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viewing 1 To 14 of 14 items
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2LP
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COSMO 013LP
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Shackleton's Tunes Of Negation ensemble return for a ceremonious second album trip into expansive psychedelic terrain following their acclaimed first chapter with a pineal payload where Gurdjieff meets Conrad Schnitzler in deep dub space. Regrouping Sam Shacketon, Takumi Motokawa, and Raphael Meinhart, with Heather Leigh guesting on album highlight "Naked Shall I Return", Shackleton's open-ended project continues to soar across musical borders with growing confidence in their astral clinamen that suggests themes of impermanence, rebirth, and transcendence. It's primed for gently getting out of your gourd and gliding the astral armchair highways in a way which has signified all Shackleton's best work of late. The six tracks are typically long enough to encourage full mind/body synchronization and immersion, aligning your chakras in a slowly purposeful flow from the cascading organs and babbling drums of "Mountain and Waterfalls", through the spellbinding suspension of Heather Leigh's possessed tongue in acres of Coil-esque synth plumes and militant snares on the outstanding centerpiece, "Naked Shall I Return", with the rolling 15-minute epic "Impermanence" illustrating Shackleton's transition from dubstep pied piper to modern day shaman. Like The Stars Forever And Ever is further evidence of mystic energy still out there in the ether between club music, the after-party-life, and lockdown bedrooms, and a sterling example of Shackleton's vital role in the fabric of contemporary electronic music. Artwork by Zeke Clough. Mastered and Cut by Loop-o. Deluxe gatefold package; edition of 600.
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LP
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COSMO 011LP
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On his adventurous first new album in five years, Vladislay Delay renders an extreme ecology of electronic sound inspired by time spent above the arctic circle, surrounded by tundra and the raw force of nature and visually given life by Ripatti's wife, Antye Greie-Ripatti, aka AGF. Although it features no location recordings, Rakka clearly imparts its theme thru a riveting palette of weathered textures, unyielding rhythms and the kind of reverberating, widescreen sound design that's defined his catalog of cult, contemporary music since the late '90s. While Vladislav been notably absent from release schedules in recent years -- aside from working on the soundtrack to The Revenant (2015) recording with Sly & Robbie in 2018 -- this new album is surely a bracing reminder of his knack for creating utterly immersive environments at the poles of ambient, dub, and noise. Inspired by the struggle to survive in unforgiving conditions, the music patently resembles a number of styles associated with music from northerly latitudes. Elemental traces of Scandinavian black metal, Pan Sonic or Deathprod-like power electronics and Thomas Köner-esque ambient isolationism are all detectable in the album's brutal panoramas, and evidently speak to a shared conception of the extreme Arctic's uncontrolled and uncorrupted wilds, and their frighteningly magnetic sort of push/pull on the senses. Titled in Vladislav's typically alliterative style, the tracks cascade in aggressive iterations of gravel-swilled rhythm and tonal attrition. The barely-harnessed might of opener, "Rakka" triggers a chain reaction on events that follows into a sort of blast-beaten ambience in "Raajat", and what sounds like throttled blvck metvl vocals meshed with flashcore in "Rakkine", whilst "Rampa" hammers home a martial noise techno tattoo, and the final couplet take this sound to its logical end-of-earth degrees with breathtaking form. Rakka is certain to both reaffirm and upend what listeners know and love about Vladislav Delay, while firmly galvanizing his sound for an unsure future. Mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Artwork by LCR.
