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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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2LP
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HALC 027LP
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A profoundly original record steeped in millennia of pre-Islamic (pagan) and Islamic theology and Arabic tradition, Dhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-Zaqum translates into "a patch of shade under the zaqum tree" and sees Myslma convey an ancient sense of existential angst via the contemporary prism of electronic music in his singular style of emo-R&B and weightless grime expression. Although entirely sung in a form of classical Arabic that even modern-day speakers may not comprehend, Msylma's impassioned delivery and intonation conveys the gravity of the album's themes in no uncertain terms, meaning that native and non-Arabic speakers alike will be absorbed by the album's emotional pull. Turning cues from a rich knowledge of pre-Islamic and Quranic poetry into a work of subversive literary fiction, Msylma charts a transition from a romanticized childhood, thru the rising self-awareness of adolescence, to problems with parents and the sardonic cynicism of adulthood, before looping back to childhood, and resolving with a burned-out, sore conclusion in an eternal here and now; effectively mulling ontological and existential themes that surely resonate with a lived human experience wherever you're listening from. Whether channeling a pained sort of R&B/soul spirit in the aching delivery and floating chords of opener "Inqirad (Rihab-U Dhakir)", singing from the midst of a weightless grime skirmish in "Min Bab AlKamal-i w AlDawam", or scaling the lofty heights of "Astaqi AlGhamam", no knowledge of the lyrics' meaning is required in order to immerse in and empathize with Myslma's music. But if you're the inquisitive type, maybe a quick Google translate of the track titles will offer more concrete pointers to each song's meaning and, in turn, open listeners to a world that's familiar yet beyond their immediate conception. This is an album that will stick in the mind long after the music stops playing, opening windows into parallel dimensions as fascinating and dramatic as the visions of Scott Walker, as haunting as Omar Souleyman's lamenting mawwals, or futuristic as Fatima Al Qadiri. Follows standout vocal work on Zuli's Terminal LP, The Wire's #2 Album of the Year in 2018 (UIQ 003LP). Design and layout by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier. Mastered by Al Carlson. Produced by the artist, Zuli, and 1127. Edition of 300; includes insert.
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LP
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HALC 028LP
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Bit of an enigma this one, the debut release -- a decade in the making -- from an artist about which little is known, Wayne Phoenix. soaring wayne phoenix story the earth is a fascinatingly intimate yet elusive record honed over years by a trained pianist recording a kind of all-encompassing audio diary that is reminiscent of everything from Klein to Burial, to RZA's incredible Ghost Dog original soundtrack. After marinating in the archive while trends passed by, the fleeting stop/start collage of honest humility and ephemeral thoughts in story the earth resembles a time capsule of a former, or parallel, self; one the artist is only now at ease to come terms with. Vacillating moments of profound lucidity and penetrative pangs of anxiety, Wayne lays his soul bare in that most vulnerable way that can sometimes lead to great art, and finds himself in solid, empathetic company among Halcyon Veil's sensitively intuitive spirits such as Myslma, Mhysa, and of course, Rabit. One of those debuts that feels uncannily familiar on the first encounter, the album dredges a remarkable and unshakeable depth of feeling and human insight via its mazy tile of vignettes, drifting from softly textured, deep blue witching hour logic to more grizzled, Tricky-esque realizations and glossolalic expressions that practically, poetically say as much as his legible lyrics. In between, pockets of fractured music box melody and sorely textured beats flower and weed in the gaps, sounding something like RZA's Ghost Dog OST adapted from dilapidated NYC rooftops to the same drizzly London streets inhabited by Burial, Klein, and Mica Levi. Maybe best of all though, there's very little pretense to this record. It simply sounds like the artist is working out their feelings through music in an exposed, genuine way that doesn't matter if nobody else ever hears it. Wayne Phoenix's frayed, dreamlike tapestry of self-reflections are set to become part of our contemporary consciousness in 2020. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. One-sided LP; transparent yellow vinyl; edition of 300.
