A piano quintet composed for and recorded by Apartment House. 

‘The instruments are muted and heavily prepared. Players are instructed to perform very quietly with an exaggerated flautando, using as much of the bow as possible while producing minimal sound. Sheen often even asks them to mime. The result is an unsettling disconnect between the intensity of physical exertion and the sound produced’ (Ed Cooper, VAN).
‘Press moves with grossly impoverished intent… trembling and stumbling on the cusp of accident… right on the edge of culture, just before language. Most of the time, it is enough simply to breathe and move: the complexity of these actions alone is astonishing… And then, through the buzz of wood, guts, and bluebottles, a piano appears—all shining lacquer, muscle, and grammar’ (Ed Atkins).

“When people play my violin pieces, I always joke with them that when you start playing them, the audience should feel like they’ve gone deaf or something. The sound is so not there that you should think there’s something wrong for a second…
“It’s so disappointing when you see a bunch of instrumentalists walk on stage and you already know how the piece is going to sound. It’s not what music is about for me…
“The word ‘liminal’ is such a cliché but it’s annoyingly pertinent for my music. Trying to find a sweet spot between states: in between presence and not presence, in between tonality and not tonality, whatever that is, between noise and pitch. I really want things to sit in an uncertain middle ground between everything.”

A terrific, fresh techno EP by Robin Stewart. Minimalist and dubwise, but fizzing with physical energy, and loaded with thrills and spills, like fairground ghost trains clanking and rattling through Rome, at a clip.
Check it out!

‘Regrows dub techno from the seeds,’ says Boomkat, ‘with a set of twisted warehouse melters that apply advanced dub logic to pointillistic technoid rhythms.
‘The off-grid, lolloping kicks are interesting enough on their own, but it’s how Stewart treats them that makes opener Stomach pop, sinking them in swirling, lysergic goop rather than drowning them out with rinsed tape FX. The oscillating, demonic subs that heave just beneath the surface don’t muddy things completely, they crack the sunroof on the top end, letting the industrialized foley clanks and hoarse vocaloid stutters boot us towards an unexpected destination. And although Compact is more trad on the surface — a gated peak-time roller, natch — Stewart’s canny processing makes the kicks tickle more than they thump. Everything builds up to the title track, where Stewart freezes mind-rinsing dissociated echo spirals into their own rhythmic forms that push against the relentless double-time thuds, weaving phantom polyrhythms out of thin air while spectral voices whisper overhead.’

“This is killer,” says Ben UFO.

‘Palestre is a study of higher-dimensional spaces and altered states of consciousness. It explores parallel dimensions and temporal anomalies from a perspective that blends mythology, modern physics, ADHD, transcendental music and club culture.
‘Sciogli Assurdi was recorded between art galleries, clubs, squats, and folkloric festivities in 2018.’

‘The surrealist, psychedelic brain-burps of notorious all-caps-tweeting wind-up-merchant Louis Johnstone aka Wanda Group. Twenty-six congealed morsels of spur-of-the-moment
sound-art executed with genuine economy of means, namely… a phone. An impulsive, scatter-brained trip into the inner circles of regional weirdness, secreting a creeping unease which really gets under your skin. Fragments of aural rubble haphazardly cohere into galvanising spacial tones and textures, punctured by Johnstone’s garbled Essex rantings. The long-distance stare of warbled tape loops is abruptly fractured by a drunken sing-along in a care home for the elderly. As hallucinogenic takes on the utterly mundane, there’s an obvious kinship with Lambkin’s nocturnal, straight-to-dictaphone sound-pieces. Dan Johannsen’s splintered classical collages on that PIG tape and the suburban soliloquies of Regional Bears alumnus Russell Walker also feel closely aligned.’ (All Night Flight)
With an A4 riso insert.

Beau Wanzer + Rezzett = maximum worries squared. Five frazzlers for all us nutters in the dance. Borez they izn’t.

A thought-provoking, deeply enjoyable consideration of displacement and dislocation, and abiding but adaptive cultural memory, this fourth collaboration mashes expert, haunting samples of the classical Iranian pop of greats like Andy, Hayedeh, and Fereydoun Farrokhzad into tough, quick-fire beat-downs.