Spencer Clark is back with Vol.2 of his eco-friendly extravaganza Avatar Blue. It’s life on earth as you never heard it. The story goes like this: Spencer wanted to do a soundtrack for the yet to be made “Avatar 2”. And if you know Spencer’s work, you’ll know that he engaged on this mission reading material that influenced the rich and crazy imaginary world of “Avatar”. If you think about it a little bit, something like “Avatar” could have really come out from the mind of Spencer Clark. But it didn’t. So, he dwelled around the idea of that soundtrack, working on what is now known as “Avatar Blue”. The record we now release is a selection he made from the 2CD released last year on his own Pacific City Sound Visions. Like many of Spencer’s other alias or incarnations, Star Searchers introduces the listener to a new world. Besides making sounds/soundtracks for alternative realities he cares about making a world for his music to live in. It’s never superficial or dedicated just to the act of imagination, Spencer creates sounds that sustain the reality he imagined. That’s why they’re so rich and consequential in the realisation of music as a medium. “Avatar Blue” is music but also literature. And cinema. Star Searchers’ sound creates an absorbent sound about what’s happening in aquatic life. It goes beyond the perception of what we’ve seen or what we’ve known, it’s a neo-future aquatic life, with a world building structure and sounds and narratives that go along with it. All done with a sound-aesthetics that could be described as slowed-down-trance, that fits 1980s synth nostalgia and dreams of sci-fi to come. --- Discrepant Music, 2020

Reading Group presents 'Wanda's Dream', the new work by Krakow-based sound artist and researcher Marcin Barski. Below is Barski's introduction to the record: "The 1980s were special. It was then when microphones became a natural common part of the equipment of many households. Audio recordings were no longer unusual: everyone could make them. Handheld walkmans with a dictaphone option, analogue answering machines, tape players always equipped with a red button and a tiny hole to which one should speak in order to have their voice archived – all of these were to be found pretty much everywhere and pretty much everyone knew how to use them. There was no philosophy behind it: tapes cost pennies. And many of them have survived to this day. (...)Disappointment is a recurrent theme in these tapes. The jammed Radio Free Europe broadcasts, the vulgar sexist cabarets which stopped being funny many, many years ago (if they were ever funny at all) and above all the conversations describing new taxes, the difficulties of everyday life, or even complaints about the phoning system and the need to wait hours by the phone before being able to speak to relatives abroad.It is not uncommon to find tapes with Father Popieluszko’s sermons about truth, disguised (perhaps to fool the militia?) as Modern Talking cassettes, with the tracklist handwritten on the red and white inlay card. In the illegal underground circuit of the 1980s, the visual could function just as a cover-up for the audial. The Polish soundscape back then was very much happening on the level of the imagination. On tapes, people were sharing things they had never seen, the voices of people they had never met and recordings of music they could never experience live in a concert. The audial was shaping their longing for the visual. The audial had the power of changing a reality which otherwise was too much stuck in its greyness. (...)The other day, I found a box of tapes with recordings of phone conversations from 1982-1984. The man who was recording them – Jan – documented every single talk he had over the phone throughout these years. His wife lived in Vienna at that time and was sending him Western goods that he distributed in Warsaw among friends. But he was also a romantic guy: the tape on the bottom of the box was titled (in handwriting in pencil) «Wanda’s Dream, May 1982». It’s a quiet, 8-minute long recording of someone’s snoring. Did Jan ever listen back to his wife sleeping? Did he go to sleep in a grey communist Warsaw flat with this tape on after both TV channels had finished their broadcasts? Did he ever try to imagine the sounds, the smells and the looks of Wanda’s bedroom in colorful capitalist Vienna? Again, disappointment is a recurring theme. In a way, Jan lived a polygamic life, with one wife behind many passport controls and another one on his tapes. Both invisible, but which one was more real?"Excerpt from "Sermons over Modern Talking" essay published in "Topos. Journal for philosophy and cultural studies" (No 1 2018). The whole text in pdf format available here.A1 - Wanda's DreamA2 - Jammed by the SovietsB1 - Sermons over Modern TalkinB2 - Conversation with FatherLimited edition of 250.Includes digital download card

