Balmat is a new label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Philip Sherburne and Albert Salinas, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show on Spain's Radio 3. Balmat's mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world. "Balmat" means "empty" or "void" in Catalan. But quite apart from any negative connotations, the label prefer to think of it in terms of possibility: a space waiting to be filled.
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BALMAT 012LP
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Balmat began its journey in 2021 with the release of Luke Sanger's Languid Gongue (BALMAT 001LP). Now, in 2024, the Norfolk musician rejoins the label with Dew Point Harmonics, the first repeat appearance on the label. Sanger's new album feels like a natural extension of his inaugural record for Balmat: It's a bewitching collection of esoteric synth sketches that slips unpredictably between consonant repetition, poignant melodies, and gnarled bursts of noise that catch in the ear like burrs in hiking socks. That natural metaphor is perhaps not accidental. Despite having been composed on Sanger's diverse array of hardware and self-written software, many of the tracks were first conceived while Sanger was hiking in a particularly wild and isolated section of the Norfolk coast. The field recording that opens the album, on "6am Beach Walk," was taken on one of his many early-morning walks there, in which he and his dog might go for miles without seeing another soul. The album's title was inspired by the overnight condensation covering the long marram grass in the dunes, glistening in the early light (and drenching everything coming in contact with it) before evaporating in the morning sun. Indeed, the concept of dew point -- the temperature at which water vapor condenses into a liquid -- feels like the perfect metaphor for Sanger's music, in which foggy ambience is distilled into glistening quicksilver orbs, transient spheres of perfection eventually absorbed back into the atmosphere. A shapeshifting collection of richly detailed and deeply expressive electronic miniatures, Dew Point Harmonics is both a testament to the mysteries of transformation and an invitation to get lost in the wilderness of your own imagination.
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BALMAT 013LP
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$26.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 11/1/2024
"Music is my forever cove," writes Portland, Oregon's Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer's line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and repetitions, shaped into richly emotive arcs, and informed by his experience as a person who stutters, it is also an album about identity, self-expression, and the energies that sluice through and across what is perceived as linear time -- like floodwaters seeking an exit, like streams running into the sea. Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR. Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. As a person who stutters, Wyland's approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he's collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA's Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.
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BALMAT 011LP
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Balmat has always been careful not to call itself an ambient label. But with the 11th release, the label turns its ears -- proudly, blissfully -- to a strain of ambient at its most timeless. The appropriately titled Dreams & Whispers comes from Warsaw's Bartosz Kruczyński, who has recorded under a number of guises, Earth Trax, as well as his own name. Over the years, he's touched upon deep house, breakbeats, acid, techno, electro, IDM, and more; often, the throughline running through a given album is simply the refusal to remain in any one place for long -- well, that, and his unusually nuanced ear for harmony and texture. Those qualities come to the fore on Dreams & Whispers, which might be the most focused encapsulation of Kruczyński's atmospheric sensibilities to date. Across 14 stripped-down tracks for shimmer and pulse, Kruczyński evokes overlapping styles in ambient -- warm vibraphones, taut arps, massing strings, lonesome delay chains -- but always with his own twist. Fitting the album's title, the album is loosely divided into two distinct moods: The A-side, "Dreams," is charged with subtle movement, rhythms spreading out like rings around skipped stones, while the B-side, "Whispers," plunges into a zone of shadows and hush. The two complementary moods flow into one another like the faces of a Moebius strip, yielding an album that's intuitively shaped and rich in emotion. Balmat is a label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show born almost ten years ago. Balmat's mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world.
