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CD
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QP K
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Quadrant Park is a new label from the makers of frozen reeds (which will continue in its own stream). It exists to present music that demands to reach a little further, occupying new spaces and a new context. For the inaugural release, SDEM delivers a live recording with a twist: this set was recorded in early 2024 in a single take to an audience of one, at a now abandoned empty club space beneath a railway arch in Leeds. Following a series of physical and digital releases culminating with Vortices (SKALD 038CD) in 2023, SDEM has focused on continuous upgrades to a mutating live set, sporadically performed, for example, alongside the Autechre and Gescom axes. In the phase documented here, the set draws deeply from turntable-era early hip hop and '80s drum machine architecture, resulting in a landscape of tactile slippage: rhythms gripping and releasing, gestural scrubs and stabs, scratching meets musique concrète. Interlocking parts snap in and out of alignment, before recombining on the fly -- kinetic, raw, and precise. The SDEM approach is marked by Tom Knapp's sculptural take on sound design, rhythm and texture -- ranging from dystopic ambient passages to pixelated, sub-heavy beats. A member of the Skam circle of atavistic beat freaks since the late '90s, Knapp's sound is that of hyperattentive electronica buried under soil and left to decay (or ferment). What emerges is somehow both ruthlessly futuristic and redolent of decrepit antique engineering. At Quadrant Park is presented in an edition of 500 compact discs with artwork by Robert Beatty unique to every individual copy. In a warped reflection of the recording circumstances, each copy forms one distinct frame of a short film never to be viewed in its totality. Liner notes are provided by the sole witness to the recording, long-standing SDEM co-conspirator Ed Martin, aka edv3ctor, while audio was mastered by the ears that matter, frozen reeds mainstay Jim O'Rourke.
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2LP
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SKALD 038LP
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Double LP version. SDEM's debut album for Mancunian electronic music imprint Skam Records. Vortices' nine tracks continue SDEM's current prolific flow after a steady series of drops via his own MEDS label and other like-minded operators (CPU, Opal Tapes, Seagrave, Superpang, etc.) Informed by hip-hop and computer music and steeped in Northern England's post bleep+bass mutations, Vortices operates in its own lane, rooted as much in the by-hand manipulations of musique concrete and free improv as the studio-as-an-instrument innovations of electro, hip-hop, dub, and bass-weighted electronica. Evolved out of hardware jams, the pieces showcased here crackle with emotion and color, repeated plays reveal suggested and subliminal depths. Neither shackled to the grid nor enslaved to linearity, the album expands and finesses SDEM's dynamic and forward-facing approach. Features S1.
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Cassette
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SKASSETTE 038CS
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Cassette version. SDEM's debut album for Mancunian electronic music imprint Skam Records. Vortices' nine tracks continue SDEM's current prolific flow after a steady series of drops via his own MEDS label and other like-minded operators (CPU, Opal Tapes, Seagrave, Superpang, etc.) Informed by hip-hop and computer music and steeped in Northern England's post bleep+bass mutations, Vortices operates in its own lane, rooted as much in the by-hand manipulations of musique concrete and free improv as the studio-as-an-instrument innovations of electro, hip-hop, dub, and bass-weighted electronica. Evolved out of hardware jams, the pieces showcased here crackle with emotion and color, repeated plays reveal suggested and subliminal depths. Neither shackled to the grid nor enslaved to linearity, the album expands and finesses SDEM's dynamic and forward-facing approach. Features S1.
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CD
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SKALD 038CD
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SDEM's debut album for Mancunian electronic music imprint Skam Records. Vortices' nine tracks continue SDEM's current prolific flow after a steady series of drops via his own MEDS label and other like-minded operators (CPU, Opal Tapes, Seagrave, Superpang, etc.) Informed by hip-hop and computer music and steeped in Northern England's post bleep+bass mutations, Vortices operates in its own lane, rooted as much in the by-hand manipulations of musique concrete and free improv as the studio-as-an-instrument innovations of electro, hip-hop, dub, and bass-weighted electronica. Evolved out of hardware jams, the pieces showcased here crackle with emotion and color, repeated plays reveal suggested and subliminal depths. Neither shackled to the grid nor enslaved to linearity, the album expands and finesses SDEM's dynamic and forward-facing approach. Features S1.
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