Best Available Technology’s Kevin Palmer keeps a backpack full of cassette tapes in his car to play at random and in their entirety. The Florist’s Mum release of Inscape Routes is an amalgamation of these long coastal drives, a high moon beaming through the windshield as a reverberating guitar plucking, structured rhythms of the highway’s rumble strips, a red light, and an indicator signalling left all take place within the tonal monastery of this metal box at 60 mph. Best Available Technology reasserts himself as a ruthless pioneer within his own field, a tree-lined pavement between ambience and dub, a dreamy drive down a barren city. --- released August 27, 2021   ---Mastered by GIusseppe Ielasi Artwork by Ziad Nagy   ---   The Florists Mum, 2021

A remastered vinyl issue of the impossible-to-find album Cri-Rythmes by the French sound poet François Dufrêne (1930-1982). First published on cassette in the 1970’s, this LP holds tracks not available since then. Dufrêne swallows the microphone, gargles the capsule, then vomits up the cables. Claustrophobic, verbal seizures, revealing once more that Dufrêne is king and all the pages of poetic history now have his spit on them.

Finders Keepers Records' continued and unwaning commitment to preserving the archives of composer Suzanne Ciani pays off in an avalanche of dividends with this latest master tape discovery, placing further markers in the historical development of electronic music and cinematic composition. Developed at a lesser-documented axis combining Ciani's key disciplines as a revolutionary synthesist and an accomplished pianist, these early works from 1973 capture a rare glimpse of one of the world's most important electronic music figures embarking on the early throes of a fruitful career as a film composer and sound designer with this rare and previously unheard documentary music illustrating the first-ever skiers' decent from the peak of the tallest mountain in Alaska. Capturing innocence and optimism in its composition, but never less than masterful in its realisation, Denali takes what would later become the yin and yang in Ciani's versatile musical personality and provides unrivalled vistas from both side of the mountain, scaling a treacherous and fine creative line. Within the context of Suzanne Ciani's achievements the words “maverick” and "pioneer" have regularly shared sentences amongst a list of "firsts" when documenting her expansive CV as a Grammy nominated, million-selling recording artist, and genuine revolutionary in the progression of future music in all its early capacities. But it is with this important release of uncovered recordings from early 1973 that Ciani's "exploratory" compositions from her formative years find kinship alongside the exploits of other radical and historic trailblazers, as the music for the film known only as Denali finally achieves a wider vantage point. Commissioned in the early years of Suzanne's "professional" life, in a period that bridged her activities with art installations, experimental theatre and her rising reputation as a film composer and sound designer, the Denali tape reels preceed Suzanne's film work such as Lloyd Michael Williams Rainbow's Children (1975) and Bryan Forbe's The Stepford Wives (1975) by just 18 months, and capture Suzanne at her wide-eyed best two years after scoring her first-ever paid work providing synthesiser loops for aquariums in Middle America shopping malls (Fish Music, FKSP011). It was in 1972, whilst occupying a studio space in San Francisco, as one of a small group of prophets then celebrating the interpolation of Don Buchla's electronic instruments, that Suzanne was approached by a French speaking ski enthusiast and short film producer called Patrick Derouin to create "forward-thinking" and "otherworldly" themes and sound design for some amazing unseen footage of the first-ever people to ski down the death-defying face of Mount Mckinley in Alaska. Recognised as one of the tallest mountains in the world, this footage would mark a significant historic feat previously inconceivable outside the hat stand notions of a small group of French speaking European explorers and would also coincide with cultural pressure within the Alaska state legislature to lobby for the United States Board On Geographic Names to reinstate the mountain's traditional name Denali (a decision widely supported by The Koyukon Athabaskans who inhabit the area around the mountain for centuries). Given what is now widely recognised about Suzanne Ciani as a composer, it is plain to see that Derouin came to the correct place and as you will hear, for the first time, within the grooves of this record the collective aura of challenge and enlightenment is almost breathtaking in its precise narrative ability; striking similarities with Eno, Kraftwerk and Neu! at their melodic best but from a very different vantage point, with polar opposite means of execution, whilst operating on Ciani's unique and all-important feminine "wave" length. The music on this record was also commissioned two years before Suzanne's first Buchla concerts in 1974 and 1975, which were accompanied by her seminal National Endowment Paper, and would reveal Suzanne's proud commitment to the developed Buchla instrument and her confidence in its place in modern music, thus proving the likes of Denali to be an earlier showcase of the instrument in it's advanced infancy although still robust enough to carry the emotive and ambitious songwriting skills of the classically trained Ciani. After hearing this record it will come as little surprise that the track known as Ski Song would later be reappropriated (and rerecorded) on Ciani's globally critically acclaimed debut album Seven Waves (as the Fourth Wave), which was initially released exclusively in Japan before Turkish-born electronic music pioneer _lhan Mimaro_lu signed the record to his Finnidar imprint at Atlantic records, thus making musical history for Suzanne as a widely celebrated American-Italian female composer. It stands as testimony to the composer's determination and inventive nature that this single track, which would later make its way on to every future music best-seller list in the country, was originally composed on just piano and the modular synth model which she had helped to assemble on Buchla's production line ten years before her Tokyo debut. "Denali was composed using just Buchla and piano," explains Suzanne in 2020. "It was recorded at Rainbow Recording, which is the studio I found and shared with recording engineer Richard Beggs, who then sold it to Francis Ford Coppola after I fell in love and quickly moved to LA," she laments. "If I had stuck around I would have probably ended up doing sound for Coppola," she jokes. Instead, Suzanne would in a short time find her filmic feet in Hollywood (providing sound design for Michael Small's aforementioned The Stepford Wives soundtrack) which would later lead to her winning the accolade of first female film composer to single-handedly record a major motion picture with The Incredible Shrinking Woman in 1982. But it was ten years earlier with Denali that the ball had started rolling alongside the film reel sprockets at Rainbow Recordings. "I have very fond memories of first meeting Patrick and his thick French accent," Suzanne explained. "He was a rugged looking young man who literally looked like he had just stepped down from the mountain himself." The basic brief around Suzanne's musical journey was to be "The story of the arduous ascent and joyous descent of the mountain," which, with one of her most melodic and dynamic projects from her early years, she successfully illustrated with utmost aplomb. Although Suzanne would only see the short film a handful of times, mostly during intense late night recording sessions ("I used to dress like a sailor so I wouldn't get street hassle on the way home"), and never meet to actual cast of the film, she can still remember mind-blowing shots of the skier cascading down the mountains, images that have remained with her throughout the subsequent five decades as a composer. As mountaineering history denotes the first-ever skier to descend from the tip of Denali was indeed in 1972, in dates that correlate directly to Suzanne's meticulously kept tape library and studio diaries. The explorer's name was French speaking Swiss skier Sylvain Saudan, a celebrated household name amongst enthusiasts to this day. Like Suzanne, like Saudan, neither artist have diverted from their path, turned their back on a challenge, nor lost their footing in the face of adversity. 

