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viewing 1 To 25 of 37 items
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2LP
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MP 060LP
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$35.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/12/2023
Cristian Vogel, the esteemed electronic music producer and composer, is set to release his 27th album, Fase Montuno. This highly personal release is a visionary take on the futuristic potential of Latin American electronica. Set to be released on Achim Szepanski's legendary Mille Plateaux label, Fase Montuno is poised to make a significant impact on the electronic music scene in 2023. The label's commitment to innovative and genre-defying music is a perfect match for Vogel's boundary-pushing creativity, and promises to deliver an unforgettable listening experience for fans old and new. Don't miss out on this latest release from one of electronic music's most talented and visionary artists. Fase Montuno is an essential addition to any music lover's collection, and a testament to Vogel's continuing relevance and creativity in the electronic music world.
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2LP
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MP 049LP
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Double LP version. First ever vinyl release. Reissue, originally released in 2002. "The Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers -- from social networks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet strives to express. We need to cool down. Thomas Köner's music can help change the pace of our perceptions: 1) In Daikan (2002) -- a Japanese term meaning 'the coldest' or 'the coldest part of the year' -- the ear stretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a sonic drama offers the slowness thanks to which the skin of perceptions can reconstitute themselves; icequakes awaken listeners to the frozen life without scaring them. 2) 'Banlieue du Vide', considered by many to be Thomas Köner's most iconic audiovisual work and best kept secret, has not been released previously. It is in the collection of a couple of art museums, e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has been awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004, in the category Digital Musics. Banlieue du Vide is the result of months of time-lapse observations of empty streets in the Finnish Arctic Circle, shown in glacially slow slow-motion. Phase cancellation, on which all noise cancelling technology is based, here affects the perception of time, the sense of the flow of time extinguishing itself. At this stage the void is not yet empty, traces of past noise fill the listeners mind with their haunting presence. A remastered stereo version of the soundtrack is released as a special premiere as a bonus track of the Daikan album. Listening to this album, an excess of heat turns into an empowering coldness -- like the transient feeling of our terrestrial embodiment in the midst of entropy." --Fréderic Neyrat, October 2022
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MP 049CD
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Reissue, originally released in 2002. "The Earth is burning, covering all environments in ashes. Smoke comes to us from computers -- from social networks accelerating the spread of burnt affects, damaging our ability to feel and respond to what the planet strives to express. We need to cool down. Thomas Köner's music can help change the pace of our perceptions: 1) In Daikan (2002) -- a Japanese term meaning 'the coldest' or 'the coldest part of the year' -- the ear stretches until touching the depth of time that persists in the ice; a sonic drama offers the slowness thanks to which the skin of perceptions can reconstitute themselves; icequakes awaken listeners to the frozen life without scaring them. 2) 'Banlieue du Vide', considered by many to be Thomas Köner's most iconic audiovisual work and best kept secret, has not been released previously. It is in the collection of a couple of art museums, e.g. the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and has been awarded the Golden Nica at Prix Ars Electronica in 2004, in the category Digital Musics. Banlieue du Vide is the result of months of time-lapse observations of empty streets in the Finnish Arctic Circle, shown in glacially slow slow-motion. Phase cancellation, on which all noise cancelling technology is based, here affects the perception of time, the sense of the flow of time extinguishing itself. At this stage the void is not yet empty, traces of past noise fill the listeners mind with their haunting presence. A remastered stereo version of the soundtrack is released as a special premiere as a bonus track of the Daikan album. Listening to this album, an excess of heat turns into an empowering coldness -- like the transient feeling of our terrestrial embodiment in the midst of entropy." --Fréderic Neyrat, October 2022
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MP 012LP
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Grains is the debut album by Numinos on Mille Plateaux. The Cologne-based producer, DJ, author, and lecturer has been writing the tech-reviews in Groove for many years, tests equipment for various specialist magazines and teaches at the Institute for Pop Music (IFPOM) and Institute for Computer Music and Electronic Media (ICEM) of the Folkwang University. In his current creative phase, he conceptually deals with the topic of "granular synthesis". A "grain" is thus, to a certain extent, a tiny spectral snapshot from a larger musical context -- an infinitely expandable, flowing intermediate state. This is also where the connection to the cover motif is found that shows the negative of a photograph of a wild field and has been taken Bernd Adamek-Schyma: The negative as an eternal intermediate state between the motif and the developed image. And despite the fact that Numinos has a fully equipped studio with a wide range of instruments, the 20 Euro iPad app "Borderlands Granular" turned out to be the creative catalyst that enabled the trained pianist to implement his sound ideas with direct haptic influence. The app gives the Cologne-based sound artist the opportunity to extract tiny fragments from the sample based on their specific tonality, to recontextualize them and thus work out structures that are not audible at the original tempo. The results are polyrhythmic sound scenes that appear harsh, artificial and strange in a moment, only to transform into contemplative, warm and familiar frequency stratification minutes later. Numinos deceives the listener in many ways. Above all with the supposed rhythm that does not exist. Because in fact almost all granular clusters within the pieces run in completely asynchronous loops. The addition of a simple kick drum then forces the brain to suddenly hear apparent triplets, quintoles, or dotted eighths in these mathematically completely chaotic structures, which are purely fallacy.
