Type Records is a record label specializing in inspiring experimental music from around the world. While we are based in the UK, Type artists are drawn from a worldwide community of musicians, and are variously located in Sweden, Norway, France, North America and England. Type was created by two likeminded UK residents, John Twells (Xela) and Stefan Lewandowski. After a chance meeting in a record shop (where else?) and starting a successful club night together, they decided it was time to take their ideas further. John was already somewhat known for his music recordings, and Stef was very well known for his graphic art and web design -- so what better pairing -- all sides were deftly accounted for. After discussing the possibilities of a label for a few months, and after a lot of careful thought and consideration, Type was born. Type artists include: Svarte Greiner, Grouper, The North Sea, Letters Letters, Skallander, Zelienople, Helios, Aaron Martin & Machinefabriek, Sylvain Chauveau and many more.
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TYPE 136LP
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Birmingham, UK's sprawl of low rise warehouses and their links to the military-industrial complex inspires this crushing new take on the "Brummie" sound and spirit from former native Arash Moori for his longtime pals at Type. In nine harsh and disorienting bouts of angular drums and hazardous noise texture, Exothermic doubles down on the tonal and rhythmic brutalism of Moori's debut for Type, Heterodyne (TYPE 125LP, 2015). It forms a deep topographical reading of his home region's maze of one-story munitions workshops, flyovers, canals, and spaghetti road systems, all intersected by the ghosts of Jungle pirate radio and lit up by hotspots of nostalgic reminiscence; places where he studied, walked thru, DJed at and protested with long-time friend and Type label co-owner, John Twells. Moreover Exothermic is concerned with how this environment and the city's progressive past affects the mood and music of its contemporary population, and how it ultimately came to inform the visceral nature of the "Brummie Sound". Working to a fierce, noisy aesthetic that's been firmly expressed in hard-bitten Brummie and Midlander music by everyone from Black Sabbath to Scorn, and even Coventry's Delia Derbyshire, who acknowledged the infamous Luftwaffe blitz on her home city as a formative sonic experience, Exothermic explodes with a tightly coiled, abstract-industrial energy that's surely worthy of comparison with any of them. In fits and bursts, rhythms inspired by the city's pirate radio jungle heritage clash with sheets of metallic calamity; sawn-off percussion ricochets the space like shrapnel searching for a target; and structures are torched like Raymond Mason's municipal artwork "Forward" which went up in flames during the city's 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq war. It's all intended to mirror a negative feedback loop of intensity between the place and its people, and does so with a mix of bostin' glee and dark humor familiar to the region. From this meld of psychogeography, subjective hauntology, and objective history, Arash Moori's work in Exothermic most cannily and explicitly results a simulacra of a place shaped by emotions, personal memories, and accreted histories, and rendered in a temporal flux as chaotically tiled and riven with radical energies as the place itself. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Arash Moori.