"Mike Cooper returns to Discrepant with a recording of a live set recorded at the Controindicazioni Festival of Improvised Music in Rome in 2003The music moves very slowly through four movements: ‘’Reluctant Swimmer’’, ‘’Movies is Magic’’, Virtual Swimmer’’ and ‘’Dolphins’’. 'Floating in out of the exotic ether and disappearing like smoke, engulfed in the alien hugeness of nature... a very elegant set by a visionary artist.'Mike Cooper says 'the first half is played on my old 1920s National tri-plate lapsteel guitar and the second half on my vietnamese electric lap steel. I also sing two songs along the way. ‘’Movies is Magic’’ by Van Dyke Parks and “Dolphins” by Freid Neil. It was the first time I had ever sung the last song.'"With beautiful artwork collage by Evan Crankshaw.

The Clearing is the debut album by the late Los Angeles-based musician Barry Craig aka A Produce. As co-founder of the underground cassette imprint Trance Port Tapes, Craig managed to assemble local artists who were working within the realms of DIY electronics and rhythmic, spacious sound. Incubated over a three year period, '88 release The Clearing draws on the roster of TPT associates such as Scott Fraser (Kronos Quartet), Daniel Voznick (Afterimage) and guitarist Scott Marc Becker resulting an 'an album of conceptual space', owing equally to the guitar-based new-wave releases of the imprint prior as to the later, and deeper ambient trance sound that would follow. Coming at this intersection of styles, there are moments of deep introspection and sulking, minimal drum machines followed by pieces of more outward expression only to be plunged back into tense, oppressive atmospheres. Yet despite these shifts in style, the sense of mood and cohesion throughout is ever-present, giving a true sense of inhabiting a unique space - or 'The Clearing'. Stockport-based store All Night Flight Records is proud to present this official reissue, with the blessing of Craig's estate and artwork replicated by the original artist - renown designer Bruce Licher of Independent Project Recordings. Release by All Night Flight

