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LP
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TYPE 136LP
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Birmingham, UK's sprawl of low rise warehouses and their links to the military-industrial complex inspires this crushing new take on the "Brummie" sound and spirit from former native Arash Moori for his longtime pals at Type. In nine harsh and disorienting bouts of angular drums and hazardous noise texture, Exothermic doubles down on the tonal and rhythmic brutalism of Moori's debut for Type, Heterodyne (TYPE 125LP, 2015). It forms a deep topographical reading of his home region's maze of one-story munitions workshops, flyovers, canals, and spaghetti road systems, all intersected by the ghosts of Jungle pirate radio and lit up by hotspots of nostalgic reminiscence; places where he studied, walked thru, DJed at and protested with long-time friend and Type label co-owner, John Twells. Moreover Exothermic is concerned with how this environment and the city's progressive past affects the mood and music of its contemporary population, and how it ultimately came to inform the visceral nature of the "Brummie Sound". Working to a fierce, noisy aesthetic that's been firmly expressed in hard-bitten Brummie and Midlander music by everyone from Black Sabbath to Scorn, and even Coventry's Delia Derbyshire, who acknowledged the infamous Luftwaffe blitz on her home city as a formative sonic experience, Exothermic explodes with a tightly coiled, abstract-industrial energy that's surely worthy of comparison with any of them. In fits and bursts, rhythms inspired by the city's pirate radio jungle heritage clash with sheets of metallic calamity; sawn-off percussion ricochets the space like shrapnel searching for a target; and structures are torched like Raymond Mason's municipal artwork "Forward" which went up in flames during the city's 2003 demonstrations against the Iraq war. It's all intended to mirror a negative feedback loop of intensity between the place and its people, and does so with a mix of bostin' glee and dark humor familiar to the region. From this meld of psychogeography, subjective hauntology, and objective history, Arash Moori's work in Exothermic most cannily and explicitly results a simulacra of a place shaped by emotions, personal memories, and accreted histories, and rendered in a temporal flux as chaotically tiled and riven with radical energies as the place itself. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Arash Moori.
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LP
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TYPE 125LP
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"I'm going to do something I never do -- I'm going to write this press release in the first person. This is a very special release for Type and it's been a long time coming. I met Arash Moori when we both attended the same Art School in Birmingham in 2000. We quickly realized that we both liked music -- I think it was a shared love of To Rococo Rot or Metamatics that sparked the first conversation -- and within weeks of meeting each other we were DJing fairly regularly. We kicked off a number of nights in the city, some successful (Default, which birthed the Type label), some not (Left Handers Disco, which confounded punters who didn't understand how well Kelis mixed with SND). Arash was also kind enough to teach me some production tricks as I was putting together my first album. In 2002, Arash headed to Finland to continue his art studies, and began to experiment with electricity and light. These experiments informed the direction of Heterodyne -- I've been waiting 13 years for this record. It's the experimental Chinese Democracy, except worth the wait. Over the years, Arash pieced together a deeply personal palette of electrical sounds from strobe lights, fluorescent lights, radios, plasma balls, and electronic devices. He exploited the peculiarities of these devices to create harsher and more aggressive sounds. This gave way to a series of live performances using minimal hardware and self-built devices to structure, shape, and trigger sounds rather than resorting to samples. The computer was an editing device, not a compositional one. Heterodyne is the culmination of these experiments. The resulting tracks are far more than academic exercises: Arash has taken years of theory and woven together a spiky collection of coarse techno and disorienting drone. The raw electrical textures and rhythms he spent years collecting are framed by analogue synth pads and oscillators which add contrast and levity. It's a demanding listen, certainly, but a rewarding one. This is an album I've seen develop for longer than any other and it's a pleasure to unleash it on the world. Our own collaboration LP (touted for release on City Centre Offices in the early 00s) will never see the light of day, but Heterodyne may be one of the most personal record I've released on Type to date. Enjoy." --John Twells, October 2015. Edition of 500.
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