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TYPE 135LP
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Back with that spice for Type, Anthony J Hart gets down to UK rave fundamentals on a killer second LP under his Basic Rhythm pseudonym. Where Hart's more prolific Imaginary Forces output is all about the push 'n pull of power noise and post-rave techno dynamics, Basic Rhythm fixes a steely focus on the physics of the UK's hardcore continuum; decimating and distilling jungle, grime, and garage into their common and most affective dancefloor denominators. Basic Rhythm offers Hart up as a sort Leyden jar battery or vessel storing decades of absorbed and condensed pirate radio transmissions, and The Basics can be heard as his disciplined attempt to parse those muscle memories and sensations into something tangibly, rudely physical but, most crucially, leaving aside those bits he considers unnecessary in a defragging process of mental sonic décollage - breaking down outmoded values and replacing at a distance from the original medium. What remains forms a kind of refreshingly eviscerated halcyontology, recollecting and rinsing out the good times spending his p's on new shells at legendary shops such as Music Power (Ilford) and Boogie Times; listening to Rude FM 88.2, Unity 88.4, Pulse 90.6, Weekend Rush 92.3, Kool FM 94.5; cutting dubs at Music House; and swanging his jaw at legendary venues and club nights like Stratford Rex, Temple, Labrynth, Telepathy, Slammin' Vinyl, and One Nation. In reducing those aspects to a pointillist vocabulary of sawn-off drums, harness-straining subs, and tessellating, tussling stabs of flavor, he leaves a spare air prompting ambiguous reading of "dread" and "ecstasy", depending on the listener's own reception/perception. It's a dichotomy at the core of "E18"'s postcode-warring sub-low shift, explored in the crevices between rap and grime in "Fake Thugs", or the way "Silent Listener (Adore)" is intended to illuminate dank bedrooms, whilst the ructions of "Cool Breeze (Summer In Woodford Green)" and the fractiously mapped road rave styles of "Blood Klaat Kore" lend an overlapping sense of deep topographical study to the mix. RIYL: Filter Dread, FiS, Rabit, Acre, Keysound Recordings. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 131LP
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Undone Harmony Following is the latest offering from Oregon's Pat Maher, a noise veteran whose career has taken him in a variety of different directions, from the pitch-black drone of his work as Indignant Senility to the fractured house of Diamond Catalog. This time he reprises the Yo-Yo Dieting project (last seen on 2010's exemplary Bubblethug) to once again plumb the depths of screwed and chopped rap, diving into haunted crevices and dissolving his collection of tapes and battered CDs and emerging with a truly confounding full-length. Maher's skill is in retaining the unmistakable sound of hip-hop while pushing and pulling it into narcotic, ear-destroying directions. Think a tenth generation copy of a DJ Screw tape piped through a broken overdrive pedal or Lil Ugly Mane blasted through a blown speaker system from a car a few blocks down the street. Tracks don't so much start and finish as they do bubble up from an oily swamp of tape hiss, reverb and delay, with beats and bass undulating beneath half-heard vocals and jagged bursts of white noise. It's not an easy listen, but it's about as vital as it gets. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 134EP
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Nino Pedone, aka Shapednoise, provides a concept suite inspired by the "Serenity Manifesto" of Eric Burton (Rabit) and Francesco Birsa Alessandri - a sort of poetic inversion of Luigi Russolo's futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises (1913). In "Motion And Depth" or the bleached electro-acoustic structures of "Delusional Path" he dissolves the tension of Emanuele Porcinai's strings into a syntax of ecstatic physics. The subatomic diffusion of "Resistance To A Harmonious Vision" with Roly Porter speaks to an experience of luscious sensory overload. In the tumultuous "Pulling At The Seams Of Existence", he and Rabit embrace the discord of uncertainty.
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TYPE 133EP
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Anthony J Hart (Imaginary Forces) is back in Basic Rhythm mode with a trio of hungry hardcore mutations, with a remix from Rabit. The title track comes spoiling with speaker-worrying levels of scything half-step patterns punctured by dancehall declamations, rinsing a paucity of elements for kernels of brutalist truth, providing the backbone to the ravenous slaughter of "Bombastic Plastic", whilst "The Curse" rolls out at full stretch with scabrous proto-grime drums balanced by a skinny, but crucial lick of pensive strings. On the remix, Rabit channels "Slewage" into a K-hole of masticated sound system samples and anti-peristaltic wretch.