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MP 046LP
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Ibrahim Alfa Jnr released techno music since the age of 17. He started to play piano when was six years old and has a master degree in sonic arts. He is known worldwide as a live act and DJ. His first album on Mille Plateaux is a fine example of "hypercussion", which implies a new rhythmic A-logic when beats split or shoot each other off, or when they overlap and mutate into high-pitched hums and rattlesnake breaks; accelerating, before music again blurs into the grains of noise or calm science fiction landscapes and at the same time builds gigantic sound walls. And such music, as far as its conceptualization is concerned, does not have to submit itself to technology at all, but must understand itself as a form that can be recombined with technology.
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MP 041LP
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Melody Tomb is the first album in a new collaboration between Tokyo artist Teruyuki Kurihara and London drone pop band The Leaf Library. The nine tracks here have in common a metallic hum and a minimal, austere kind of beauty that recalls Teru's work on his 2020 Frozen Dust album (MP 004LP). Machine tones mix with static, noise, and warm drones, whilst in other places the lineage of classic mangled Warp hardware is visible. In March 2020, The Leaf Library sent their friend Teru a batch of synth drones to play with in the hope a new collaboration would be born. "From the first time we heard Teru's music we knew we wanted to make something with him," say the band. "It has been such a pleasure seeing him take our minimal synth parts and turn them into something really strange and beautiful." The track "Kite Beach" was the first to arrive, featuring on The Leaf Library-curated Object Ten compilation on Objects Forever in 2021, with the rest of the album slowly appearing over the last year. The artists hope to continue the collaboration with another album in the near future. For fans of: Autechre, Biosphere, Ben Frost.
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MP 044CS
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Statique is the fifth full length album on Mille Plateaux and Force Inc. labels by Automatisme, the Canadian musician and conceptual artist William Jourdain active since 2011. Jourdain met the label owner Achim Szepanski in 2019 and did an album in solo (Alter-, Mille Plateaux, 2020) plus four others in collaborations (with iadema, Beyond Humans, Stefan Paulus, and Viatorism in duo with Pheek). Automatisme now returns as a solo act on that label. The results are, on one side, an expanded vision of fast rhythmic clicks and cuts, like on his "Alter-Rate" tracks and that are entitled "Ultra-Rate" on the Statique album. On the other side, it is the multiple "Ultra-Scape" tracks that are an augmented version of the granulized ambient dub techno he developed since the beginning of the Viatorism moniker. Jourdain adds elements of chaos and perturbation into algorithmic electronic music like static electricity is the presence of a disturbing body in a circuit.
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MP 045CS
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Fathersong is Rick Bull's eighth album release under his Deepchild moniker, arriving ten years after the former Berliner's Neukölln Burning album (Thoughtless Music). Exploring a shimmering post-dub vista, rich in granular textures, Fathersong draws influence and inspiration from contemporaries like Fennesz, Tim Hecker, Burial, and Vladislav Delay. Unshackled from the percussive undertow of previous albums, the album's palette nonetheless displays the familiar, sensual pulse of Bull's musical aesthetic.
