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2LP
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ATONAL 007LP
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Berlin Atonal announce the release of Mika Vainio's live performance at the 2016 edition of the festival. Accompanied by the artwork from Vainio's personal archives, its soft lack of focus is reminiscent of the natural looseness in his sound programming, lending itself to jazz as much as any form of electronic music. Right at the tips of his fingers, sparks fly unhindered by background noise, left to saturate in his universe of swollen intent. This pared-down, sensitive, and serious music has no parallel. Deep, throbbing analog laments emanate from the outset reaching far into the furthest fissures of Kraftwerk's main hall, a chasmic exercise in arching minimalism. Between crisp, upfront sonic assault and backset rhythmic work, it morphs about the cavernous hall exploring to the core the relationship between sound and architecture. Unrelenting and icily atmospheric, the haptic saturation arouses a body of nerves. As ever the scope of Vainio's poignant work is vast, with limited tools at his disposal. Motifs are revisited and reiterated, calmly rendering confrontational and extreme mechanisms. Feedback blasts buzz over and destroy passages, punctuated by sparse rhythm. As the performance draws towards a close, percussive sounds come to the fore. Rhythmic patterns hint but never falling into predictable repetition, always manipulated, Vainio etching away with his machines. A longform performance, of ebbing passages, it grows in quasi-orchestral style as mountainous sounds vie for daylight in a thick sound horizon. Includes photography by Mika Vainio on sleeve and printed inner sleeves; Edition of 400.
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5x12" BOX
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ATONAL 013LP
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In a year which made impossible the now highly anticipated annual unveiling of new projects and collaborations that usually accompanies Berlin Atonal, the festival has compiled a major selection of new works by a range of artists from across the advanced musical landscape. Entitled More Light, the compilation traverses the vast spectrum of musical experience. French producer Aho Ssan -- who made his debut at Berlin Atonal's 2019 edition -- has smelted the vocals of Exzald S into a multi-layered track that gestures towards a future language for computer-produced music. New York's Hiro Kone pairs with group A's Tot Onyx to debut their collaboration with an outstanding showpiece of groaning power-surge electronics, while legendary futurist Gerald Donald's XOR Gate alias. Speculative widescreen-electronics protagonists Roly Porter and Paul Jebanasam unveil the first recorded track of their collaborative Altar project, conjuring up an entire ecology composed of both positively and negatively charged emotional-electronic particles. Enchanted Belgian magicians Pablo's Eye offer a new track that grows out of the melancholic ambient-pop that the collective has been making since the '90s, while Nkisi hones in on a section of her premiere Atonal '19 set "Initiation" and reworks it into a brawling, bleak, hard-edged trampler. These tracks sit beside a transformational collab between Abdullah Miniawy and Carl Gari, evocative synthesized works from Caterina Barbieri and Laurel Halo, unclassifiable post-ambient from exael, and Kazakh-British violinist Galya Bisengalieva, and more. The festival's legendary revived imprint which has previously hosted contributions from Cabaret Voltaire, Psychic TV, Marshstepper, and others now has a monumental new chapter. Also features Tunes Of Negation, Lafawndah, Galya Bisengalieva, Alessandro Adriani, Vladislav Delay, Lee Gamble, LABOUR, Peder Mannerfelt, and dBridge.
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12"
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ATONAL 005EP
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Marshstepper with Drew McDowell, Silent Servant. Marshstepper are the most radical incarnation of Ascetic House, the collective and publishing house based in the desert city of Tempe, Arizona. Marshstepper's dark electronic ritualism is performative, violent, unusual, shocking, unpredictable, and raw. During their Berlin Atonal show in 2016, they were joined by Drew McDowall, Jonas Rohnberg, and Juan Mendez.
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12"
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ATONAL 006EP
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Roll The Dice is the Swedish duo consisting of Malcolm Pardon and Peder Mannerfelt. Pardon is a storied composer of film and television music. Mannerfelt's acclaimed third solo album Controlling Body cemented him as in the top handful of creative forces working in experimental electronic music. This theatrical, surprising world premiere performance cemented the two musicians as spearheads of a fractured type of future basement jazz. For this record they selected extracts in 2017.
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12"
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ATONAL 004EP
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SUMS is the collaborative project of French electronic producer Kangding Ray and Mogwai multi-instrumentalist Barry Burns. The project was first conceived by Berlin Atonal, who gave the musicians carte blanche to develop a new group. Adding drumming savant Merlin Ettore, the pair devised a musical world that crafts post-rock soundscapes and structures using the sound-language of contemporary techno and experimental electronic music. After a grand debut performance in 2013, the group decided to take the project into the studio. Over a two-year period, SUMS began to produce tracks that achieved an organic fusion of spatial electronics and rousing post-rock sounds.
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12"
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ATONAL 003EP
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Berlin Atonal Recordings present live cuts from synthesizer genius Max Loderbauer (NSI, Sun Electric, Vilod, Moritz von Oswald Trio) and techno experimentalist Jacek Sienkiewicz (Recognition) from the opening night of the Berlin Atonal Festival in 2015. Blending harmonic drones and almost unrecognizably distended vocal samples with adroitly weighted melodic passages this collaboration was a masterclass in expertly crafted ambient music from two of the genres' leading exponents. Two passages from this set have been mastered and cut to vinyl in a special 12" with artwork by Pedro Maia based on his visuals for the show.
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12"
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ATONAL 002EP
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Berlin Atonal Recordings present live cuts from Peder Mannerfelt. Mannerfelt supplies four jams, fashioned out of his own exceptional live show at the Berlin Atonal Festival in 2015. Raw, unsoftened, brutely analog sound from an EMS Synthi AKS punctures space in an oddly futuristic rhythmic experiment, gesturing at a brand new way of thinking about electronic music. The cuts are also packaged in a special 12" featuring artwork based on his own breathtaking live audio- visual show.
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3x12"
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ATONAL 001LP
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Edition of 500 copies, featuring tracks from Cabaret Voltaire, Miles Whittaker, Fis, and Abdulla Rashim. The Berlin Atonal festival picks up on a tradition begun in 1984 with the publication of two volumes of live recordings from the 1983 edition of the festival. Those records bore witness to the most inventive, adventurous sounds of the festival, and therefore of their time, containing live bits from Psychic TV, La Loora and Z'EV. Berlin Atonal Vol. 3 carries this custom three decades forward with selections from four of the standout performances of Berlin Atonal 2014. Of course, Cabaret Voltaire's lauded and historic first show in over 20 years is featured, with Richard H. Kirk's no-nostalgia and machinery-driven set firmly putting the Cabaret Voltaire project in a future-facing direction. Miles Whittaker's surprising and muscular live performance also contributes a cut, as does festival favorite Fis, with his characteristically lumpy, textural soundscapes. Finally, two selections from Abdulla Rashim's memorable session gesture toward a possible future for synthesized music. Housed in a gatefold sleeve.
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