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TYPE 132LP
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Classically-trained Boston producer Kaan Erbay, under the name Insha, explores the push-and-pull of tension and relief with his debut album Dysplazia, a record that drags familiar sounds into shadowy, wayward new places. Punctuated by barely-audible vocal samples, the album takes cues from artists such as Burial and Arca, stripping rhythms from their usual context and burying them beneath swathes of noise and abstract sound. As a founder of Boston's DRAW collective, Erbay has developed his ear DJing countless parties and settling on a sound that straddles usual divides. On Dysplazia he takes influence from R&B, video game and film music and British dance music and manages to fuse these disparate sounds into a beguiling, melancholy collage. Pounding beats crash and crumble as fizzy neon synths flourish and fade rapidly and voices chatter and scream. Erbay subverts these tropes with the hand of a DJ but exhibits a rare vulnerability. It's this restraint twinned with his compositional skill that makes Dysplazia so crucial - anything but a bundle of dance tracks, it's a widescreen, narrative experience that needs to be absorbed in its entirety. RIYL: Arca, Burial, Actress, Rabits. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 130LP
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New England's Lee Tindall has been a mainstay of the noise/electronic scene for some time. Working as Zerfallt and Belarisk, and in a variety of groups (including Astronaut with Daniel Lopatin), Tindall has been perfecting what he calls "Hy-Fy mutant music" for a decade, working on the fringes of a sound that has slipped in-and-out of focus. Moments In Shapeshifting is Tindall's most fully-realized release to date, bringing together his interest in abrasive noise, abstract electronics and haunting ambience. It follows a long spell in a maze of his own confusion, navigating the labyrinth of corporate tech support, hell-to-reach, complete mental and physical exhaustion. The tracks came together from vivid dreams and nightmares during this time, as Tindall embraced the negativity of the New England mindset, crafting the songs as an escape or moment of clarity. Referencing '80s sci-fi and body horror, the album concerns itself with duality, betrayal and paranoia - many of the tracks have more than one title and some pivot mid-way through, shifting focus and transforming completely. As Tindall fixated on dreams, surrealist art and fiction, the nature of rural New England landscape gave him something tangible to reflect on, and the result is a beguiling collection of tracks that flow into each other without fixating on a certain genre or other. At times reminiscent of Tim Hecker's dense ambience and at others closer to M.E.S.H. or Oneohtrix Point Never, Moments In Shapeshifting offers an enticing distortion of reality - a cracked mirror for us to gaze into and obsess over. It might be the most human electronic record of the year. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 129LP
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You might not have come across Melbourne's Kane Ikin before, but he's far from a newcomer. A member of experimental duo Solo Andata, Ikin also released material on Taylor Deupree's influential 12k imprint, working with a variety of different sounds and elements over the last decade. Modern Pressure is a milestone for Ikin, written at a trying time that was the producer's hardest financially but most creative musically. Selling equipment to pay the rent, Ikin wrote track-after-track in quick succession to hone his skills, using the process as both a form of escapism and reflection. The resulting album is a mirror of this struggle, a collision of stomach-churning bass and searing percussion that overwhelms your senses, staying with you long after the music has subsided. Ikin manages to harness a variety of influences, folding the sound of early '80s industrial tapes and no wave with the relentless pulse of house and techno, the intense low-end of hardcore and the eerie mood of John Carpenter's most menacing soundtracks. It's an album with a defined narrative that looks to the past without ever losing sight of the future. Dark, shimmering and textured, Modern Pressure is an album for our era - damaged, but not without hope. Mastered & Cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500 copies.