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2LP
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MP 040LP
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The new Cristian Vogel album 1Zhuayo sounds as if non-musicology and ultra-blackness is not an end or a destination to be arrived at, but as if it is the point of departure, much like tomorrow relates to the day after tomorrow. As if we have left the space of certainties and are moving instead into one of manifold possibilities. They are anticipated in the micro-structures of sound, which is the process of playing with and against the software. Beyond genre delimitation and fragmentation, it is non-music in the post, without itself immediately becoming a cliché, like deconstructed club music or hyper pop. Without being superficially conceptual, the musical material alone succeeds in creating a different, coherent, sonically possible world.
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MP 034LP
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Double LP version. Aubrite was first released 1995 on the label Barooni. Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. His music is often defined as dark ambient or drone, because of the use of low frequencies, material from gongs, shadowy resonances and boreal ambience, but at the same time its sound with constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, what makes it organic, human and almost comforting. Köner's soundscapes are no longer simply dark, the question now is that of a profound blackness. Such is the generic darkness of the abyss, the void and vacuum, the darkness of more than silence, of catastrophe and cataclysm, but also the soundscapes have utopian moments. It is a cosmological blackness, the black of nonbeing. "The more subtractive, the blacker the sound synthesis", Köner writes. Such blackness is non-music. Music will never be music until it ceases to represent and begins to sound like non-music or monochrome. "Whoever hears the distortion of all sounds, will soon become Ultrablack. Whoever listens to this world, but has no affection for any of its sites, even to the place of Black Noise, may soon reach Ultrablack. Whoever understands the spirit of impartiality through ten thousand million partial tones, hears Ultrablack and can no longer be measured. No measures, no enclosures, no properties are the sign of ultrablack scores." Roland Speckle helped with production of the album. Aubrite is the name of a group of meteorites named for Aubres, a small achondrite meteorite that fell near Nyons in 1836. Includes two bonus tracks. Double LP version marks the first time the album has been released on vinyl.
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MP 035LP
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Double LP version. Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. Following the re-release of the legendary album Biokinetics (MP 026CD/LP), which is superb subaquatic dub techno, Mille Plateaux re-release Porter Ricks' first album on the label, a self-titled album released in 1997. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkiness with an underlying almost organic rhythm might, but still, it's not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkiness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.
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MP 005LP
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Alter- : A reaction to the alter modernism in sound art. Automatisme on the album: "I am inspired by how the art historian Nicolas Bourriaud defines the Altermodernism. Bourriaud understands the term 'alter' as a way to mean 'other'. The alter modernism would be another modernity that is different from the avant-garde modernism and post-modernism. More precisely, this is a new paradigm from the XXIe century with alternative ways to motivate artists to be more radical in art by traveling in the physical and digital world, by cutting the frontiers and by creating other time lines. I apply the 'alter' subject to time and to landscape and those, to the rhythmic and the ambient glitch music."
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CD
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MP 013CD
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Second album for Blakk Harbor, the Greek Berlin based act Angelos Liaros-Copola and prolific sound designer of Native Instruments (DE), delivering disrespectful broken tech noise with this release. Waves of noise and advanced sound design through pattern repetition and pulsating percussive blasts. Fairly terrorizing yet hypnotic with flashes of raw electricity and feedbacks riding on thick grainy waveform textures. Broken hardware transmissions and in-depth manipulated signal processing tamed to craft film-scaping monolithic sub-techno structures. Staying devoted to his cinematic approach in music and darker narrative storytelling A Modern Dialect is an edgy backlash on the modern dehumanized declining society, a harsh uncompromising "dialect" against an ever-deteriorating globalization.
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2LP
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MP 009LP
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Downfall is the first album under the name Saito created by Lena Saito, aka Galcid, and produced by accomplished analog synthesizer guru, Hisashi Saito, aka Lena's husband. Having descended from a long line of Japanese sword-smiths, the industrial sound of smashing steel is embedded in Lena's DNA and reflected in her music, however there are also refined, hypnotic tones showing a side with more finesse. The music itself is not scored and is predominantly improvised. Words and vocals are adlibbed as well. Sometimes the machines respond as if through telekinesis, altogether emitting a sound which can be categorized somewhere in the range between modern experimental dance music and something possibly making more sense to enlightened minds a thousand years in the future.
