting in its effect. The narrator is damaged and unreliable: Martina Quake's voice, digitally processed into a flat, AI affectless-ness, conveys this all too well. Is this the vernacular poetry of the Uncanny Valley, or is it just that loss makes robots -- numb and listless not-quite-humans -- of us all? Locks revels in the space between the spontaneous and the programmed (what is a poem if not a program?). It's part Tales Of The Unexpected, part Susan Howe, part Ruth Rendell, part HAL (or Holly). Tarquin Manek's music is widescreen but understated... A becalmed landscape populated by distant drones, just-out-of-focus field recordings, and phased, minimalistic, Rhodes-style keys -- a sort of somber, lunar jazz. Just as Quake's words are cumulative in their tragedy, the music grows more agitated and turbulent, at certain points harking back to the smoked-out psycho-acoustics of Manek's 2015 Blackest Ever Black LP, Tarquin Magnet (BLACKEST 047LP, 2015), and his work in F ingers, with Samuel Karmel and Carla dal Forno. Last copies...
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BLACKEST 017LP
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Double LP version. With his ice-cold debut album, Pessimist delivers a defining work which represents the culmination of nearly a decade of collective research and development in underground drum'n'bass. It is hard to think of any producer, past or present, who has so skillfully and successfully bridged the sonics and sensibilities of d'n'b and techno. In fact, Pessimist makes drum'n'bass work as techno: combining the monotone, infinite-horizon quality of the latter with the rhythmic swerve and soundsystem heft of the former. Cutting edge techno-d'n'b hybrids form the backbone of this, his first LP, but there's more to it than that. Out of its relentlessly noir, paranoid, smoked-out dubscape, emerge fierce, Babylon-shall-fall jungle tear-outs ("Through The Fog"); zoned, acidic rave ("Peter Hitchens"); downtempo breakbeat excursions ("Glued"); sleek and rude "Balaklava"-esque steppers ("Spirals"); and passages of bleak, bombed-out industrial ambience. At times it feels like the missing link between British Murder Boys and Source Direct, or what might have happened if late '90s UK jungle-ists had listened more closely to Chain Reaction. The ruthless minimalism, and the tension which comes of that restraint; the swing and propulsion of the drum programming; the abyssal reverbs and long trails of delay; the deep and body-numbing sub-bass; the uncompromising palette of blacks and blues. Features Loop Faction and Overlook.
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BLACKEST 062EP
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Jac Berrocal, David Fenech, and Vincent Epplay return with their first record since 2015's Antigravity (BLACKEST 011CD/LP). The title track is a louche but volatile art-rock panther-stalk... a cracked jazz ode on street hassle, pitched somewhere between Vince Taylor-in-exile and PiL's Metal Box (1979)... Berrocal on vocals, a slurring stream-of-consciousness that becomes a yowl of despair; drums loose and dub-delayed; Fenech's jagged guitar phrasing, and Epplay's electronics set to flay. "Ice Exposure" situates Bef's mournful, muted trumpet in the eerie deep-freeze ambience that characterized Antigravity, and "Alienor En Aout" coaxes a gloomy poetry from affectless cold war radio broadcasts. Last copies...
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BLACKEST 054EP
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Five tracks of dark-side slither from somewhere under London - sidereal downers for all hardcore ravers. The dread energy of grime and bleep techno distilled into pungent electro-acoustic ooze. Paranoid street music meets the cosmic disturbances of musique concrete, the spine-freeze of isolationism and England's Hidden Reverse (2012). Staccato string stabs, murmured voices, black holes of reverb and pulverizing, body-numbing bass. Drums optional; Unwanted side-effects include nosebleeds, earaches, stomach cramps, and nausea.
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BLACKEST 055LP
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Gunshots At Crestridge is the second full-length album from Philadelphia's Jesse Dewlow, recording under the moniker People Skills. The follow-up to 2014's Siltbreeze set, Tricephalic Head. Ten sunken songs, derisively adorned with rhythm and rudimentary dub effects. Bedroom elegies for the lost and irretrievable, last-ditch spells for transformation and renewal. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley likened the previous record to "South Island New Zealand pop played inside of an armored car," and that description holds here: underneath the hoods of these wracked and weather-beaten recordings are melodies of disarming beauty and optimism, bordering on the (willfully) mawkish, bubblegum ground underfoot. Whether speaking through stately keyboard pastorals ("Mint Julep"), rat-arsed rock 'n roll slur ("89¢ Public Render") or sulphurous aggro-electronics (the two-part title track), Gunshots At Crestridge exposes, then seeks to redeem, all of our tiny acts of self-sabotage, all of our sins against time.