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BALMAT 010LP
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Panoram makes soundtracks for daydreams gone sideways. Picture the scene: an afternoon nap with the television on, quietly, in the corner; snatches of conversation drift in through the open window. Wandering, half-formed thoughts take unexpected detours; before you know it, there's a movie playing out against closed lids, the colors bright, the characters unfamiliar. Accidental rhythms, incidental melodies, imitations of life, messages in code. Across 17 fragmentary, sketch-like tracks, Panoram carves a labyrinthine path in which nothing is what it seems: a fantasy world of breathy vox pads, faux guitar, detuned synths, bursts of flute and orchestral percussion, and even the occasional cheeky cartoon sample. It's chillout music with a chilly edge, ambient with a darkly ironic undertone. Panoram has been making music under his principal alias for more than a decade now, releasing albums on labels like Firecracker, Running Back, and his own Wandering Eye. Panoram's output has ranged widely, taking in abstract pop, classical composition, twisted takes on library music, and cyborg funk. One record of "bio-acoustic transmissions" came with a cannabis leaf pressed in clear wax; his 2021 album Pianosequenza Vol. 1 gathers his experiments on the Yamaha Disklavier. But Great Times offers the truest picture yet of a project that has never been easy to pin down. Loath to overshare details about his personal life, Panoram instead lets the music do the talking, using his cryptic tracks to express the slipperiest sorts of ideas -- the thoughts that take root where anxiety, distraction, and the most fleeting traces of grace commingle. Panoram's approach flies in the face of contemporary ambient orthodoxy, with its emphasis on immersion and uplift. Great Times expresses something thornier, more difficult to translate, yet also more tantalizing to contend with. Its 17 tracks offer a chance to get lost -- and an invitation to remain in the maze as long as you like.
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BALMAT 009LP
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Coral Morphologic and Nick León's Projections of a Coral City marks a series of collisions between distant worlds: the organic and the artificial, the Eocene and the Anthropocene, sea and cement -- and even, perhaps, ambient music and activism. Coral Morphologic are the Miami duo of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay; since 2007, they have used a variety of multimedia projects to generate environmental awareness of marine biodiversity -- most notably Coral City Camera, an underwater webcam streaming live from an urban reef ecosystem in Port Miami. Their city-mate Nick León is a linchpin of South Florida's contemporary leftfield electronic scene, with releases for Tra Tra Trax, Future Times, and NAAFI, and credits on records by Rosalía, GAIKA, and Iceboy Violet, among others. This collaborative project dates back to 2022, when Coral Morphologic mounted a monumental projection mapping installation on Biscayne Boulevard. For five nights in late November and early December, macroscopic films of corals played out across the exterior of Knight Concert Hall. The installation was, on the one hand, a glimpse into a possible future, imagining how the city's skyline might appear if unchecked global warming and rising seas led coral reefs to colonize the built environment. But it also represented a look back into the deep past, a reminder that Miami is literally built from marine limestone mined from the Everglades. As an album, Projections of a Coral City is a suite of interconnected movements spread across two sides of vinyl. The tones are watery, the mood elegiac, the colors a washed-out pastel. Forms that appear static on the surface gradually open up to reveal hidden depths teeming with microscopic movement. You might detect resonances with other aquatically minded works -- Jürgen Müller's Science of the Sea, Harold Budd's liquid piano compositions, even the slow-moving melancholy of Dr. Roger Payne's Songs of the Humpback Whale. But ultimately Projections of a Coral City creates the impression of a world unto itself -- a hauntingly beautiful space at the meeting point between sorrow and hope.
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BALMAT 005Y-LP
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2023 yellow vinyl color repress. The British producer μ-Ziq has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs μ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment. Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them μ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s -- coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N' Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin's Rephlex label -- and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forward-looking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album's title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early '90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles. There's no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more self-aware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like μ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas's first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light. Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones ("Marmite"), horror-film themes ("Belt & Carpet"), jungle breaks ("Mesolithic Jungle"), and even house music ("Houzz 13"), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. "1977" features Meemo Comma.
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BALMAT 008LP
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Together, JD Walsh and Jeff Crompton are Anagrams, and their debut album Blue Voices might initially seem like a departure from Balmat's habitually electronic terrain. It's not ambient music, but it's also not not ambient music, at least to listeners in the right frame of mind. On Blue Voices, Crompton plays alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet, electric piano, and organ; Walsh lets his experimental tendencies take the lead. Playing acoustic and electric guitars, electric lap steel, bass, Moog Matriarch, modular synth, and programmed drums, he concentrates his energies on richly textural layers and abstract assemblages of tone color. Across the album's 11 tracks, there are faint echoes of familiar touchstones: the atmospheric twang of Daniel Lanois' pedal steel; the mercurial modal runs of Ethio-jazz; the late-summer calm of Fuubutsushi; the versatility of players and composers like Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Gendel, who are asking similar questions about where jazz ends and some other, nameless territory begins. Mostly, though, what Blue Voices captures is the quixotic sound of two restless musical imaginations making it up as they go along, two voices discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue.