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TYPE 128LP
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Anthoney J Hart is hardly a newcomer. After cutting his teeth spinning hardcore, jungle, and drum and bass at legendary pirate radio station Rude FM, Hart eventually began producing under the Imaginary Forces moniker, channeling his early influences into noisier, more abstract territory. As Imaginary Forces plumbed the depths of abstraction, Hart was keen to find an outlet for dancefloor material, and that's where Basic Rhythm comes in. Hart wanted to reference the hardcore and jungle he grew up obsessing over, but not simply as an exercise in nostalgia. Avoiding breaks altogether, he went back to the samples that littered the genre, reframing them with contemporary rhythms. Raw Trax is not an attempt to recapture the sound of jungle or hardcore, but a new twist on a familiar setting. It's also not a dull academic experiment; Basic Rhythm was always intended to be fun to listen to, fun to dance to, and fun to mix. Raw Trax delivers in spades. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 127LP
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Shapednoise is Italian producer Nino Pedone, and since emerging in the early 2010s he's built a name for himself issuing music that bridges the gap between the basement and the club. Noise and techno are proven bedfellows at this point (for better or for worse), but Pedone pushes harder and further, and Different Selves, as the title suggests, is his most diverse and challenging work to date. Fusing the industrial grind of early Godflesh (Justin K. Broadrick even makes an appearance on opening track "Enlightenment") with the raw power of mid-'90s D&B, the visceral pleasure of early grime, and the ominous scrape of dark ambient, Shapednoise expertly navigates unfamiliar territory. Whether traversing beatless outworld landscapes with "Travels in the Universe of the Soul" or assaulting the senses with the acidic, rhythmic blast of "Heart Energy Shape," there's a sense that Shapednoise is exploring his own boundaries. Different Selves is a challenging, unruly selection of tracks; not a deconstruction of club music, but an amplification, blowing every sound out to near cacophony. The result is truly explosive. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 125LP
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"I'm going to do something I never do -- I'm going to write this press release in the first person. This is a very special release for Type and it's been a long time coming. I met Arash Moori when we both attended the same Art School in Birmingham in 2000. We quickly realized that we both liked music -- I think it was a shared love of To Rococo Rot or Metamatics that sparked the first conversation -- and within weeks of meeting each other we were DJing fairly regularly. We kicked off a number of nights in the city, some successful (Default, which birthed the Type label), some not (Left Handers Disco, which confounded punters who didn't understand how well Kelis mixed with SND). Arash was also kind enough to teach me some production tricks as I was putting together my first album. In 2002, Arash headed to Finland to continue his art studies, and began to experiment with electricity and light. These experiments informed the direction of Heterodyne -- I've been waiting 13 years for this record. It's the experimental Chinese Democracy, except worth the wait. Over the years, Arash pieced together a deeply personal palette of electrical sounds from strobe lights, fluorescent lights, radios, plasma balls, and electronic devices. He exploited the peculiarities of these devices to create harsher and more aggressive sounds. This gave way to a series of live performances using minimal hardware and self-built devices to structure, shape, and trigger sounds rather than resorting to samples. The computer was an editing device, not a compositional one. Heterodyne is the culmination of these experiments. The resulting tracks are far more than academic exercises: Arash has taken years of theory and woven together a spiky collection of coarse techno and disorienting drone. The raw electrical textures and rhythms he spent years collecting are framed by analogue synth pads and oscillators which add contrast and levity. It's a demanding listen, certainly, but a rewarding one. This is an album I've seen develop for longer than any other and it's a pleasure to unleash it on the world. Our own collaboration LP (touted for release on City Centre Offices in the early 00s) will never see the light of day, but Heterodyne may be one of the most personal record I've released on Type to date. Enjoy." --John Twells, October 2015. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 126LP
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Italian artist Andrea Taeggi's Mama Matrix Most Mysterious is a rich exploration of tense, rhythmic minimalism. Unlike his work with Koenraad Ecker as Lumisokea and his material under the Gondwana moniker, the album showcases Taeggi's interest in finding strength in simplicity. Taeggi was able to limit himself by working on old modular synthesizer systems -- the Buchla and the Serge, to be exact. "I needed to adapt to them," he admits. "I don't actually master them, which isn't necessarily a disadvantage." This playfulness buoys Mama Matrix Most Mysterious throughout, distancing it from the litany of self-involved modular synth LPs filling the shelves right now. The Serge and Buchla systems allowed the Italian producer to realize his rhythmic and timbric visions; Taeggi filters decades of beat-driven electronic music through these machines to come up with a record of chattering, bass-heavy experiments that sound like little else. You'd struggle to dance to it, but Taeggi's sound is so physical that you can almost feel the electricity running through the circuits. And isn't that exactly what electronic music should be about? Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. RIYL Pan Sonic, SND, Raster-Noton. Edition of 500.