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2LP
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COSMO 010LP
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Shackleton works up a hypnotic group energy alongside avant-goddess Heather Leigh, percussionist Takumi Motokawa, and mallet player Raphael Meinhart in their debut as Tunes Of Negation for Shapednoise's label; Cosmo Rhythmatic. Reach The Endless Sea is a heady blast of lysergic, chromatic color, and syncopated rhythms that partly imagines an alternative musical timeline where the Hawkwind and Ash Ra Tempel fans, proto-Humanoid types, and new age travelers who made up the UK's rave vanguard prevailed against the law to enact a freely psychedelic dance music. The album follows in the vein of Shackleton's previous trio of vocal-focused trips for Honest Jon's and his Woe To The Septic Heart! label to find the mystic pied piper's spirit bolstered and tempered by a collaborative, multi-directional flow of energies. Gushing in five durational parts running between 10-15 minutes each -- or long enough to draw listeners into their dilated temporality -- the music comes in waves of pointed, timeless intensity, and illusory suggestion, subtly shifting pattern with an acid-dosed logic. Following her triumphant Throne LP in 2018 (EMEGO 257CD/LP), Heather Leigh provides sacral vocals to the canto couplet of "The World Is A Stage" and "Reach The Endless Sea", providing an elevated constant between its moiré of possessed vibes and lilting rhythms, before the trio of instrumentalists take the reins on a mazy trajectory between the harmonic lather of "Tundra Erotic", through the sanguine meditation of "Nowhere Ending Sky", and an epic, 15-minute invocation of ancient Indian raga traditions and mountaintop kosmiche in "Ruckschlag Rising Then Resonant", before they all come down together in the Amazonian delta flow and oozing sprawl of "The Time Has Come". While no single description will sum up the potency and conviction of Tunes Of Negation, their mission can be summed in a line from a poem by 13th C. mystic Jalalu'I-Din Rumi which inspired the album's title, stating that Reach The Endless Sea strives to "aid transmutation and enter into the light." Artwork by Zeke Clough. Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Gatefold sleeve.
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2LP
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COSMO 009LP
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2020 repress on silver vinyl forthcoming... Double LP version. Woe are King Midas Sound on Solitude, their crushingly desolate new album, auspiciously cued for a Valentine's Day release on Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmatic label. A meditation on loss, narrated by Roger Robisnon and produced by Kevin Martin (The Bug), Solitude sees KMS gut out their sound following the bittersweet shoegaze-dub blooms of their Edition1 collaboration with Fennesz (2015), resulting in a starkly noirish elegy to extinguished romance and love in the end times. Combining the grown-up, confessional vulnerability of Robinson's lyrics and dreader-than-dread delivery with the most stripped-back arrangements in Kevin Martin's entire catalog, the duo drill deep into emotional suffering with simultaneously suffocating yet somehow beautiful results. Over the course of 12 songs, they glacially limn a coming-to-terms with a loss that has been enforced or unexpected, and ultimately arrive at the starkest conclusions with cinematic effect. Solitude pushes King Midas Sound's pessimism to heart-rinsing degrees. Staging Robinson in a series of vantablack scenes veiled by smoky, minimal synth-lighting, the poet processes irrational and incessant feelings of rejection and loneliness. From the aching desolation of "You Disappear" to the unflinching realizations of "X", the ache imparted by Robinson's lyrics is only amplified by his quiet stoicism, while Kevin Martin finds power in a sense of deferred gratification and his embrace of negative space. The effect is nothing less than transfixing in the physicality of Robinson's descriptions and the detached nature of Martin's sferic electronics on "In The Night", while pangs of lush optimism lend an exquisite contrast to the desiccated riddim and gloom of "Alone", and the sylvan keys in their sensuous reverie, "Her Body". Solitude is a more than worthy follow-up to King Midas Sound's two albums for Hyperdub and their collaboration with Fennesz for Ninja Tune. It's bound to reset what you know about KMS, and become a go-to album for anyone going thru conscious uncoupling, domestic strife, or meditating on love in the age of info overload. Cover Artwork by Japanese contemporary photographer Daisuke Yokota. Mastered and cut by Pole at Scape mastering.