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BALMAT 007LP
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Minor Science -- aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson -- makes his Balmat debut with Absent Friends Vol. III, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms. The first two Absent Friends -- a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93) -- were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio -- idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc. -- he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden. Absent Friends Vol. III is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science's world, even a category as simple as "studio versions" is slightly opaque. Finlayson's organic process of ideation and realization might help explain the unusual coherence of the album, in which sounds and textures flow seamlessly from one to the next, sometimes seeming to stand still, and sometimes looping back. There are virtually no melodies, few recognizable motifs or riffs, yet the eight-track album nevertheless moves with a distinctive logic and a determined sense of purpose, from the frozen-in-time shimmer of the opening "Introduction" through the early cuts' studies of space and light; from the seemingly autobiographical "Summer Diary" through the rushing trance (yes, trance) arpeggios of "Contingency" and on to the dulcet denouement of the closing "Gather Your Party (Dispersed Mix)."
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BALMAT 006LP
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Ylia -- aka Susana Hernández -- had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut album, Dulce Rendición, on Barcelona's Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth. But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. "That's a lot of things all at once, no?" she says. Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response to those life events -- a record of grief. The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia's debut, but it differs in key ways. Where Dulce Rendición was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru -- a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, "the rain lifts" -- captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements, even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro Lévar, lends fingerpicked acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of "Todos los Cuerpos"; multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to "Ame Agari" -- or "after the rain" -- which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an extended deluge. One track, the dub techno-influenced "Flowers in June," grew out of Ylia's live sets, but the rest are the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in Málaga, five minutes from the beach -- jamming and then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the closing track, "El Único Adiós Posible," she leaves you alone with the instrument in all its stark, unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means and purity of expression: a cycle of life counted out in the passage of storm clouds and clearing skies.
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BALMAT 005LP
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Double-LP version. The British producer μ-Ziq has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs μ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment. Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them μ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s -- coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N' Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin's Rephlex label -- and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forward-looking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album's title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early '90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles. There's no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more self-aware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like μ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas's first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light. Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones ("Marmite"), horror-film themes ("Belt & Carpet"), jungle breaks ("Mesolithic Jungle"), and even house music ("Houzz 13"), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. "1977" features Meemo Comma.
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BALMAT 004LP
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For Balmat's fourth release, the label turns their attention close to home: to the Mallorca-born, Barcelona-based artist Nueen, aka Nacho Pezzati. Nueen has been developing his highly personal style of blissfully Balearic ambient over the past few years, with releases on labels like Quiet Time Tapes and Good Morning Tapes. On Diagrams of Thought, he explores new depths in his sound. His atmospheres remain bucolic, but there's a disturbance at work, a hint of uncertainty swirling beneath seemingly placid pads. While Diagrams of Thought retains the ambient (or at least ambient-adjacent) focus of all Balmat's releases so far, the album also marks new frontiers for the label; the album's first half is graceful and largely beatless, but the mood grows murkier with the foggy drones of "Dome" and the intimations of liquid drum 'n' bass on "Maxima"; "Veta," meanwhile, might just represent the most forceful rhythm to appear on a Balmat release yet. Despite the album's considerable range of moods, tones, and textures, it's all tied together by a singular preoccupation, says Nueen: "Lately, I've become conscious of my fascination for the notion of the break, on a conceptual and musical level. What's temporary and what's permanent. Thinking and making out of what isn't there, yet is. Some people would call it silence, but it could also be a skip of the needle, an ellipsis. Something very basic -- or Basic Channelesque. A set of sounds and silences, structuring just a hint of rhythm. Sounds that become silences, and silences that become sounds. The other day, I was saying to someone that for me, the sound of electric current running through the power lines above the train tracks is the most ambient sound there is. That infinity in which you never quite grasp all the harmonics and reverberations. It's a form of time detained or expanded. Recently, I've been rereading Morton Feldman -- you can tell, right -- Vertical time, the silence that sounds. A sort of sacredness. My mind is blown every time I walk into a church, for whatever that's worth."