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TYPE 122LP
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Boston, Massachusetts-based Matthew Azevedo is a world-class technician, and by day engineers architectural acoustic simulations, teaches students about musical acoustics at Berklee College of Music, and occasionally finds time to master the odd record. It's this rare set of skills that can be heard on Aokigahara, an album made up of two long slabs of low-frequency drone. Aokigahara's focus on bass isn't necessarily anything new -- it positions itself alongside tomes such as Earth's seismic Earth 2 (1993) and Sunn O)))'s soupy ØØ Void (2000) -- yet Azevedo manages to inject something very different into the mix. Unlike many contemporary drone records, the album is an acoustic recording made in a concert hall, something which adds a certain magic that's impossible to recreate using software trickery. Azevedo's use of the space is the record's power, and occasionally you find yourself focusing not on the booming sub-bass but the airy flutter around it, or the echoing distortion that rips through like thunder. This is not a record to listen to on laptop speakers or through your flimsy, white Apple headphones. To experience its literal punch to the gut you need to make sure you've got the right gear to hand -- a good subwoofer is highly recommended.
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TYPE 123LP
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Dave Henson has been producing electronic music on the fringes of any discernible scene since the late '90s, operating outside of the boundaries of good taste and slowly formulating his own very particular sound. Since 2010 he's been recording as Nochexxx, and firing the influence of vintage electro and early bleep techno through an arsenal of barely-working gear to create a sound that's as grubby as Wolf Eyes but with the unmistakable slap of late '80s Detroit. Plot Defender is Henson's third proper album under the Nochexxx moniker, and is his most developed to date, anchored by clattering tape-distorted rhythms and synth squelches that make the TB-303 sound well-mannered. Whether giving the nod to Incunabula on "Between Two Stations" or to the masters Drexciya on "Stinson Fish," Henson's vision is never anything but unique, offering a cracked-glass vision of the last few decades of electronic music and doing so with a very British nod to the camera. Anyone who fell in love with 2014's transmissions from Ekoplekz would do well to investigate. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Edition of 500 copies.
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TYPE 124LP
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Awake is a collaboration between noise veteran Mike Shiflet and guitarist John Kolodij (aka High Aura'd), and was recorded over the course of three autumn days in Kolodij's Rhode Island studio. This isn't your expected by-email collaboration though; rather, the two sat together in the same room with amps humming and strings vibrating, letting the space and the physicality dictate the music. The sessions were improvisational in nature, and as the recordings were cleaned up and edited, only sparse field recordings were added to enhance the live takes. It's a record that might sound electronic in parts -- indeed, echoes of Tim Hecker or Yellow Swans are present throughout -- but has the guitar at its core. Awake is a direct descendent of Godspeed You! Black Emperor or even Glenn Branca, but has been smudged, distorted, and delayed beyond recognition. What's left are traces -- the ghosts and outlines of songs, trapped in a fog of white noise and overdrive -- and the end result is disarmingly serene. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500 copies.
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2LP
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TYPE 120LP
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Hamburg's Marc Richter has been busy with his Black To Comm project since his last appearance under that name on Type, 2009's genre-bending and critically acclaimed Alphabet 1968 (TYPE 053CD). Aside from helming the prolific Dekorder imprint, he's put out a number of musical curios, including 2012's excellent film soundtrack EARTH. Now Richter is back with Alphabet 1968's proper follow-up, a self-titled double album pieced together from crumbling samples, vocal snippets, and an arsenal of noise generators and filters. Richter's material has always been characterized by an air of surrealism, but it's never been more obvious than on the pulsing, chattering opener "Human Gidrah" or in the delirious, fractured pop of "Hands." There are real songs hidden in here somewhere, but they're disintegrated by Richter's sound manipulation techniques and dissolved into soupy, extended drone marathons. The centerpiece is undoubtedly "Is Nowhere," which builds slowly over 20 minutes with rumbling organ sounds and buzzing filters, never losing the listener's attention for a second. Black To Comm is a deeper, more challenging record than its predecessor, but one which repays the patient listener. Richter's dusty, unique sound has never sounded so well-honed and pointed, and it's a patchwork of ideas and fragments that only improves over time. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Artwork by Andreas Diefenbach.