This manifesto of outsider orchestrations, teenage symphonies and cultivated concrete is the debut album of experimental Irish avant garde and electro acoustic innovator Roger Doyle. A pianist, composer and improvisational jazz drummer with a penchant for experimentation that would marginalise him from traditional seats of learning in his native homeland but embrace him to the bosom of Europe’s leading forward-thinking research centres for electronic and computer music. Here he would piece together two highly sought after experimental albums before returning home to channel his multi-disciplinary work ethic into the agit pop theatrical company Operating Theatre and play a leading role in the burgeoning Irish new wave scene as an early signing to U2’s Mother Records. A collection of some of Doyle’s earliest works as an indomitable scholarship student of composition at the Royal Irish Academy Of Music in Dublin and then as founding member and drummer of experimental jazz rock outfit Jazz Therapy (who would later become Supply Demand & Curve), this patchwork 1975 debut long-player draws from what was an already bulging portfolio that included academic assignments, living room compositions and soundtrack collaborations with Irish filmmakers. Originally part-recorded and subsequently aborted when the would-be label vanished without trace overnight, Oizzo No was shelved indefinitely until a scholarship at the prestigious Institute Of Sonology at the University Of Utrecht in Holland afforded Doyle not only the opportunity to partially revise his humble opus in their state of the art studios (as well as those of the EMS Studios in Stockholm) but also the money to press a limited run of 500 copies and help further cement the foundations of his future status as one of Ireland’s leading and most versatile contemporary composers. 

This is really something, don't miss the wholly unique world of the 1990s hidden classic. Frank Dommert’s debut album was one of the first significant volleys from Cologne in the new decade. His history stretched back through the second half of the 80a, as he’d already released a number of cassettes via his label Entenpfuhl, and had collaborated with Hirsche Nicht Aus Sofa (H.N.A.S.), the Aachen-based surrealist-noise-junk outfit led by Christoph Heemann and Achim P Li Khan. Their connection with English cut-up/industrial project Nurse With Wound (NWW’s Stapleton released an early H.N.A.S. album on his label, United Dairies) can be heard in Kiefermusik as well, a disorienting collage which, as Dommert says, “is pretty much a [LSD] trip, intentional and in a large portion, unconscious.” Dommert’s music has a peculiar logic to it that marks it out from the pack, though, perhaps due to his growing fascination with “Art Brut and naïve stuff”. Kiefermusik is simultaneously a rough-as-guts album of collapsing architectures and an intelligent, sensitively sculpted masterpiece of editing, with Dommert winding a psychedelic spool around loops that could spin out into eternity. --- - Fresh remaster by Frederick Alstadt- Added interview insert sheet with Frank Dommert- Limited edition pressing of 500 --- Pacific Sound Vision, 2017

Dog Life explores free improvised music on a high-energetic plateau, descending from the outskirts of free jazz, and further towards a harder, darker and undefined terrain. Their debute album was critically acclaimed in Europe as well as in the US. On their new album Fresh From the Ruins, Doglife continue to push the freejazz-punk limits and sets out new directions with elements of doom and noise. --- Anna Högberg: Saxophones Finn Loxbo: Electric Bass Mårten Magnefors: Drums --- Omlott Records, 2018

SLE008.5 shows Parisian artist D.K.'s concern for the nostalgia-tinged 90s electronica and second room IDM that inform not just his compositional practice but also our own tastes here at the label. Recorded live at the intimate South Korean venue The Edge, this limited 12" births fleeting moments in a late night music bar into physical form. Propulsive rhythmic tension, heavy doses of reverb and glassy, cavernous sound design across six movements.

Typhonian Highlife is the new moniker of Spencer Clark. Clark is the ultimate shape shifter, a trickster continuously mutating from a sci-fi hero, into a mystic guru or into a speculative visionary. As Typhonian Highlife he assimilates juxtapositions of the natural world and fantastic technology to reanimate the manieristic tradition. His compositions envision possible futures and speculative pasts. They imagine a new vision upon mankind, as a mythical underwater creature who creates meaning through a prosaic mysticism. His latest record, "The World Of Shells" works as an dream expedition that has overflowed itself into real time. Through continual material-world visualization a technological nature music unfolds as series of movements outlining the existence of Mythological African creature. Travelling through Hollywood, Hanging Rock, Australia, and The Ear of Dionysus in Sicily the creature was placed, and has enacted a music and art form that explores a sci-fi aquatic and wind-blown desert fusion to uncover the life and wanderings of this non-material being. --- Written, performed & produced by Spencer Clark Artwork by Spencer Clark Mastering by Christophe Albertijn --- Released 2016

Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen came together for a gig in Berlin, organised by Pattern Dissection in February 2020, at which they shared the stage for the first time — resulting in a sweaty winter night and a cheering, overwhelmed audience. Their idiosyncratic line-up of electric bass, synthesizer and drums is foundation to spectacular group improvisation, pushing through seething soundscapes and incredibly dynamic interplay to agile free jazz attacks of astonishing intensity. They met again six months later for a day in the studio to record their debut album and the inaugural release on the Pattern Dissection record label. Dag Magnus’s down-tuned drum set builds the ground for relentless legwork and hectic wrestling, shaking the floor when confronted with Farida’s high string slaps on the bass guitar, which they occasionally swap for droning vibrations and scorching fingerpicking, neither shying away from a heavy riff nor stripped back momentum. Liz’s synth is an idiosyncratic creature of its own, birthing sounds rarely graspable but utterly fascinating, swift in taking turns and always one step ahead of any expectation. Before meeting as a band the three artists cut their teeth in numerous projects and constellations as well as finding a highly personal voice in playing their respective instrument: By challenging possibilities and limits and navigating to unknown territory, CIRCUIT will keep you on the edge of your seat. All music composed and performed by Farida Amadou, Liz Kosack and Dag Magnus Narvesen, recorded in Berlin on July 28, 2020.

TWO LIVE RECORDINGS + UNRELEASED TAPE + UNRELEASED CONFERENCE + INTERVIEWHenri Chopin came to perform in Besançon in 1995 at Garage Caméléon the birthplace of Erratum Musical activities and the label. People involved were Michel Giroud (who introduced Henri Chopin to us and helped to publish “Poésie Sonore Internationale”), Joachim Montessuis, Yvan Etienne and Masahiro Handa. This place used to be a 300m2 garage where we lived, worked and organised noise performances and poetry actions from 1993 to 1998. When Henri Chopin arrived, he was 72 years old, calm and slow, and was delighted to meet a younger generation interested in sound art and electronic sound poetry experiments. He brought his tapes and we rented a powerful sound system that would be perfect to fill all of the space with his mouth noises. He then asked us to project the sound and follow his gestures concerning volumes and dynamic panning, and the resulting high pitch echos and feedback intensity along with the slowly melting speakers (audible here) gave him an incredible excitation and joy that we all could witness - and it was a contagious enthousiasm. Direct energy ! Later in 2004 Henri Chopin gave us two tapes to release, the first one was for the CD “La danse des tonneaux roulants et brisés” and the second one was “Les gouffres des bronches sont des cavernes infinies”, which was aired for the first time on France Culture radio in 2013 thanks to Thomas Baumgartner. Henri Chopin was born in 1922, this LP is echoing his 100th anniversary and celebrates the passion he channeled and transmitted to many artists along his life and beyond.

Beside Myself is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist Crys Cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP Sand/Layna (BT 017LP, 2015), Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019) Includes download code; edition of 300. 