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2LP
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HALC 021LP
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IVVVO mounts an ambitious debut album for Rabit's Halcyon Veil with doG, a double-LP of synth-driven panoramas painted in neon, riddled with rave tropes and rendered in hyperrealist, cinematic sound design. The follow-up to Good, Bad, Baby, Horny (2017) sees him unpackage and build upon that EP in all directions at once in a viscerally corporeal and sorely emotional salvo intended to be taken as his definitive opus to date. Across its 15 songs the London-based, Portuguese producer spells out a narrative as vividly hypermodern as a Nicolas Winding Refn flick but set in the fashionista underbelly of London, with crucial assistance on two of the album's highlights coming from soundtrack composer and Hollywood Medieval producer Maxwell Sterling. Like a magpie with fancy taste, IVVVO picks the shiniest and most affective elements of contemporary dance/rock/pop and electronica -- from deconstructed trance synths to blockbuster sound design and choral arrangements -- and then weaves them into searing, reactive expressions of modernity. The results are skizzy, veering from anxious to ecstatic and often in the space of one song. Kicking off with convulsive samples of Korn's Jonathan Davis wedged into the nerve-jangling opener "This Is Dog", the album bleeds with emotion at each step, from the heart-bursting Lorenzo Senni-esque style of "Life" to the clenched and knotted grunge reflux of "Forever Your Mouth" to the visceral, Arca-like incision of "Blade", while two pieces with Maxwell Sterling, the Coil-like arabesque "Untitled" and the vertiginous flight of "Last Days", seal the deal with decadent flourishes. Album design and photography by Lane Stewart and Collin Fletcher. Mastered and cut by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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LP
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HALC 020LP
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Rabit presents Life After Death, his third full-length album. The album was recorded in home studios in Houston, Texas and Paris, France, and is the culmination of two years of experiments in various forms of synthesis. Like Les Fleurs Du Mal (HALC 016LP, 2017), Life After Death marks a further advancement in the development of his own distinct musical language. Realized through genre-free expressions that pull inspiration from Surrealist art to DJ Screw, Enigma, and Japanese ambient artists like Hiroshi Yoshimura, the album has an exploratory, transcendental core. The project's artwork (a cut-up mandala?) can be seen as a reflection of the artist's kaleidoscopic approach to this pivotal new album. This is a transformative moment not only for the creator but for the listener as well. Rabit notes, "the probing and revisiting of genres in electronic music felt fetishistic and limiting and wasn't the best way for me to communicate." Instead, his approach reflects a wider, broader sound field. Rabit adds, "Exploring sound is alchemy if you want it to be, but I would be wary to explain these aspects of my work because there's a raw understated quality to the record that I want to respect. I think the occult term is interesting because I don't hear this explored in music in ways that I find relevant. I leave it to time and the intelligent listener to make up their own meaning." Life After Death is in some ways the sonic equivalent of an early Alejandro Jodorowsky movie, or maybe even like being guided through a tarot reading by Jodorowsky himself. It's an alchemical, mysterious and captivating listen, yet also futuristic. Rabit is thus further removed from his early work for labels like Tri Angle by building himself a more dreamlike, fluid universe. As he says, "Surrealism is still around in different ways; it is a feeling. I think there's something trying to communicate itself under the surface in the tools we all use to express. It's important to me to let that speak. This new way I create is more satisfying than ever because there are layers and feelings that reveal themselves over time." Artwork by Collin Fletcher. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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LP
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HALC 018LP
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Adoration is the restrained yet ravishing début album by Mélissa Gagné, aka CECILIA, a Rome-based Montreal artist who previously lit up two songs on Rabit's Les Fleurs Du Mal album (HALC 016LP, 2017), released an EP for Yves Tumor's label (2017), and now makes a commanding and significant impression with one of 2018's most haunting LPs, a filigree dramaturgy of trip hop, ersatz film score music, and ambient collage. CECILIA wrote and produced Adoration, singing in English, French, and Italian with accompaniment by mutual spirits such as her friend Jasmine Pisapia and the poet activist Griséldis Réal, who help to render a stark yet subtly gilded cross-section of her psyche, which places the listener as dark interpreter to a series of tumultuous inner dialogues. "One is summoned to whisper truth, beauty, tragedy to demon ears." Incubated for 18 months between Montreal, Toronto, and New York, Adoration reads like intimately diaristic pages recalling an amorphous lucid dream. In that phantasmagoric headspace she meditates on loss and romanticism, using a shifting backdrop of highly visual stimuli to frame her thoughts and bring them to life with an uncannily immersive effect perhaps not felt so strongly since Félicia Atkinson's Hand In Hand in 2017 (SHELTER 081CD/LP). Electronic bass and percussion are shadowed with traces of synth and guitar improvisations, but the one consistent element is the female voice. Sometime detached, glossolalic, and at others uncannily familiar, plaintive, that vocal presence is integral to the LP's quietly absorbing atmosphere, and even if the listener can't understand their direct meaning, they connote so much more through abstracted inference and ambiguity. Following her early forays made with the Charity Whore EP for Yves Tumor's Grooming label, and previous work as DJ/producer Babi Audi, along with her hybrid stage works, CECILIA ties all those strands into an illusory yet highly distinguished work set to resonate with listeners from myriad backgrounds and disciplines.
