Forest root

Let's party like it's 1998*. The soundtrack? A sudden, notable eruption of new music from the near-holy trinity of Jan Jelinek, Oval and Pole, three pioneering titans of experimental electronica. 


Jelinek has just launched only his second release as Farben since 2004 - a self-released 12" of deviant disco, like its predecessor. Stefan Betke is about to unleash his first as Pole in several years (also his debut under his own label & again a 12").


Meanwhile, the past year's outpouring of Markus Popp's reinvented Oval is poised to continue with - somewhat unimaginably, given his torrential recent output - the 'lost tracks' of OvalDNA. In contrast to his peers' vinyl-clad modesty, Popp's maximal "much more than a regular music CD" package is also to include a DVD & software).


To these ears, Popp's playful, textured workouts are particularly compelling. Inevitably, though, Farben's warped loops & Pole's bassy warmth offer much as well. 


Anyway, the comparison is probably witless & certainly unfair. OvalDNA excavates 17 years in unearthing its 35 tracks, even if some are recognisably of the zithery, twangy 'new' Oval (others are clearly not, as inspired glitches like Gegenlesen & Savvy below underline - "I am almost sure there will be a lot to like about this record, especially for fans of the classic Oval sound," Popp says). 


Jelinek & Betke's releases document their notable efforts to still be making new music after all this time. Still, OvalDNA manages to sound rather more contemporary than either (despite being the opposite, of course) - perhaps reflecting the constraints imposed by Farben & Pole's closer adherence to genres, especially Betke's willingness to keep mining dub techno tropes. Happily, Jelinek seems to smuggle in a little breadth to his palette from the Oramic sci fi territory he's been exploring as Ursula Bogner.  



Oval - Glass UFO


*OK, so Oval's legendary 94diskont. came out a few years earlier. But the point - unexpected, welcome resurgence of 90s legends - stands... 

farben - xango (album preview)


Farben - Xango EP - clips

Oval - Gegenlesen 30s preview


Oval - Pockyrocky 30s preview


Oval - Savvy 30s preview


Oval - Stealth 30s preview


Oval - IV 30s preview



Navigating Oval

Blurb: "As the next step in the evolution of a legendary producer, on September 1st 2011, Stefan Betke is founding a new artist label named “pole.” 

Made for the music of pole, this new imprint will keep Betke’s large back catalogue available, as well as give his forthcoming releases an autonomous structure for experimentation and creativity.
For over a decade, Stefan Betke has been working as a label owner, publisher and mastering engineer, contributing his experience to the development of electronic music.
The artist label “pole” is intended to create a place where pole´s original and unique sound can be developed further, and combined with new production methods and ideas.
In the second half of 2011, pole will re-release his full back catalogue digitally, including classical records such as “1,2,3,” “Steingarten” and “Steingarten remixes,” as well as his new music on a series of 12 inches released on vinyl and digital. 

As Pole puts it: “My new music will sound very warm, has a lot of bass and stands in a strong relation to my musical history."

Wurzel - Excerpt by pole


Wipfel Dub - Excerpt by pole


Wipfel - Excerpt by pole


Pole photo by Kai von Rabenau. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Corporeal wilderness

Hot on the heels of his post-jazz quartet, more Vladislav Delay goodness - this time in the gloopy, lateral form of the nicely non-generic Latoma EP. A kind of meta dub techno, both the swampy slurring original (eventually flogged along into something more kinetic) & the spacious, almost languidly round-the-houses Loderbauer/Villalobos remix seem to energise themselves - the Villo to the extent it can be arsed... - by toying with the genre's tropes. But the best of all may well be the pounding, shuddering lope of Korpi.

Photos by Emanuele Sason (top), Allert Aalders & Nicola / Fotonix (bottom).

Vladislav Delay - Latoma EP (Preview Mix)

More excerpts via Hardwax: Latoma / Korpi / Latoma (Villo Remix)

Delay treasure-trove...

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Magical nectar

Two fascinating, unsettling excursions by Erstlaub into mystically-tinged spoken drone. Wands & Cups powerfully summon the elemental suits through Dave's dark intoning (wording below) to apt, notably restrained settings of metallic hum & spiral or wind buffeted echo...

Erstlaub > Wands

"Part of a written/spoken-word project I'm working on concerned with the 4 suits of elements.

The Spark, causality, an entire chain of consequence spiralling outwards.

This glowing magical nectar, stolen by Prometheus from the gods and fenced, in turn, to man with dire justice exacted upon both parties. Dragging us out of our Neanderthal fug and blazing our way forwards through time, marching over history, conquering with the weapons we forge, no longer content with rock and stick, through to our inevitable mass cremation. Sucking oxygen and converting to pure destructive energy, a parallel is drawn.

At the heart of our solar system lies a gas giant, greater than comprehension, temperature beyond understanding, an ever watchful eye, surveying its suspendedmicro-marble collection, keeping everything hanging just so.

With fire comes movement, progress, transport, the steam engine, coal driven power plants and combustion engines. We burn up the fossil-fuel paved carriageway behind us with juggernaught mass. Objects in the rear-view mirror may appear less charred than they are.

Wands, the renewing flame. Thoth attributes fire to Will. Those bound to this house are hot of temperament, passionate, driven, destructive. Fire concerns itself with the future, as all that lies in its wake is used up and devoid of nutrition.

Tarkovsky shows us over the image of the burning house, the burning barn, the sacrifice of possession and livelihood. A purging, a banishing. The lighting of a ceremonial candle to this ritual hungry, deity of consumption. The Nightclubs of our soul, lie torched in an inside insurance-job.