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CD
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COSMO 009CD
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Woe are King Midas Sound on Solitude, their crushingly desolate new album, auspiciously cued for a Valentine's Day release on Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmatic label. A meditation on loss, narrated by Roger Robisnon and produced by Kevin Martin (The Bug), Solitude sees KMS gut out their sound following the bittersweet shoegaze-dub blooms of their Edition1 collaboration with Fennesz (2015), resulting in a starkly noirish elegy to extinguished romance and love in the end times. Combining the grown-up, confessional vulnerability of Robinson's lyrics and dreader-than-dread delivery with the most stripped-back arrangements in Kevin Martin's entire catalog, the duo drill deep into emotional suffering with simultaneously suffocating yet somehow beautiful results. Over the course of 12 songs, they glacially limn a coming-to-terms with a loss that has been enforced or unexpected, and ultimately arrive at the starkest conclusions with cinematic effect. Solitude pushes King Midas Sound's pessimism to heart-rinsing degrees. Staging Robinson in a series of vantablack scenes veiled by smoky, minimal synth-lighting, the poet processes irrational and incessant feelings of rejection and loneliness. From the aching desolation of "You Disappear" to the unflinching realizations of "X", the ache imparted by Robinson's lyrics is only amplified by his quiet stoicism, while Kevin Martin finds power in a sense of deferred gratification and his embrace of negative space. The effect is nothing less than transfixing in the physicality of Robinson's descriptions and the detached nature of Martin's sferic electronics on "In The Night", while pangs of lush optimism lend an exquisite contrast to the desiccated riddim and gloom of "Alone", and the sylvan keys in their sensuous reverie, "Her Body". Solitude is a more than worthy follow-up to King Midas Sound's two albums for Hyperdub and their collaboration with Fennesz for Ninja Tune. It's bound to reset what you know about KMS, and become a go-to album for anyone going thru conscious uncoupling, domestic strife, or meditating on love in the age of info overload. Cover Artwork by Japanese contemporary photographer Daisuke Yokota. Mastered and cut by Pole at Scape mastering.
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LP
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COSMO 008LP
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Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux's brutal yet filigree electronics hauntingly come to light in Ignis, which finally discloses the further, etheric results of recording sessions that made up their Peau Froide, Léger Soleil album in 2014, their celebrated previous collaboration for Cosmo Rhythmatic (COSMO 003CD/LP). Posthumously issued following Mika's untimely death in 2017, Ignis taps into the pair's mutual respect for unsound and proprioceptive allusion, operating at liminal levels of tonal and spatial perception in a six-track LP that leaves the project with a sense of unresolved tension. Since Mika Vainio's seminal Pan Sonic group with Ilpo Väisänen ceased service in 2009, Mika found one of his sharpest foils in French multi-instrumentalist Franck Vigroux. They embarked on a lengthy creative process, articulated through studio and live performances, resulting in the powerful Peau Froide, Léger Soleil album and stacks of further recordings planned for a second release. The end results of their efforts are collected on Ignis, a set of six parts paying tribute to a mutual fascination with what lies at and beyond the threshold of sonic comprehension. Where their previous effort traded in a mix of colossal, pendulous industrial funk and abyss-baiting doom, this follow-up fully embraces the void in all its glorious mystery. From a trail of icy bleeps, "Brume" lures you into cathedral-like ice cave dimensions with breathtaking cinematic effect, before the antechamber of "Ne Te Retourne Pas" highlights those supposed dimensions with streaks of phosphorescing light to much more paranoid, imposing degrees, before calving off into the mechanical jaws of "Luxure". Deep in the beast's mouth, Vigroux bleats a forlorn vocoder message on "Un Peu Après Le Soleil", and their "Luceat Lux" gives rise to their most extreme, dynamic frequency massages, for "Feux" to wrap up the trip in a barbed wire bouquet of ravishing distortion.