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TYPE 121LP
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Wisconsin's Jon Mueller and New Orleans' Duane Pitre are both towering figures in the world of avant-garde sound. Mueller has notched up an astounding amount of albums and collaborations in the past (including two on this very label) and while most of his time is spent eking out unusual textures from his plethora of percussive instruments, he can also be spotted moonlighting as the drummer for main-stage indie act Volcano Choir. Pitre, having retired as a professional skateboarder (seriously), has also amassed an enviable catalog, collaborating with Eleh and Cory Allen, among others, and releasing on a variety of labels in the process. Inverted Torch finds the duo meeting somewhere in the middle; Mueller's familiar patter (this time on a collection of gongs) is matched with Pitre's bowed cymbals and his expertly-realized collection of Max/MSP patches. The album is made up of two pieces -- "No Longer of Our Time" and "A Fading Light Within Its Place," both taking influence from a poem (also titled The Inverted Torch) by Edith Matilda Thomas. This might seem inconsequential at first, but the duo used the text as the starting point in a process that allowed them to discuss change, life, time and human action as they blended real-time performance with synthetic elements, seamlessly. The push and pull between electronics and "real" instruments is a conversation artists have been struggling with for decades, but Mueller and Pitre somehow make their collaboration sound effortless and decidedly organic. Blissful, unique, and oddly moving, Inverted Torch is a record that defies comparison and encourages patient, deep listening.
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TYPE 119LP
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"I used to think that music was my escape from reality, now I think it's an escape into reality." --Mike Weis, 2014. Mike Weis is probably best-known for sitting behind a plethora of drums and gongs in long-running Chicago three-piece Zelienople, but his music is just as potent unaccompanied. Weis might be an obsessive collaborator (his work with Scott Tuma, Mind Over Mirrors and Kwaidan is also essential), but on his own, he is able to allow his unique percussive skills to bubble to the surface, without the intervention of conflicting egos. He began working on Don't Know, Just Walk under particularly difficult circumstances. It was 2013, he had just been diagnosed with prostate cancer, and was gearing up for a punishing year of "man-diapers and boner pills," that could very well have been his last. Thankfully though, the time wasn't entirely spent holed up in a hospital bed under the watch of urologists -- Weis managed to spend choice moments in the woods or on prairies with a microphone, and in the Zelienople studio (which has long been in his basement) while the family slept upstairs. These late-night sessions weren't only musical -- Weis used the time to meditate, and to clear his head of the mental baggage that was clouding his view of the world. In spending time using Zen Buddhist techniques (which the title references), this allowed him to not only meditate on life (and its brevity), but also to inform his compositional and recording techniques. At this point, the music came naturally, and Weis began experimenting and recording without hindrance. Using loops of field-recordings, gongs, radios, home-made instruments, drums and traditional Korean percussion, Weis pieced together an album that is as reflective as it is mesmerizing. Solo percussion albums are rare, certainly, but Weis uses his drumming simply as the record's backbone, allowing his ideas to flourish overhead. Don't Know, Just Walk is a complicated record -- an album about death that doesn't dwell on the negative, and one created by a drummer that doesn't contain a whole lot of rhythms. It's right to expect the unexpected, and as Weis found solace in the recording process, we too can find solace in the listening. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Limited edition of 500 copies.
