fumi

How did I miss this release more than two years ago? Seriously satisfying haul of deep & wavy ambient-leaning mood music from L.I.E.S. affiliate Krikor Kouchian, deploying 40 minutes of fizzing synths into clouds of smoke situated somewhere between Vangelis, Artemiev, Thomas Köner and 0PN. Establishing quite a rep as soundtrack composer with his scores for ‘Building Arnold Schwarzenegger’, 'Six & Demi Onze' and ‘Saudi’ in recent years, ’Seven Hertz’ finds the ambidextrous Parisian producer push into deepest sci-fi-cinematic sound design in a classic model somewhere between Tarkovsky’s ‘Solaris’, THX1138 and 2001: A Space Odyssey, albeit defined by a sort of gallic clinamen to mystery and romance. You know the stuff, and it’s done here so brilliantly well, ranging from a dark ambient regression in ‘7hz intro’ recalling Delia Derbyshire’s ‘The Dreams’, to a soaring trance elegy somewhere in the vicinity of Malibu/DJ Lostboi in ‘A Short Cycle of Club Life’, and gawping ambient IMAX dimensions in ‘Merciless Retaliation’. ‘The Last Dream’ marries Eno-esque subtlety with samples of Picnic At Hanging Rock, and ‘Love Memorabilia’ switches to a Hollywood finale scaled like some Jóhann Jóhannsson work, and the supernaturally textured electronics of ‘Rotting Flesh Suit’ locate him on a line from JMJ to FSOL and the West Mineral lot.

New album. In quite a break from his usual technique, he dispenses with the arpeggiators altogether. This is a piano-based album but his signature style is evident everywhere. Utterly gorgeous.

A sequel to 2018's ace "Loopworks", Istanbul-based artist Koray Kantarcioğlu expands his scope from 1960s and '70s Turkish records to include vintage TV samples, new age tapes and jazz recordings. Properly haunted soundscapes for anyone into The Caretaker, Philip Jeck, Ekin Fil. Another killer from Discrepant, "Loopworks 2" advances Kantarcioğlu's method by allowing it to spread its wings somewhat. The producer still uses vintage loops to create queasy, quasi-nostalgic soundscapes, but his sounds have been pulled from a wider range of sources, entrenching the album in a hard-to-place out-zone rather than (specifically) 1970s Turkey. So lengthy opener '1982 / Nepa 01' uses filtered new age synths to echo the 1980s DIY cassette scene without sticking too closely to the established rulebook. Kantarcioğlu's process is unsettling: he's subtle but uses noisy, reverberating processes that echo The Caretaker. Additional elements are unclear, but Istanbul's Ekin Fil contributes vocals and "sound textures", while drummer Berke Can Ozcan adds percussion. These new elements are lost in Kantarcioğlu's dense atmosphere like tears in the rain, everything shaping itself into a continuous, slowly shifting soundscape. It's impressive to witness. https://boomkat.com/products/loopworks-2

And my favourite... You may remember this was used (most famously) in the Cosmos series with Carl Sagan.

Damn. This is ridiculous. Klaus Schulze and now this.

Live in the UK next month.

Live in the UK next month.

Catch him on the 22nd June.

The White Hotel, Salford.

I'm pretty sure Klaus Schulze probably deserves his own thread, given he was a pioneer of late 20th-century electronic music. Three of my favourite pieces from a long and prolific history. 1974, 1989 and 2018.

https://boomkat.com/products/in-every-dream-home-a-heartache-6e3a15a9-6f8d-4792-b0e5-c319afe2bce4 Twin Peaks and Melrose Place fiends beware: Lynch protégé Dean Hurley meets the none-more-enigmatic Romance for a spellbinding, scanline-obscured examination of VHS-frazzled post-vapor euphoric melodrama on a feature-length episode resourced from YouTube’s shared memory banks. Limited edition tape housed in a semi-opaque red case, including a download of the release dropped to your account. Since joining forces with David Lynch on 2007’s 'Inland Empire’ as a sound supervisor, Dean Hurley has worked with the cult US director on the majority of his projects, mostr famously as a sound designer on 2017's unforgettable ‘Twin Peaks: The Return'. On his own, Hurley has carved out a niche for a unique brand of burned melancholia that joins the dots between crumbled NYC illbient and stonewashed ambience - as heard on 2020's ace "Concrete Feather". Meanwhile Romance, whoever they, he or she might be, has spent the last few years proving to us that high and low art can exist simultaneously in perfect harmony, most recently sweeping Celine Dion samples into gut-wrenching Tarkovsky-esque mistral forms on the incredible 'Once Upon A Time'. Together, the duo divine a masterstroke of concept and execution, ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’ celebrates the pulpy, melodramatic appeal of daytime soap opera, and its now nostalgic allure, thru a finely smudged lens of rearranged samples from YouTube. Embracing the genre’s curdled glamour and heart-rending tension from temporally displaced, hauntological perspectives, the duo draw on rich online archives as well as personal repositories for a contemporary classic that echoes the groggy air of The Caretaker and Pinkcourtesyphone’s valerian vapours via mistily soft-focussed nods to Angelo Badalamenti and Mark Snow. Bathed in absorbing soft focus and the faint promise of menace in the air, the 13-part suite drifts scene to scene with a heart-in-mouth quality and flicker of intrigue that evokes the genre’s hyper-melodramatic examinations of moral conflicts, secret relationships, adultery, and familial turmoil amidst the mundane landscape of the domestic interior. Like the work of Hurley’s peer, David Lynch on the original Twin Peaks series, he and Romance wrest a poetry from banal conventions conceived to keep viewers hooked, dangling us by a silvery thread with their gripping yet ephemeral limning of life and death narratives and navigation of nostalgic chicanery. A smudged masterpiece, no less.

Boomkat: https://boomkat.com/products/last-index-of

This was a limited only tape on Boomkat about two weeks ago but the label have now dropped the digitals. Good stuff. Later pieces, like the unsettling 'Bergman Meow' - feeling like a more detached sense of wonder, peering down the wrong end of a telescope, with all the strange feelings, both lush and more frazzled, in the process.

Some 635 comments on that YouTube piece. He must have picked up a whole new audience after that Tik-Tok thing. Kirby goes mainstream.

I'm ready.

My opinion on this hasn't changed since the previews and track 9 is just, well, garbage. I can understand the Oversteps vibe as it does allude to that but I think it's more by accident than deliberate. I hope he still continues with the washed-out, fuzzy stuff he's well known for and doesn't try to become become the next Actress.

New Carmen Villain album out now. EP has a Huerco S. 9 minute reinterpretation of 'Subtle Bodies'.

I didn't like it so much but I'm always grateful for any heads-up.

@oscillik Can you remember one of his rarer pieces that had a sample from 'The Burning Bed' (1984)?

Agreed. And yet... I ordered straight away. Go figure. Kraftwerk know me better than I know myself.