Building upon a standing commitment to the work of artists who worked in international obscurity under the shadow of 1960s and '70s fascist Spain, Alga Marghen returns with "El Artilugio”, a never before issued body of work by Manuel Calvo. Bridging the contexts of installation, sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music / noise, its stunning two sides - issued in a limited edition of 200 copies on vinyl, housed in a gatefold sleeve with an accompanying large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo - open a visionary creative universe, too long hidden by the history's weight. Over their decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has illuminated a near countless number of historical artefacts at the juncture of visual art, experimental music and avant-garde deployments of language, helping to radically reshape our understanding of 20th Century creative practice. Embedded within their ever-growing discography lies a small window, via releases by Zaj members Walter Marchetti, José Luis Castillejo and Juan Hidalgo, into the avant-garde happening occurring in Spain during the '60s and '70s, while the country lay under the final decades of fascist rule. Now, Alga opens access to this radical world with El Artilugio, a stunning LP of previously unavailable sonic art by multidisciplinary artist, Manuel Calvo, created in 1966. Creatively thrilling and existing outside the larger historical vision of experimental practice occourring in Europe during that decade, its stunning sounds are issued on vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, accompanied by a large format 8-page booklet with in-depth liner notes by musicologist Gabriele Bonomo, in an edition of 200 copies. As important as world-premiere releases come.Born in 1934, during the 1950s and '60s Manuel Calvo emerged as a forerunner and a protagonist of geometric abstract painting in Spain, working against the odds attempting freely expression within the context of fascist rule in Spain that had taken hold during the early years of his life. During his early career, he was closely aligned with groups like Equipo 57 and Grupo Parpallo, artists who were active around Valencia and held strong connections to the rest of Europe, developing the principles of an analytical art in opposition to the main currents of informal art and lyrical abstraction.This restless questioning increased to more radical tendencies in his work, a period spent in Paris and then Brazil, before returning to Spain in 1966 where he fell into contact with artists like Juan Hidalgo and Walter Marchetti, who had founded the Zaj group in Madrid in 1964, and begun creating some of the most subversive means of aesthetic communication encountered during that period.Calvo’s new phase of radicalism, embarked upon between 1966 and 1967, centered around the transformation of his studio into a laboratory where he could hold a permanent exhibition of his works, opening it to the public with no temporal limits, in the hope to reverse the standing perceptions of what an exhibition was. Within this space, Calvo created El artilugio, a participatory installation where the effects of light variations were randomly activated through simple buttons by the audience, opening the potential for open structures of unlimited possibilities for random variation. In addition to this, through a process similar to that applied to the light, Calvo introduced a reel-to-reel recording machine and a pre-recorded magnetic tape as a sonic element, recording the parasitic noises of an old electric engine that were then introduced into the installation via the reel-to-reel. It is this sound component of the installation that makes up Alga Marghen’s incredible LP, El artilugio, opening long overdue access to this singular creative world.El artilugio comprise two side long tracks. The first encounters the brilliant, randomized sonic universe that accompanied the installation of the same name, appearing somewhere between sound collage - split and juxtaposed by the participant’s push-button activated manipulation - and a microscopic journey across the surface and generative possibilities of the machine whose sounds it captures, rattling, clicking, scratching, droning, and buzzing as it goes, before fading out in a glissando after nearly half an hour.As a fascinating juxtaposition, the second side of El artilugio features the performance of an Austrian soprano singer reading out phonems, alliterations of single words, tongue twisters, and texts in different languages, repeated obsessively into states of abstraction that offers a stunning counterpoint to other forms of sound poetry being created during this period across the globe.Issued in a vinyl edition of 200 copies, in a gatefold sleeve that also includes a large format 8-page booklet, with El artilugio Alga Marghen has offered yet another triumphant window into the incredible world of singular artists working against the odds within fascist Spain, expanding their long-standing commitment to illuminating under-celebrated artefacts from the 20th Century, and changing history as they go. Absolutely incredible, and a must for any fan of sound art, sound poetry, and experimental music at large.

'Studies / Studien / Etudes' is a collection of pieces on synth by Rotterdam-based artist Joost M. de Jong jr., inspired by the first wave of Krautrock, Wendy Carlos and straight-to-VHS soundtracks. His music is both abstract and melodic, playful and austere, highly experimental and endlessly replayable... TEXT ↓It turns out that ‘Joost M. de Jong, Jr.’ is just one of the incarnations, in name and character, of the man sitting in front of me. As a person, he is apologetic about being chaotic and about being a millennial. As a musician, he goes by a number of monikers, past and present. Oliver Oat makes pop music, Boze Adelaar raps, and Jose Happa does Casio Latin. Joost also lends his musical assistance to many other bands. It was in one of these bands, Bonne Aparte, that Michiel Klein, who runs the cassette label DeHef, noticed Joost’s doodling between songs on the MoPho, a one-voice synth with sub-oscillator. He encouraged him to keep playing around, to record some segments and forward them to him for a future tape compilation release. This provided a focus for the heretofore ‘unguided’ doodling and arpeggios; they now had a purpose and a goal.In much the same way, Joost’s earliest musical inclinations at the age of five were directed into piano lessons by his parents, to formalise his fiddling. This led to a sequence of musical adventures through his childhood, including participation in a church choir and playing Swedish folk music; violin- and singing lessons; and pop-music lessons. Later on he studied sublime poetry in Edinburgh, Scotland; picked up the accordion and the ukulele; messed with PCs and SCSI hard-disk recording; then went on to the guitar, melodic death metal, and radio-promo productions.Joost’s classical training can be clearly discerned in the arpeggiated tracks on this album, influenced by Béla Bartók, Bach’s fugues, eighties soundtracks, Krautrock, and electronic pioneers such as Wendy Carlos. The tracks were recorded on VCR using a combination of Roland JX-3P, Korg Mono/Poly, Roland Juno-60, an old mixer, an Echolette suitcase delay machine and more. Klein’s curatorial input was responsible for losing a drumtrack and looping some shorter pieces.So, listen closely and let the mathematical intricacy of synthesised arpeggios take you on a ride over some imaginary moviescapes. Text written by Danny Bosten, Rotterdam