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LP
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TAL 030LP
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Yuko Kureyama returns to TAL with the album Heart Fresh, her first ever full-length release under her Kopy moniker. All tracks for the album were recorded in Tokyo in June 2023 at the famous live house Ochiai Soup. For the recordings of the ten tracks, Ochiai Soup was swiftly converted into a recording studio as the intimate atmosphere of the club and its perfect room acoustics gave Kopy the chance to record her music like in a live situation. Amazingly Kopy's instrumentation on Heart Fresh consists only of a Jomox x Base 09 rhythm machine and an Elektron Digitakt mini sampler. In the hands of Kopy this fairly basic and common gear creates an unmistakably intuitive and original approach to drum programming, which is recognizably her very own. Heart Fresh seems even more focused, urgent, and ambitious than its predecessors, the Paredo EP, the Eternal EP (TAL 024EP, 2021), and the split album Super Mild (TAL 015CD, 2019). Nothing on Heart Fresh is subdued. The entire production is resonating with its peculiar frequencies, it is wonderfully evocative, open hearted, full of life and intelligence. The album opens with "Night Sarkas" with quirky snare rolls played against slashing, nervy chunks of melody. Samples of organ and chimes evoke a rollercoaster spinning out of tune and synch. "Hole Hole" is a beat driven and melody free short story for bass drum, snare and hi hat with constantly changing bpm's. "TIR TONE" marks the arrival of annunciatory rhythm patterns and a lovely sprinkling of distorted synths. The album's final track "Moonlight Pool" is the perfect closer for an album of taut, free-wheeling figurations of meter and tone, a nod to classical ambient music as well as to contemporary more experimental digressions. However, the album's most startling and unexpected moments come when Kopy follows her futuristic inclinations and matches them with dissonant excoriations that shuttle the mind into a completely different place where all kinds of different activities seem to follow their own individual compasses.
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12"
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TAL 024EP
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Following the footsteps of her Super Mild split album with Tentenko (TAL 015CD/LP) from 2019, Tokyo producer Kopy makes a welcome return to TAL with a new EP full of gritty wonders and buzzing rhythm structures. Eternal EP presents two of her new tracks plus luminous remix appearances by Elena Colombi, Harmonious Thelonious, and Dynamo Dreesen & SJ Tequilla. Kopy sums it up: "For 'Fujiko', I had an aggressive spaciousness in mind. The track 'Lok' made me feel like my feet were firmly on the ground." The pièce de résistance of the entire EP might be the extended reworking by Elena Colombi (Osàre! Editions), who in her debut appearance in the producer's chair offers up a cinematic bricolage, inspired by dreams and scraps of intimate, cartoonish ambiences. The eight-minute-long journey is full of space, swirling alarm clocks and candid evocations of imaginary creatures and environments crossed with diverse snippets of Kopy's two original tracks. Harmonious Thelonious who has already shared the stage with Kopy at Düsseldorf's Salon des Amateurs, contributes a trademark HT remix which combines infectious danceable beats with injections of oddness and raw beauty. For their "Kopy Kontrast" mix DD and SJT drew inspiration from a fulminant Kopy live set in Osaka which they had witnessed while being on a tour in Japan. The 12" EP is lavishly presented, with a fully illustrated jacket and inner sleeve design by Sarah Szscesny. Includes download code; edition of 400.
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