As children, fire holds wonder, we scry in the flame for dragon’s tails, we write letters to Santa and offer them up, an invocation, a will driven sacrament, naïve magic. As adults, the veil is less opaque, something deeper, more frightening, more powerful than us lives within, glimpses of another realm. We are its keepers, but it, our master. Cerberus juts three crackling, snarling jaws into our physical. Hades whispers to us, subsonic, hidden in the white noise.

Burn the undead and they cannot rise. We made them this way when we became them."

Erstlaub > Cups

"

This is a tape loop caught in entropy, passing the play heads again an

d again, becoming softer, less defined, but still indelibly imprinted. Layers of psychological surface noise build up.

By means of water-tape theory, all emotion records directly into the fabric of our surroundings, every emotional twinge imprinted deep within building, within wood and brick, in every particle of moisture within the clay. Time trickles through everything, clinging to its hydrogenised host, coming back into the vast single consciousness of the water table.

Our human condition leads us to stare into this measured passage of time at moments of inner turmoil, are we looking for answers? Do we wish the rumble of static that clouds our thoughts washed away? Absolved? Transmuted into this neverending conveyor belt away from the here and now and deposited like silt in another place, somewhere else, across the sea?

We look to bridge disasters and suicides; the spanning of such an ancient, infinite entity invites disaster. Tiptoeing across the sleeping jaws of an alligator, a subconscious, dream-twitch brings about catastrophe. Poseidon claims the souls of those who bob and sink, whose bodies lie still in the deep, unfound, dissipating their organic matter back to source, memorialised in populist shortbread tin prose by the like of McGonagall.

The same water flows past us now as it once did our fathers who brought us into being, our grandfathers who fought great atrocities, and back further yet, infinitely past their grandfathers who toiled and saw hardship in the name of progress. The same water, altered, now loaded up with generations upon generations of pollutants and chemicals, the diluted effluent of evolution that our ancestors would find abhorrent, haunts us and flows again through our being.

Twice a day the tides change, and the information contained feeds back on itself, the psychological backwash as heavy as the spate volume of water makes the riverbanks heave under its incalculable weight.

We are beings of the water; it gives us life and context, an infinite time machine in deep black and quicksilver trapped in a constant mutual state of both record and playback, eroding and replenishing all. Everything that ever was, and ever will be will one day be crushed and washed into each other. Time fills our lungs and drowns us.

"

Rere-up of previous Erstlaub/TVO/Broken 20 post in one last attempt at aggregation...

We are all broken - indisputably, Broken20_0.5 brings "drones, noise, clipped beats, rumbling bass". But to these ears what it most brings is a striking melding of protaganists TVO & Erstlaub into two sides of the same genre-defying, richly experimental & viscerally intense post-techno coin (appropriate image for a 3"...).

The two pieces bleed into each other in fascinating ways. Keep Away From Fire And Flames is the sound of a delicate drone infusion onto a notably restrained & modulated bed of skippy beats. Meanwhile, Entering The Eye Of The Storm squirts a faintly oriental, exuberant pipe* over a boldly slashing, clanking base unfamiliar from earlier Erst. *not a pipe really, just a sound somewhat like one...

The whole release is clearly also a kind of kissing cousin to TVO's prismatic epic We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the inspired first official B20 release (extracts below).

Separately, a new B20 artist: "Isodyne is a musician and dj from Edinburgh; he’s also recorded and worked under his own name, Patrick Walker, as well as AVX/Avionix and is perhaps best known currently for his work as half of Forward Strategy Group."

Dave's report on live botanics.

Previous coverage (also here & here [B20]; here, here & here [TVO]; & here, here & here [Erst])

TVO > Keep Away From Fire And Flames (Excerpt)

Erstlaub > Entering The Eye Of The Storm (Excerpt)

TVO > We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Excerpt 2)

TVO > We Can Remember It For You Wholesale (Excerpt 1)

Isodyne > Answer To No Dub

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Firestorm

We are all broken - indisputably, Broken20_0.5 brings "drones, noise, clipped beats, rumbling bass". But to these ears what it most brings is a striking melding of protaganists TVO & Erstlaub into two sides of the same genre-defying, richly experimental & viscerally intense post-techno coin (appropriate image for a 3"...).

The two pieces bleed into each other in fascinating ways. Keep Away From Fire And Flames is the sound of a delicate drone infusion onto a notably restrained & modulated bed of skippy beats. Meanwhile, Entering The Eye Of The Storm squirts a faintly oriental, exuberant pipe* over a boldly slashing, clanking base unfamiliar from earlier Erst. *not a pipe really, just a sound somewhat like one...

The whole release is clearly also a kind of kissing cousin to TVO's prismatic epic We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, the inspired first official B20 release (extracts below).

Separately, a new B20 artist: "Isodyne is a musician and dj from Edinburgh; he’s also recorded and worked under his own name, Patrick Walker, as well as AVX/Avionix and is perhaps best known currently for his work as half of Forward Strategy Group."

Erst's report on live botanics.

Previous coverage (also here & here [B20]; here, here & here [TVO]; & here, here & here [Erst])

TVO > Keep Away From Fire And Flames Excerpt

Erstlaub - Entering The Eye Of The Storm Excerpt

TVO > We Can Remember It For You Wholesale Excerpt 2

TVO > We Can Remember It For You Wholesale Excerpt 1

Isodyne - Answer To No Dub

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.