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BLACKEST 056LP
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Ashtray Navigations's To Make A Fool picks up where the nerve-damaged exotica of 2015's A Shimmering Replica left off - acerbic "surf" guitar and synthetic salt-breeze fit for the Tropic of Yorkshire. Instant immersion in a potent, pungent psychedelia that feels equal parts cosmic and aquatic. What Phil Todd wrenches out of his instrument these days is a language unto itself - a helical, grieving howl, a (super)natural efflorescence, beyond earthly description - ur-rock and post-everything. Equal emphasis is given here to pulsating machine rhythms and lush keyboard textures, with contributions by Mel O'Dubhshlaine. There were pre-echoes of all this in the recent Fluctuants (2015) and Aero Infinite (2014), but To Make A Fool feels like the fullest expression of something which was only glimpsed in those earlier works. The side-long "Spray Two" - gently eddying string-pads gradually slashed with fraught piano improvisations - is a masterpiece in its own right. At its delirious peak, the whole thing boils over into brooding, arpeggiated noir-techno - Michael Mann's steadicam roaming Leeds's B-roads, some kind of tangerine nightmare - before finally cooling into a bleary starfield of pure and sumptuous hypno-tone. This is a trip, in the most skull-splitting, soul-crinkling sense of the word, but it soothes and heals as well. A circular and transformative journey to the other side of the underneath, and a landmark recording from one of the most adept and visionary nodes in Britain's freak-out underground.
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BLACKEST 015LP
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2022 restock; LP version. Carla dal Forno presents her debut solo album You Know What It's Like, following time in cult Melbourne group Mole House and an earlier association with Blackest Ever Black as a member of F ingers and Tarcar. Her voice is an extraordinary instrument: both disarmingly conversational and glacially detached. It has something of the bedsit urbanity of Anna Domino, Marine Girls, Antena, or Helen Johnstone - stoned and deadpan - but it can also summon a gothic intensity that Nico or Kendra Smith would approve of. This voice is the perfect embodiment of dal Forno's emotionally ambiguous songs: their lyrics rooted in the everyday, observing and exposing a series of uncomfortable truths. "Fast Moving Cars" and "What You Gonna Do Now?" weigh up claustrophobia against loneliness, inertia against acceleration, doubling-down versus taking-off; the title track acknowledges the provisional nature of love and "real" intimacy, then decides to brave it anyway. By the time the startlingly sparse "The Same Reply" arrives, the sense of dejection is absolute. The vocal-led pieces are interspersed with richly evocative instrumentals. Smothered in tape-hiss and reverb, the seasick synthesizer miniatures "Italian Cinema" and "Dragon Breath" channel the twilit DIY whimsy of Flaming Tunes and Call Back The Giants. The drum machine and bassline of "DB Rip" are pure Chicago house, but then its dark choral drones nod to Dalis Car's dreams of blood-spattered Cornwall stone. "Dry The Rain" drinks from a stream of moon-musick that runs through Coil, In Gowan Ring, Third Ear Band, even the Raincoats's Odyshape (1981).
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CD
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BLACKEST 015CD
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Carla dal Forno presents her debut solo album You Know What It's Like, following time in cult Melbourne group Mole House and an earlier association with Blackest Ever Black as a member of F ingers and Tarcar. Her voice is an extraordinary instrument: both disarmingly conversational and glacially detached. It has something of the bedsit urbanity of Anna Domino, Marine Girls, Antena, or Helen Johnstone - stoned and deadpan - but it can also summon a gothic intensity that Nico or Kendra Smith would approve of. This voice is the perfect embodiment of dal Forno's emotionally ambiguous songs: their lyrics rooted in the everyday, observing and exposing a series of uncomfortable truths. "Fast Moving Cars" and "What You Gonna Do Now?" weigh up claustrophobia against loneliness, inertia against acceleration, doubling-down versus taking-off; the title track acknowledges the provisional nature of love and "real" intimacy, then decides to brave it anyway. By the time the startlingly sparse "The Same Reply" arrives, the sense of dejection is absolute. The vocal-led pieces are interspersed with richly evocative instrumentals. Smothered in tape-hiss and reverb, the seasick synthesizer miniatures "Italian Cinema" and "Dragon Breath" channel the twilit DIY whimsy of Flaming Tunes and Call Back The Giants. The drum machine and bassline of "DB Rip" are pure Chicago house, but then its dark choral drones nod to Dalis Car's dreams of blood-spattered Cornwall stone. "Dry The Rain" drinks from a stream of moon-musick that runs through Coil, In Gowan Ring, Third Ear Band, even the Raincoats's Odyshape (1981).