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LP
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HALC 014LP
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Mhysa is in possession of a totally compelling voice and production style, both feeding into a sound that's prone to intuitively explore and reassert the limits of R&B, electronica, or modern soul in 2017. She makes a big impression with fantasii, her first album proper following dispatches with NON and a lauded mixtape alongside chukwumaa as SCRAAATCH. Think Klein's freeform R&B structures riddled with Rabit-like production tics, and you're in grasping distance of the fractious but idiosyncratically coherent styles inhabited by this highly intriguing addition to the vanguard of new music from the fertile margins of American music. Against a refreshing general lack of broken glass or gunshot samples, the self-described "Black queer femme cultural producer, sound designer, womanist + Diva" animates swirling, impossibly balanced structures with a tearaway imagination, keening from vaulted, pitch-shifting gospel in "Special Need Intro" to a multi-dimensional, abstract grime cover of Prince in the course of 11 songs. The Klein comparisons are apt, the pair share a unique perception of R&B and church music as a gateway to other, dreamlike dimensions. From the way Mhysa appropriates the ecclesiastic psychedelia of physical church spaces in the reverb-storm of "Glory Be Black" to the rugged ambient inversion of R&B's usual warmth in the six-minute highlight "Bb", or undermining the conventions of club music in the A-grade anti-bangers "Strobe" and "You Not About That Lyfe", she offers a particular example of the contemporary, young, Black, and queer experience. No doubt, fantasii is a vital addition to the canon of boundary pushing and resetting music and politics also espoused by Elysia Crampton, Rabit, ANGEL-HO, or Chino Amobi -- one of 2017's most rewarding albums. In Pitchfork's Top 10 Experimental Albums of 2017. Read more about E.Jane here.
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LP
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HALC 016LP
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Les Fleurs Dul Mal is the absorbingly grotesque sophomore album by pioneering artist, DJ, and label owner Eric C. Burton, aka Rabit, who, along with regular collaborators such as Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton, is in part responsible for defining the contemporary conflux of avant club, folk, and noise musics. On his follow-up to Communion (2015), Rabit indulges his fascinations with psychedelic themes in an ambitious attempt to locate his sense of self amid increasingly chaotic environments. The result is a personal milestone for the artist; a riveting tableaux of hyper sensual texture, color, and melody, forming a densely detailed and layered prism to best peer upon the abyss between his reality, your own, and a shared consensual hallucination. In aesthetic and intent, Rabit boldly embraces the vacuum left by the late, great Coil; realizing a genre-agnostic consolidation of folk, new age, drone, and noise tropes transcended through acousmatic processing and modular synthesis, in this case fittingly provided by erstwhile Coil member Drew McDowell. In the process, he potentially triangulates Les Fleurs Dul Mal with records by fellow Coil fiends, Elysia Crampton's Demon City (2016) and Chino Amobi's Paradiso (2017), who all essentially project bold, new, independent worlds unto themselves which find common links in Coil's canon. Unfolding in 12 movements, like some future classical tragedy, Rabit gestures his sounds with a remarkable freedom of rhythmic meter and freehand strokes that belies its meticulous construction below the surface. Cecilia's vocals and the sharp strings of opener "Possessed" suggest the spirit of Baudelaire's text heard at street level, while the dissonant stress of "Bleached World" -- a secret weapon 'til now -- expresses a beautifully bittersweet anguish, and the recursive curdle of "Ontological Graffiti" catches in the throat with uncannily emotive effect. "The Whole Bag" locates his firmest dembow rhythms, but buried under collapsing sidereal pressure, and Cecelia's return in closer "Elevation" perfectly emulates something like a new age tristesse, which defines the record's humanity in the face of such uncompromising synthetic sensations. RIYL: Coil, Elysia Crampton, Autechre, Visionist. Artwork by Collin Fletcher; Photo by Lane Stewart. Mastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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LP
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HALC 012LP
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A Goal Is An Image is City's debut LP for Rabit's Halcyon Veil, providing an elusive yet tangibly bittersweet testament to the Vancouver artist's hybrid of experimental metal and weightless electronics. Further to his Arcadia mix for Halcyon Veil (2016), City distills that release's ideas into 11 naturally tempestuous takes on the digital zeitgeist, ripping away its hi-fi sheen to reveal a reactive ecology of overgrown, semi-organic textures and pranging rhythms wrapped up in chaotic harmony. Getting right under the skin of his thing, Will Ballantyne has realized a mean contribution to the conversation around peripheral club music and its electronic production, morphing its perimeters between computer game and film soundtrack tropes, soundsystem-testing prangs, and styles foreign to the putative club experience. The effect