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TYPE 117LP
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Warehouse find, last copies; Double LP version. Kostas Soublis' productions under the Fluxion moniker helped define legendary Berlin imprint Chain Reaction, and with 1999's Vibrant Forms, the Greek producer released a milestone in the dub techno genre. Hazy and distant, there was still more than enough dancefloor push to propel Soublis into the (very short) list of genre legends, and make Vibrant Forms one of the very rare techno albums that works from beginning to end. Out of press for far too long, this new edition of Vibrant Forms has been remastered and will finally see the entire album released on vinyl for the first time. The most shocking thing hearing it almost 15 years after its original release, however, is how little it has dated. Soublis wisely avoided any cultural tropes, and the productions still sound fresh and deceptively alien. Through washes and waves of reverb and the faint thud of a kick drum, the all-analog productions contain a raw quality that is all too rare these days. Just head to the album's elegiac closing number "Opaque." Upbeat and propulsive, the track still maintains a deceptive calm, buoyed by swirling synthesizer washes and sizzling, tape-saturated percussion. This is the way dub techno should sound -- don't accept any imitations, Vibrant Forms is the real thing. Completely remastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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TYPE 117CD
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Kostas Soublis' productions under the Fluxion moniker helped define legendary Berlin imprint Chain Reaction, and with 1999's Vibrant Forms, the Greek producer released a milestone in the dub techno genre. Hazy and distant, there was still more than enough dancefloor push to propel Soublis into the (very short) list of genre legends, and make Vibrant Forms one of the very rare techno albums that works from beginning to end. Out of press for far too long, this new edition of Vibrant Forms has been remastered and will finally see the entire album released on vinyl for the first time. The most shocking thing hearing it almost 15 years after its original release, however, is how little it has dated. Soublis wisely avoided any cultural tropes, and the productions still sound fresh and deceptively alien. Through washes and waves of reverb and the faint thud of a kick drum, the all-analog productions contain a raw quality that is all too rare these days. Just head to the album's elegiac closing number "Opaque." Upbeat and propulsive, the track still maintains a deceptive calm, buoyed by swirling synthesizer washes and sizzling, tape-saturated percussion. This is the way dub techno should sound -- don't accept any imitations, Vibrant Forms is the real thing. Completely remastered by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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TYPE 116LP
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Work/Death might be a new name to most, but for anyone listening to noise that is lucky enough to be based in and around Rhode Island, then Scott Reber's grizzled drones are likely a well-known staple. Reber is something of the noise musician's noise musician, and his deeply knowledgable and surprisingly technical take on the sound has left those able to source one of his rare tapes or manage to catch a show slack-jawed. One such tape is Phone About to Ring, which emerged from the ether on Reber's own Three Songs Of Lenin imprint in 2012 with little fanfare. Now Type is proud to announce that it is being given the deluxe treatment, and has been remastered by Reber himself before being cut to vinyl for the first time. The music itself is hard to get a grip on -- two effortlessly gloomy passages of sludgy, ominous noise, which in the wrong hands could end up falling into usual traps, but with Reber at the helm sound both fresh and deeply complex. Instruments are bashed into near obscurity by Reber's steady-handed layers of tape-hiss and crunch, and thick, doomy bass echoes like an earthquake in the background. The most startling aspect of Phone About to Ring is Reber's ability to inject harmony into his stark, low-end rumbles and piercing cacophony. Comparable to Tim Hecker or even Thomas Köner at times, Reber makes noise that has a lot more beneath the surface that you might initially realize, and Phone About to Ring is his most concise and involving statement to date. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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TYPE 115LP