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MP 033CD
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Aphàiresis (Greek meaning "abstraction") is an audiovisual work composed between 2017 and 2019, whose aim is to investigate the relationship between materiality and immateriality, between presence and metaphysics. It is from the fruitful relationship between materiality -- imperfection -- and immateriality -- perfection -- that, through a filtration and regeneration process, a different and new world is created in which the single elements lose a part of themselves on their way to reorganize themselves in a higher order. Starting from static, interferences, distortions of obsolete projection and visual equipment -- such as, VHS and analog projectors -- in old film shots, the composer makes the visual element dialogue with the sound, mainly drawn from data bending processes, revealing something about the nature of the digital medium, which would otherwise be opaque. On the other hand, by using artifacts from analog projectors, he shows the transmission specificity of this visual reproduction device, revealing the presence of an inherent historical contrast. The intuition of using the invisible substrate that makes up what appears to us as a compositional material reveals the will to examine the technological element beyond its normal functions. Here is the background turning into the subject, and opening up new perspectives of artistic research.
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2LP
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MP 029LP
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Simona Zambolis's first album on Mille Plateaux Ethernity is a piece of haunting music -- vibrating, pulsing and cutting through the concrete and the chaos at the same time, when you listen close enough. The album is a journey through trans-reality, not only as a melancholic drama, but also as a travel to alien worlds, hence as a necessity of an electronic intervention. Ethernithy is radical fiction in a non-expressive, non-melancholic and ultra-black sense. Profound music demands blackness, not silence. When we speak of communication or mediation, the reference is always that of the mystical tradition of the via negativa; mediation and communication always imply the dissolution of sender and receiver, leaving not only the message that is the gulf or abyss, but a perception out there, which senses should be able to recognize and even love.
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MP 004LP
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"Frozen Dust is an album unified by the theme of 'destruction' and 'creation'. Inspired by the power of nature; we've has expressed how we humans overcome the magnificent phenomena and impacts nature has on us -- while it brings us joy, it can sometimes take away our lives and pleasures. We've incorporated this rather difficult theme by telling stories of fictional characters in the album; an adventurer in the Arctic region who confronts the threat of nature and survives between life and death, or a widow who never eases the pain of losing her sailor husband by a great storm in the Age of Discovery. Frozen Dust is our manifestation of destruction and creation and each sound brings you the essence of it."
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MP 006LP
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Double LP version. "Motus is more (to me) than just music made with analog synthesizers, it is about attitude, a way of relating to sound and the affects. A lifestyle, where movement, being moved and moving become one. My practice is vibrational, about the skin, touch and surfaces and the gaseous medium in between. I dream of a dance floor where Motus would be enjoyed. What kind of world, or rather, what kind of society would allow that? And when? Is this futuristic? A situation-to-come, where the understanding of music expands greatly, when blissful moments are independent of simple melodies, where harmony appears beyond I-V-vi-IV chord progressions, when the techniques of social alienation, which determine the use of all the drugs that accompany recreational music, are reversed into creative tools of exploration. Motus is part of this exploration: to find dance, free of clock, and groove, free of rhythm. There is pulsation, and the downbeat connects to the downward beings as in stones and minerals, the upbeat connects to the upward beings as in grasses, flowers, trees and stars. Binding both together, connecting sky and earth, is the dancer. The moves/the movement is pure. It is the kiss of spirit and matter." --Thomas Köner
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MP 006CD
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"Motus is more (to me) than just music made with analog synthesizers, it is about attitude, a way of relating to sound and the affects. A lifestyle, where movement, being moved and moving become one. My practice is vibrational, about the skin, touch and surfaces and the gaseous medium in between. I dream of a dance floor where Motus would be enjoyed. What kind of world, or rather, what kind of society would allow that? And when? Is this futuristic? A situation-to-come, where the understanding of music expands greatly, when blissful moments are independent of simple melodies, where harmony appears beyond I-V-vi-IV chord progressions, when the techniques of social alienation, which determine the use of all the drugs that accompany recreational music, are reversed into creative tools of exploration. Motus is part of this exploration: to find dance, free of clock, and groove, free of rhythm. There is pulsation, and the downbeat connects to the downward beings as in stones and minerals, the upbeat connects to the upward beings as in grasses, flowers, trees and stars. Binding both together, connecting sky and earth, is the dancer. The moves/the movement is pure. It is the kiss of spirit and matter." --Thomas Köner
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MP 035CD
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Porter Ricks is a collaboration between Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig. Following the re-release of the legendary album Biokinetics (MP 026CD/LP), which is superb subaquatic dub techno, Mille Plateaux re-release Porter Ricks' first album on the label, a self-titled album released in 1997. The album demonstrates the move to a kind of discoid funkiness with an underlying almost organic rhythm might, but still, it's not music for beautiful souls. Instead, it combines funkiness with alien sonic fluxes and the rhythm of a killing mover.