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LP
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BLACKEST 053LP
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Includes MP3/FLAC download code. Wreck His Days is dubbed-out cosmic pastorals and politically exasperated techno-exotica from Blackest Ever Black's most secretive and shape-shifting project, Tomorrow The Rain Will Fall Upwards. Guest contributors include Conrad and Jonnine Standish of HTRK, Genevieve McGuckin (These Immortal Souls), and Lucas Santanna. The ghosts of Les Baxter, Rowland S. Howard and Nina Simone are also in attendance. But whoever is pulling the strings remains hidden. Structurally Wreck His Days recalls the grand collective statements of This Mortal Coil or Massive Attack, but musically its dreamlike overtures have more in common with Deux Filles, Global Communication, Arthur Russell or Penguin Cafe Orchestra. It roams far and wide: from near-Balearic piano loops of the title track, to the Audrey Horne-worthy death-jazz of "Ghost From The Coast" and the hulking, bass-heavy soundsystem weapon "Reverberasia". The swelling, uplifting astral psychedelia of "...And I Tried So Hard", while "I Beat As I Sleep As I Dream" reprises the bleak existential synth drift of T.T.R.W.F.U.'s extraordinary 2014 10", How Great A Fame Has Departed. A deep-seated socialist impulse drives the whole thing.
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BLACKEST 012LP
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LP version. Blackest Ever Black presents Af Ursin's 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato. Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Van Luijk's process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique. He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Aura Legato is one of van Luijk's darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings: a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence - dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den - and has earned comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS.
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2LP
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BLACKEST 014LP
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Double LP version. Raime presents their second album, Tooth. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focused futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely up-tempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms. No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of Tooth is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and sound-system sensibilities, but Tooth pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another. If Quarter Turns was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then Tooth is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.
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CD
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BLACKEST 012CD
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Blackest Ever Black presents the first CD edition of Af Ursin's 2005 masterpiece Aura Legato. Af Ursin is the alter ego of Finnish autodidact composer/improviser Timo van Luijk. His work is rooted in the use of acoustic instruments (wind, percussion, strings), but his special sensitivity to the timbral qualities of each instrument, and his deft blurring of them, results in a sound-world that is mysterious, amorphous and hallucinatory, full of suggestive shadows, creaks and whispers. Van Luijk's process begins always with pure improvisation: music played in an intuitive, sensual way, without the employment of conscious technique. He performs and overdubs each instrumental component himself, and out of this process micro-structures and loose arrangements emerge: the piece becomes an improvised composition. Aura Legato is one of van Luijk's darker and more acutely psychedelic offerings: a work of profound interiority, but one that also conjures images of old Europe and fin-de-siècle decadence - dabblings in Thelema, the fog of the opium-den - and has earned comparisons to Third Ear Band, Nurse With Wound, Mirror and HNAS.
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CD
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BLACKEST 014CD
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Raime presents their second album, Tooth. The widescreen melancholia of their 2012 debut, Quarter Turns Over A Living Line, gives way to an urgent and focused futurism, in the shape of eight fiercely up-tempo, minimal, meticulously crafted electro-acoustic rhythm tracks. The DNA of dub-techno, garage/grime and post-hardcore rock music spliced into sleek and predatory new forms. No let-up, no hesitation. Needlepoint guitar, deftly junglist drum programming, brooding synths and lethal sub-bass drive the engine. The production is immaculate, high definition. No hiss, no obscuring drones or extraneous noise: the music of Tooth is wide-open and exposed. The seeds of its supple dancehall biomechanics can be found in the self-titled 2013 EP by Raime side-project Moin, an ahead-of-its-time synthesis of art-rock and sound-system sensibilities, but Tooth pushes the template further, binding the disparate elements together so tightly that they become indistinguishable from one another. If Quarter Turns was an album that confronted total loss and self-destruction, even longed for it, then Tooth is the sound of resistance and counter-attack: cunning, quick, resolute; calling upon stealth as much as brute-force. At a time when so many pay lip service to experimentation without ever fully committing themselves or their work to it, Raime return from three years of deep, dedicated studio research with a bold and original new music: staunch, rude, and way out in front.
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