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BALMAT 003LP
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Following her debut album, I'll Look for You in Others (Past Inside the Present, 2022), Patricia Wolf joins Spain's Balmat label with See-Through, her second album. See-Through finds the Portland, Oregon musician and field recordist continuing to develop her signature style of ambient, balancing radiant soundscaping with a carefully expressive sensibility. But the new album is also marked by an important difference. Where I'll Look for You in Others was largely written in response to the death of a loved one, See-Through represents a kind of rebirth. She wrote and recorded many of the album's songs quickly, in preparation for an August 2021 broadcast on the online radio platform 9128 Live. Excited for the opportunity to play live after more than a year of the pandemic, Wolf decided to write all new material for the event, working with a lean setup of Octatrack, Roland Synth Plus 10, Make Noise 0-Coast, and Novation Summit. (In fact, Wolf was the first sound designer invited to create patches for the Summit.) She also picked up an acoustic guitar that her brother had loaned her. "Woodland Encounter", "Under a Glass Bell", "The Grotto", "The Mechanical Age", "The Flaneur", and "Psychic Sweeping" are all products of those sessions; the through line holding them together is their exploratory spirit and clarity of vision. Other songs, like "A Conversation With My Innocence", "Recalibration", and "Psychic Sweeping", wrestle with the traumas of the preceding year. Though they may linger on the heaviness of loss, Wolf says, "What I discovered is that a stronger archetype had grown inside me to steer my emotions and thoughts to a better place." Likewise, "Wistfulness" and "Upward Swimming Fish" -- her first experiments with VST synthesizers -- balance the bittersweet embrace of melancholy with the freedom to choose happiness. "Pacific Coast Highway", the album's lone song with drums, might at first seem like an outlier. But it also signals Wolf's interest in finding a fusion between the introspection of ambient and the togetherness of beat-oriented music. Listeners with keen ears might recognize the album's closing song, "Springtime in Croatia": A different mix of the song originally appeared on the 2021 digital compilation secondnature & friends Vol. II, from the Seattle label secondnature. This marks its first appearance on vinyl, however, and its spiritual home is undoubtedly here, at the close of See-Through.
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BALMAT 002LP
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Balmat's second release comes from Hoavi, aka Kirill Vasin, a Russian electronic musician whose work approaches what might be familiar reference points -- deepest dub techno, atmospheric ambient, liquid drum'n'bass -- with a singular and refreshing point of view. Balmat first became aware of Hoavi after coming across one of his tracks in a DJ mix by Leech, aka Peak Oil label founder Brian Foote; the label began corresponding, which led to a massive zip file of unreleased tracks turning up in Balmat's inbox. Music for Six Rooms has been culled down from that bounty, its disparate moods distilled into ten profoundly immersive tracks that touch upon dream pop, dub techno, and new age, all swirled together into the headiest of ambient dreamscapes. Active since the early 2010s, when he founded his Shells Rattle label, Hoavi has released on a number of labels including floe, Snare Tapes, Fauxpas, and Minor Notes. In October, Peak Oil will finally release his album Invariant, recorded in 2019 and intended for release in 2020, then tied up in pressing-plant backlogs for over a year. Balmat's Music for Six Rooms follows roughly a month later; Balmat think that the two albums offer a wonderfully complementary view of Hoavi's talents -- one rhythmic, the other largely beatless, yet both of them sensuous in the extreme. The vinyl edition Music for Six Rooms appears on a single piece of vinyl upon which some tracks have been subtly edited in length, to ensure maximum audio fidelity; the digital version features extended edits and runs some 18 minutes longer, in total, for a maximally immersive experience. All vinyl purchases include a download of the full digital album.
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BALMAT 001LP
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2023 repress! Balmat's first release comes from Luke Sanger, a Norwich, UK-based artist whose two decades of electronic music-making have encompassed a range of tools and techniques, from MaxMSP to modular synthesis. Along the way he has built an extensive catalog encompassing ambient atmospheres, abstract soundscaping, and more. With Languid Gongue, he puts multiple approaches into play. Experiments in microtonal composition balance out pieces in standard tunings, while esoteric electronic machines merge with familiar acoustic treatments and microphone techniques. The result is a constellation of his signature sounds: freeform new-age fantasia; spring-loaded toytronic arpeggios; quartz-driven braindance clockworks. Drifting between consonant, almost lyrical compositions and shape-shifting textural sketches, the album drifts with the nonchalance of a sky-high cirrus cloud, and it glows as if illuminated from within. When the label heard the material, they knew that it was the perfect choice to launch the label. To Balmat, it sounds like a roadmap for points unknown.
Balmat is a new label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Philip Sherburne and Albert Salinas, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show on Spain's Radio 3. Balmat's mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world. "Balmat" means "empty" or "void" in Catalan. But quite apart from any negative connotations, the label prefer to think of it in terms of possibility: a space waiting to be filled.
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