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MP 034CD
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Aubrite was first released 1995 on the label Barooni. Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. His music is often defined as dark ambient or drone, because of the use of low frequencies, material from gongs, shadowy resonances and boreal ambience, but at the same time its sound with constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, what makes it organic, human and almost comforting. Köner's soundscapes are no longer simply dark, the question now is that of a profound blackness. Such is the generic darkness of the abyss, the void and vacuum, the darkness of more than silence, of catastrophe and cataclysm, but also the soundscapes have utopian moments. It is a cosmological blackness, the black of nonbeing. "The more subtractive, the blacker the sound synthesis", Köner writes. Such blackness is non-music. Music will never be music until it ceases to represent and begins to sound like non-music or monochrome. "Whoever hears the distortion of all sounds, will soon become Ultrablack. Whoever listens to this world, but has no affection for any of its sites, even to the place of Black Noise, may soon reach Ultrablack. Whoever understands the spirit of impartiality through ten thousand million partial tones, hears Ultrablack and can no longer be measured. No measures, no enclosures, no properties are the sign of ultrablack scores." Roland Speckle helped with production of the album. Aubrite is the name of a group of meteorites named for Aubres, a small achondrite meteorite that fell near Nyons in 1836. Includes two bonus tracks.
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MP 026LP
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Mille Plateaux present a reissue of Porter Ricks' Biokinetics, originally released in 1996. Techno isn't a genre that has birthed many consistent albums, and the dub techno subgenre even less so, but one indisputable classic is Porter Ricks' debut Biokinetics. Originally issued on the legendary Basic Channel sub-label Chain Reaction in 1996 following a trio of 12"s, Biokinetics was the first of the label's album releases, and still stands as its crowning achievement. Porter Ricks are Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig, and between them they re-framed the techno sound, imbuing the spacious ambience pioneered by label bosses Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald with a frosty, isolated experimental bent, and combining it with the sort of haunted minimalism of early Plastikman. What separated Biokinetics from other albums at the time was its unwavering narrative -- the exact sound has been interpreted countless times since, but the immersive qualities of this singular record have rarely been touched. Maybe it is down to the silvery underwater concept that ties each track together -- the bubbling pads, sub-aquatic basses and muffled kick drums. But as with any great album, it's hard to exactly put your finger on what makes it a classic. Simply put Biokinetics is one of the most important records in the genre and one of techno's finest albums. It has been re-released ten years ago by Type Records, and now Mille Plateaux is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Porter Ricks and Biokinetics with this sumptuous double vinyl edition.