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To this day, Nicholas Bullen is best-known as a founding member of arguably grindcore's most important act: Napalm Death. Although he decided to call it a day before the band slipped into the mainstream circuit, his sonic fingerprints were all over their influential debut Scum, and he's been breaking boundaries ever since. A key figure in Birmingham's experimental scene, Bullen was also a founding member of Scorn and has been involved in a variety of projects since. Over 30 years later we arrive to Component Fixations, an album that Bullen has been contemplating, working, and reworking for some time. It is, after all, his solo debut proper, and as such is a work that absolutely represents him as an artist both visually and aurally. Taking influence from the early electronic artists of the 1960s, Bullen has fused this passion with his own musically explorative past, resulting in an album of beguiling tape-manipulations, drones and noise. Component Fixations is far more than a simple exercise in academic sound, and Bullen has injected his long-form pieces with a rare mortal sense of corruption and failure. Every single sound on the album was taken from field recordings captured in the confines of Bullen's house and garden, and this only serves to confirm the unshakable humanity of the record. Component Fixations might be a long way from Scum, but dig deep and you'll find the same curious mind, desperate to pull apart sounds and give them a brand-new meaning. Extreme doesn't have to mean loud, after all. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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TYPE 114LP
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It's been three years since Rhode Island sound artist Geoff Mullen released his last album for the Type label, but he's hardly been taking it easy in the interim. After a few small-run cassette releases and a string of dates in Europe (both solo and in the Oxtirn trio with PAN's Eli Keszler and Ashley Paul) he found some time to get stranded in the woods and craft this beguiling long-form record. A mono recording of a multi-channel installation piece, Filtered Water is probably the most unusual addition to Mullen's catalog, and definitely the most hypnotic. Recorded in the Hudson Valley, the album blends field recordings, feedback, and tape collage to create a deeply immersive sound environment. This is a record that reveals itself slowly, and uses the most spare of materials. Everyday sounds like a passing train or a far-off party are subsumed by the music, and the raw sounds of nature are tempered by electronic processes. Luckily, Mullen's signature musical sensitivity prevents this extended experimental piece from ever becoming trying or indulgent. It is honest, textured sound and far more beautiful than a description can attest. Geoff Mullen is one of New England's most impressive sonic innovators, and Filtered Water offers a fascinating glimpse into his unique sound world. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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TYPE 112LP
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It's tough to know what to expect when dealing with the output of musical mastermind Brad Rose. Under a plethora of different guises, he has stamped his mark on just as many genres, yet Isolatarium, his second under the Charlatan moniker, might be his most focused to date. Dispensing with the jerky 808-led shimmer of its predecessor Triangles, Isolatarium makes its case with cold, digital synthesis and buried 4/4 pulses. The searing noise of Rose's output as The North Sea is still audible somewhere in the mix, but the key to this record is restraint, and any clouds of white noise are tempered by cascades of sizzling FM synthesis. While album highlight Kinetic Disruption gives a nod to the outsider dance moves of Actress, Rose manages to push his clatter even further into the ether with a shroud of grinding oscillators and grimacing tape noise. It almost sounds like a devastating new take on the delirious experiments of Maggi Payne or Suzanne Ciani, but with the added hoarse cough of 21st century pessimism. Rose makes his best case with the album's closing track "Terminal Zero," and as the clanking percussion and drunken tones spiral into spluttering computer malfunction, there's no doubt that he has hit on his richest seam to date.
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TYPE 111LP
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2015 repress. Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe has been through many shifts in his musical career, from playing with influential Chicago rockers 90 Day Men and forging haunting vocal drones as Lichens all the way to becoming a member of transcendent rockers Om and collaborating with Lucky Dragons and Doug Aitken. Timon Irnok Manta marks the beginning of a brand new stage in his process. Recorded under his full name and based on fabled British science fiction series The Tomorrow People, the record establishes Lowe's format perfectly, with a single mantra-like piece followed by a "version" in classic dub fashion. "M'Bondo" follows closely in the footsteps of Lowe's recent slew of highly-limited private-press releases, taking tumbling electrified rhythms and setting them up against slowly-modulating analog patterns, gradually building into something even more revenant. A far cry from the maximalist synthesizer music that has come to represent the norm, this is bass-heavy and precariously stripped bare, leaving only skeletons of influence and form. On "M'Bondo (Version)" we are given a closer look at Lowe's wide range of influences as he touches on Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works II, early Popul Vuh, and Rhythm & Sound in one fell swoop. The basic building blocks of the original track are still present, but graced with Lowe's unmistakable voice and punctuated by warbling tape hiss and chilling echoes. This is a brave step from one of the most compelling voices in experimental music, and the beginning of what promises to be a very rich musical seam.
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