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LP
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COSMO 007LP
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Irregular Territories is a new EP of hyper jungle-ist future sickness by Bristolian sound artist Sophia Loizou for Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmatic label. Sophia's first release since the much acclaimed Singulacra (KTX 004LP, 2016), Irregular Territories provides a definitive example of Loizou's sound as it firmly asserts her music in a rarified hauntological rave headspace that meticulously explores an exploded deconstructionist style that she's developed since her 2014 debut Chrysalis. With one foot in late '90s halcyon daze, and another toeing the future, Sophia combines a lust for the ruffneck with a sharp mind for complex structural integrity and inventive aesthetic. Synching fragmented beats with human gasps, choral synths, and richly ephemeral textures, she bridges temporalities and dimensions in a way that recalls an auditory DeepDream composite formed from millions of eyes-shut moments at Metalheadz sessions. Album opener "Loop Of Perception" quite literally takes off like a jet engine in the rave, while "Memories Of Angels" conjures and sustains a lump-in-throat suspense through unresolved pads and hide 'n seek breakbeat edits, before it all comes together, gelled by wide, pressurized subs in "Shadow Box". The brief vignette of hoover and percolated vocal motifs in "Frozen Dust" opens up the B-side like some Arca and EVOL collusion, and "The Interior Life Of Another" feels like a jungle inception of 4Hero's Parallel Universe (1994), leaving the poignant "Morphogenesis" to sum up the metaphysical flux of her sound in febrile detail. RIYL: Lee Gamble, Demdike Stare, The Automatics Group. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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LP
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COSMO 006LP
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Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) retitle themselves Die Angel for Entropien 1, their eighth LP of electro-acoustic music together, and the duo's debut for Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmic label. Accompanied by skilled improviser Oren Ambarchi on two tracks, Die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, electric guitar, and field recordings warped and riddled with FX. Taking its title from both the Finnish word and German plural for entropy -- in physics, the measure of thermodynamic disorder within a system -- Entropien 1 renders seven examples of their kinetic systems in elusive action, keening from arrhythmic mulch to sloshing Brownian motions and a brilliantly towering 15-minute exploration that tips into billowing, white hot feedback with scintillating effect. The amorphous results document and describe a freeness of energy travelling from body to machine and diffused across alternating acoustic environments. Each player works as controlled, external variables which act upon and interact with the different acoustic conditions to tempestuous impact, convulsing between squashed, recursive diffractions in "Roha", to the sublimated roil of jazz drums and electric guitar wail in "Terminen Kevät", before harnessing sloshing feedback chaos in the combustible, diaphanous two parts of "Entropia" -- both "North" and "South" -- which bring the LP to its logical, compelling conclusion. With the addition of Wold or KTL-like metal emulsification and lacquer-bubbling grain in "Kitka", and Ambarchi's plasmic overdubbing in the burning plasmic plong of "Silvaticum", the overall impression is like auditive DMT, dissolving the senses and the ego -- simultaneously theirs and the listeners -- to better snag the listener in the music's metastable potential and aid our unanchored exploration in those dimensions. Entropien 1 is dedicated to Mika Vainio. RIYL: Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio, KTL. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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12"
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COSMO 005EP
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Rimini, Italy's Simbiosi rip out their first 12" proper on Cosmo Rhythmatic since their debut full-length shock-out Elements for Actress's Werk Discs imprint in 2015. Indastria EP slugs like a rusty Italian motor with a wonky cam shaft in a fiercely condensed session of hardcore techno thistle and knackered throbs. It's grim and remorselessly underground material, banking the escalating NPLGNN-style filtered noise of "HRD90", cycling through the bombed-out doom core trample of "Indastria" to the depressive collapse of "Eve" with its carmine horror pads, then spluttering out the tarry churn of "Dixentra" and chaotic inverted bass drum pressure of "TEIWSJH".