is simultaneously hyperreal and severed from the daily grind; a simulacrum of impossibility animated with physically reactive impact. Across the album listeners are torn in and out of "the box", perpetually reframing his sound between naturally elegant and digitally unreal environments in a way that resonates with the LP artwork. He establishes this upending uncertainty with the gravelly whorl of field recordings, processed textures and floating, Coil-like harpsichord motifs in "Provinces" and "Your Stream", harnessing a sense of struggle against gravity in the buckshot-riddled mass of "Pain/Power" and with searing trance riffs nailed into place on "End Zone" like Lorenzo Senni running a gauntlet of snipers. City's experi-metal impetus bleeds thru most strongly in the glowering poise of "Inevitable", and with needling bite in the towering recursive riffs of "Ffaith", quite literally galvanized through electronic process, leading to the record's most captivating, expansive pinnacle with field recordings and sample pack presets diffused into the otherworldly detachment of "SAR" and his trance dress-down, "Immaculate". As Halcyon Veil's first full-length feature album, A Goal Is An Image arguably epitomizes the label's aesthetic -- unflinchingly upfront and uncannily emotive -- and gives voice to a true outsider spirit that will be recognized by anyone of a similar disposition. RIYL: Lorenzo Senni, Logos, Rabit, Croww. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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12"
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HALC 005EP
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Debut of zinging, weightless productions by New Orleans-based Mistress. Hollygroove is articulated with an American diction, yet draws heavily on UK grime.
First is the shuddering echo chamber drill menace of "Lie Dormant", an aching balance between stasis and cocked tension, whilst the dank-but-dainty southern bounce of "Hollygrove" nails a sort of gaunt 3-step swagger aching for an acapella, and "Mjolnir" sounds like a Scratchy '05 riddim sent into orbit. Classic grime sound is twisted back into the twinkling 8-bar dancer, "Kanagawa Homicide" and "Behemoth" veers back to U.S./Latino club sounds. "Gatekeeper" ascends/descends into heavenly hellish, weightless baroque synth structure.
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12"
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HALC 003EP
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Rabit's unpredictable Halycon Veil imprint presents a quartet of reticulated grime and noise mutations from London-based Anthoney J Hart aka Imaginary Forces. And What? finds Imaginary Forces at his most brutal and disciplined, continuing to draw on his British heritage with signals to the ghosts of '90s/'00s pirate radio on one hand and references to masters of early electronics and literature on the other, creating something visceral and more immediate than his previous releases. The swarming concrète jungle militancy of "And What?" sets a scorched aesthetic, steeling the body for the pavement-cracking hooves and atonal buzz of "Chat 'Bout?" before cannily conflating the atmospheres of pirate radio and J. G. Ballard with the eviscerating intensity of "High Rise." "Make Ends Meet" deals in instrumental grammar of glottal grime galvanized with glossolalic noise texture, and "Makes Ends Meet (London Something Version)" whips those same elements into a strobing vortex of UK-style footwork rufige. This is the fifth 12" by Imaginary Forces following editions for Hart's Sleep Codes label, Fang Bomb, and Bedouin Records, plus a CD on Entr'acte. Its release coincides with the release of Hart's 2016 Raw Trax LP as Basic Rhythm on Type (TYPE 128LP). RIYL Pan Sonic, DJ Rashad, DJ Scud. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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12"
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HALC 002EP
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Rabit's Halycon Veil label swerves left with a freakish release from the Korean-born, Danish-raised Why Be (DJ Hvad's Syg Nok, Janus regular, Total Freedom's 2012 Blasting Voice compilation). Grime, bumpy techno, and internet-world electronics add up to a frictional but fluid batch. "Heroin Hat" crosses wires between ersatz Afro melodies and sublow techno with the playful dexterity of Physical Therapy; the massive blackened mass of "Whalin (Kyselina OST)" proves an impressive aptitude for beatless, abstract sound-design. He glances askew at ballroom house from a loop vortex with "Deeq"; its bitch-slapping counterpart "Late (Laser Ha)" throws down limb-synched edits for the voguers.
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12"
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HALC 001EP
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Evaporate is the first issue from Rabit's highly promising Halcyon Veil label, and also the exceptional solo debut from Londoner Myth, 21 years old at the time of this release. It rotates seven slick grime and 2-step instrumentals including the instantly recognizable version of his and Rabit's flip of Ciara's "Backseat Love," which is currently still under heavy rotation from Rinse FM. It's all as sharp-cut, raw, and moody as anything from Zomby or Visionist, but with a unique, salty streak of emotion running thru its skeletal structures, at its most potent in the majestic "Lonely" or the iridescent 2-step twinkle of "Phoenix."
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