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LP
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RM 4237LP
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From Lawrence English: "It's hard to imagine that this year [2024] William Gibson's Neuromancer celebrates its 40th anniversary. Having recently re-read the book for the first time in a great many years, the world building Gibson undertook in that text and the lingering cultural specters he conjured, feel ever so evocative of moments of our contemporary lived experience. The books continued cultural resonance has resolved in a way that captured a future reading of an, at that time of its release, unknown internet era. It was an era of promise, and imagination, of speculative hope and down-right uneasiness in equal parts. In 1994, as the books 10th anniversary was on hand, New York duo Black Rain were commissioned to make a soundtrack to the audio book version of Neuromancer. Read by the author himself, this document, originally publish on a series of cassettes, would go on to be recognized as a unique glimpse into Gibson's sensing of the characters and places that make up the Neuromancer zone. Following a period of work as an expanded collective, Stuart Argabright and Shinichi Shimokawa, the two core members of Black Rain, decided to strip back their unit largely to a duet format. Their focus became more engaged around studio practice, and it was this refocusing that was ultimately serendipitous. As they started work on Neuromancer a number of new approaches and techniques emerged and with them came a new sonic language the pair had only imagined previously. The audio book was a huge success and the soundtrack too was recognized for its brooding and post-industrial electronic grind. Since that time however, the recordings have largely remained in obscurity. While a couple of the pieces have surfaced in various editions including an excellent compilation by Blackest Ever Black, the entire suite of pieces has remained unpublished until this moment. Working off the original master tapes, this edition (like the book), folds and morphs over itself in an episodic stratification. Pieces emerge, like strange architecture, from one another forming a sonic environment that feels almost tangible. I spent many weeks working on these tapes and also on the connections between the pieces. In collaboration with Stuart, our joint aim was to create a version of the soundtrack that speaks to the very atmosphere of the text itself. It's a delight to share this collection of work for the first time."
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12"
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BLACKEST 072EP
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Stuart Argabright (Ike Yard, Dominatrix, Death Comet Crew) is joined by Black Rain founder member Shinichi Shimokawa as well as more recent recruit Soren Roi and Zanias, vocalist on 2015's Dark Pool (BLACKEST 009CD/LP, 2014), making for the most group-oriented iteration of Black Rain since its earliest days. Sonically too, there is a sense of evolution but also of coming full circle: the cyberpunk techno of Argabright's celebrated William Gibson soundtracks, and extrapolations of Dark Pool's neuromantic yearning cut with glimpses of the thrash and industrial rock energies that animated Black Rain's incendiary live shows in the early '90s.
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CD
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BLACKEST 009CD
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Dark Pool is the new studio album from Black Rain, the project's first in 18 years. Produced in New York City by Stuart Argabright, Black Rain's founder and figurehead, Dark Pool is a work of hard-edged sonic fiction rooted in cyberpunk's quintessential neo-noir cityscape/dataspace but projecting into a farther future of biotechnological advancement and alienation. Stuart Argabright first landed in New York in 1978. By day, he worked as a landscape gardener for the upscale likes of Rock Hudson and Bob Dylan, while at night involving himself in all manner of subcultural activity -- the reverberations of which are still being felt today. He co-founded seminal no wave minimalists Ike Yard (whose early 1980s work has been cited as an influence by the likes of Kode9, Young Echo and Silent Servant), collaborated with the late Rammellzee in futurist hip-hop outfit Death Comet Crew (recently reactivated for an LP on Powell's Diagonal label) and as Dominatrix scored a bona fide club hit with the downtown electro classic "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" (1984). Black Rain was revived in the wake of 2011's Now I'm