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LP
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COSMO 004LP
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Limited pressing, comes with a giant foldout two-sided 24" x 24" poster with additional art and liner notes. Conversation Sur Lettres Mortes is a conceptual album revolving around the relationship between Berlin's Jesse Osborne-Lanthier & Grischa Lichtenberger and the archaic apparatus of old cathode ray televisions and VHS units. It was first conceived as a live project for the Mutek/Elektra festival 2014 at the MAC in Montréal, QC Canada and now lands heavy on Cosmo Rhythmatic - the label curated by Shapednoise. Based on a series of conversations (excerpted in the liner notes) discussing the sets' obsolete status and the schism between tradition and trade, the A-side holds six cranky, skudgy and rhythm-driven creations framed by that familiar, ghostly, whining timbre of the cathode ray tube that would persist behind anything that was playing, or which would become distorted when you had to "tune" your set using baffling arrays of fiddly knobs like some modular boffin, when all you wanted was to watch some garbage without "snow" or streaking lines across the monitor. However, a few samples of dialogue aside, it's not a mere exercise in nostalgia; rather Osborne-Lanthier and Lichtenberger find strange, synesthetic life in these old and somewhat magical analog machines, working their spectral resonance and crankiness into creaking, contorted and deconstructed patterns that evoke a more contemporary sense of temporal dislocation. The remixers all seem to relish messing with the material, too. Low Jack offering a screen-scrambling flux of hellish sound-imagery ruffed-up with footwork rhythms and harpy and a Cronenberg-ian sort of body horror. Gabor Lázár's patented streaking filaments recall the sound of a set rapidly flicked on and off, marking one of his strongest, layered solo pieces. Rabit really pushes the envelope with a hyper, tumultuous stunner seemingly emulating an Einstürzende Neubauten live show. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Edition of 500.
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2LP
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COSMO 003LP
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Double LP version. Peau froide, léger soleil is the result of a three-year recording process initiated by Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux after a series of shared live experiences, beginning with a show in Paris in 2012. Their collaboration is an exercise in sensitive intensity, drifting through the whole space between minimalist meditations and maximalist kinetics. Vainio's signature brutalist production resonates throughout the album, constructing a psychic scenario for Vigroux's researches in spatial abstraction and tonal radicalism. Densely built through free-from structural limitation, this intense nine-track album is the third installment in the catalog of Berlin-based label Cosmo Rhythmatic, and acts as new chapter in the label's construction of an uncompromising sonic identity. Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering. Lacquer cut at D&M, Berlin. Front cover photograph by Umut Ungan. Back cover photograph by Diego Jr.
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CD
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COSMO 003CD
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Peau froide, léger soleil is the result of a three-year recording process initiated by Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux after a series of shared live experiences, beginning with a show in Paris in 2012. Their collaboration is an exercise in sensitive intensity, drifting through the whole space between minimalist meditations and maximalist kinetics. Vainio's signature brutalist production resonates throughout the album, constructing a psychic scenario for Vigroux's researches in spatial abstraction and tonal radicalism. Densely built through free-from structural limitation, this intense nine-track album is the third installment in the catalog of Berlin-based label Cosmo Rhythmatic, and acts as new chapter in the label's construction of an uncompromising sonic identity. Mastered by Denis Blackham at Skye Mastering. Lacquer cut at D&M, Berlin. Front cover photograph by Umut Ungan. Back cover photograph by Diego Jr.
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12"
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CR 002EP
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Apophis by Black Rain (aka Ike Yard's Stuart Argabright) and Shapednoise is named after near-Earth asteroid 99942 Apophis. Black Rain and Shapednoise are clearly ready for the asteroid's potential impact, from the rubbling noise forces and slivers of electronic salvation on "Metal Home" to the thunderous, scudding speedcore mass of "Autonomous Lethality" and the double-timed serpentine lash of "Interceptor." Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker delivers a reshape of "Interceptor" that exudes sludgy, effluent hardcore techno tropes. Definitely one for Mad Max characters, techno freaks, and noise creeps. Next up on the label: Mika Vainio!
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12"
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CR 001EP
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Centaure is artist Franck Vigroux's newest solo studio effort, following a period of both live and studio collaborations (with artists such as Ben Miller, video artist Antoine Schmitt as Tempest, and Mika Vainio) and music specifically written for multimedia performances. As the inaugural release for Cosmo Rhythmatic, the 12" sees Vigroux indulging in his taste for dynamic intensity, pairing abstract free noise of the heaviest sort with a taste for dense electronics beats, in order to explore new structural possibilities beyond industrial, techno, and concrete.
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