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MP 027LP
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LP version. Mille Plateaux present a reissue of Thomas Köner's Nuuk, originally published as one of four CDs on the 1997 compilation Driftworks and re-released in 2004 by MillePlateauxMedia. Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. Alongside Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, Köner has been centrally responsible for electronic music's fascination with depth and reduction. His signature sound is vast, seemingly endless, which at first seems homogenous and infinite, but once exposed to it, when our senses calibrate to the fine nuances of changes, you discover and immerse into abundance of textures, richness of modulations, and almost infinite range of sonic titillations. Köner's work was inspired by his frequent travels in the Arctic, and listeners feel his music as a journey to mysterious worlds of the Arctic region. The experience of being exposed to the extreme cold, the heightening of our senses and ability to notice even the slightest changes in color, sound, light or density that creates this dangerously reductive environment, is like an immersion in the sonic world of this German artist, where masterfully crafted layers of sound open into colossal spaces, teeming with aural life, waiting to be discovered by those who venture into it. The titles of Köner's highly regarded albums from the '90s ever so often play with this affinity -- Nunatak, Permafrost, Teimo -- all reference to the world of the Artic region, just as his album Nuuk that points us to the capital of Greenland. Subdued and minimal at first glance, this album is brimming with low-end frequencies, shadowy resonances, and boreal ambience, but at the same time, constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, makes it very organic, human and almost comforting, like the tiny harbor existing in the sea of ice, it is named after. It also served as the source of music material and inspiration for Thomas Köner's video art by the same title, which was awarded a Tiger Cub Award at the 34th International Film Festival in Rotterdam a year later.
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MP 026CD
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Mille Plateaux present a reissue of Porter Ricks' Biokinetics, originally released in 1996. Techno isn't a genre that has birthed many consistent albums, and the dub techno subgenre even less so, but one indisputable classic is Porter Ricks' debut Biokinetics. Originally issued on the legendary Basic Channel sub-label Chain Reaction in 1996 following a trio of 12"s, Biokinetics was the first of the label's album releases, and still stands as its crowning achievement. Porter Ricks are Thomas Köner and Andy Mellwig, and between them they re-framed the techno sound, imbuing the spacious ambience pioneered by label bosses Mark Ernestus and Moritz Von Oswald with a frosty, isolated experimental bent, and combining it with the sort of haunted minimalism of early Plastikman. What separated Biokinetics from other albums at the time was its unwavering narrative -- the exact sound has been interpreted countless times since, but the immersive qualities of this singular record have rarely been touched. Maybe it is down to the silvery underwater concept that ties each track together -- the bubbling pads, sub-aquatic basses and muffled kick drums. But as with any great album, it's hard to exactly put your finger on what makes it a classic. Simply put Biokinetics is one of the most important records in the genre and one of techno's finest albums. It has been re-released ten years ago by Type Records, and now Mille Plateaux is celebrating the 25th anniversary of Porter Ricks and Biokinetics with this CD edition.
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CD
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MP 027CD
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Mille Plateaux present a reissue of Thomas Köner's Nuuk, originally published as one of four CDs on the 1997 compilation Driftworks and re-released in 2004 by MillePlateauxMedia. Thomas Köner is one of the most influential modernist minimal composers. Alongside Wolfgang Voigt's Gas project, Köner has been centrally responsible for electronic music's fascination with depth and reduction. His signature sound is vast, seemingly endless, which at first seems homogenous and infinite, but once exposed to it, when our senses calibrate to the fine nuances of changes, you discover and immerse into abundance of textures, richness of modulations, and almost infinite range of sonic titillations. Köner's work was inspired by his frequent travels in the Arctic, and listeners feel his music as a journey to mysterious worlds of the Arctic region. The experience of being exposed to the extreme cold, the heightening of our senses and ability to notice even the slightest changes in color, sound, light or density that creates this dangerously reductive environment, is like an immersion in the sonic world of this German artist, where masterfully crafted layers of sound open into colossal spaces, teeming with aural life, waiting to be discovered by those who venture into it. The titles of Köner's highly regarded albums from the '90s ever so often play with this affinity -- Nunatak, Permafrost, Teimo -- all reference to the world of the Artic region, just as his album Nuuk that points us to the capital of Greenland. Subdued and minimal at first glance, this album is brimming with low-end frequencies, shadowy resonances, and boreal ambience, but at the same time, constant fluctuation and vulnerability of sonic events, makes it very organic, human and almost comforting, like the tiny harbor existing in the sea of ice, it is named after. It also served as the source of music material and inspiration for Thomas Köner's video art by the same title, which was awarded a Tiger Cub Award at the 34th International Film Festival in Rotterdam a year later.
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