Just a Number's release and Argabright has toured extensively under the name and in 2013 released an EP of live recordings, Protoplasm, on BEB. Three of the EP's four tracks appear here on Dark Pool in radically revised and expanded form: the stuttering ribofunk of "Endourban" is now anchored by ominous string pads faintly redolent of Argabright's label-mates Raime, while "Data River" revisits the accelerated beat-stream of Black Rain's 1996 album Nanarchy, and the low-slung "Protoplasm" has evolved into a sprawling, syncopated techno epic -- the sound of red dawn rising on an illegal replicant rave. A further seven new productions feature. "Burst," its title perhaps a nod to Sogo Ishii's 1982 biker gang saga Burst City, harks back to the scrap-metal-banging brutalism of Black Rain mk.1; "Xibalba Road Metamorph," the album's angry, anguished centerpiece, externalizes the sadness and self-loathing of Jeter's oppressed post-human workforce. "Night in New Chiang Saen" reimagines dub as the viral product of one of AgriGen's morally-suspect scientific initiatives in The Windup Girl, before "Who Will Save the Tiger?" calls upon spidery, Metalheadz-esque breakbeats and wailing guitar drones to summon a 23rd century Ark. Vocals (on "Profusion" and "Profusion II") from Zoe Zanias (Keluar), and a brief spoken intervention from Sean Young (who of course played Rachel in Blade Runner) are simply the most audible manifestations of a dejected feminine presence that haunts the entire album. For all its textual references, Dark Pool is a visceral and straight-talking affair: its body-hammer rhythms and brooding sound design require no explanation for their impact to be felt.
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LP
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BLACKEST 009LP
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LP version. Dark Pool is the new studio album from Black Rain, the project's first in 18 years. Produced in New York City by Stuart Argabright, Black Rain's founder and figurehead, Dark Pool is a work of hard-edged sonic fiction rooted in cyberpunk's quintessential neo-noir cityscape/dataspace but projecting into a farther future of biotechnological advancement and alienation. Stuart Argabright first landed in New York in 1978. By day, he worked as a landscape gardener for the upscale likes of Rock Hudson and Bob Dylan, while at night involving himself in all manner of subcultural activity -- the reverberations of which are still being felt today. He co-founded seminal no wave minimalists Ike Yard (whose early 1980s work has been cited as an influence by the likes of Kode9, Young Echo and Silent Servant), collaborated with the late Rammellzee in futurist hip-hop outfit Death Comet Crew (recently reactivated for an LP on Powell's Diagonal label) and as Dominatrix scored a bona fide club hit with the downtown electro classic "The Dominatrix Sleeps Tonight" (1984). Black Rain was revived in the wake of 2011's Now I'm Just a Number's release and Argabright has toured extensively under the name and in 2013 released an EP of live recordings, Protoplasm, on BEB. Three of the EP's four tracks appear here on Dark Pool in radically revised and expanded form: the stuttering ribofunk of "Endourban" is now anchored by ominous string pads faintly redolent of Argabright's label-mates Raime, while "Data River" revisits the accelerated beat-stream of Black Rain's 1996 album Nanarchy, and the low-slung "Protoplasm" has evolved into a sprawling, syncopated techno epic -- the sound of red dawn rising on an illegal replicant rave. A further seven new productions feature. "Burst," its title perhaps a nod to Sogo Ishii's 1982 biker gang saga Burst City, harks back to the scrap-metal-banging brutalism of Black Rain mk.1; "Xibalba Road Metamorph," the album's angry, anguished centerpiece, externalizes the sadness and self-loathing of Jeter's oppressed post-human workforce. "Night in New Chiang Saen" reimagines dub as the viral product of one of AgriGen's morally-suspect scientific initiatives in The Windup Girl, before "Who Will Save the Tiger?" calls upon spidery, Metalheadz-esque breakbeats and wailing guitar drones to summon a 23rd century Ark. Vocals (on "Profusion" and "Profusion II") from Zoe Zanias (Keluar), and a brief spoken intervention from Sean Young (who of course played Rachel in Blade Runner) are simply the most audible manifestations of a dejected feminine presence that haunts the entire album. For all its textual references, Dark Pool is a visceral and straight-talking affair: its body-hammer rhythms and brooding sound design require no explanation for their impact to be felt.
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