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viewing 1 To 23 of 23 items
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2LP
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IDEAL 188LP
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At long last, Boston's Isabella Koen delivers her long-in-the-making debut album of raving mutant body music, trance riffs, and industrial synth topographies forged with raw and brooding industrial sound design that marks her out among N. America's most interesting new producers of electronic music. Big tip if yr into Jasss, Helena Hauff, Gesloten Cirkel, AFX... Spanning proper techno artillery, trance riffs, and noise excursions, Melody Depleted expands on the ruffcut but classy ideas put forth on her tapes and 12"s for the likes of Peder Mannerfelt Production, Börft, and Jacktone over the past half-decade. It serves a broad but singular showcase of her ability to generate club punishing rhythms, barely-tamed electronic noise and surprisingly sensitive ambient space probes that revel in electronic music's capacity to evoke fine spectra of technoid feelings with a say it-without-saying-it instrumental finesse. In an emotive arc that takes in crude, rush-y rave futurism ("I'm Laughing") through to dark, bolshy industrial tekkers ("The Harm That I Dream For You") and an outstanding nine minute finale of deep distance ambient hypnagogia ("Hypnic Jerk"), Isabella's first album most deftly transposes a sense of pre-Millennial late '90s techno warehouse dread into a world dealing with its own register of worries. And like the work of Jasss, Nkisi, or Helena Hauff, Isabella proves highly adept at translating the most vital, if elusive, aspects of her reference points with a totally fearless, up-to-date but timeless swerve. Big hitters like the Peder Mannerfelt-esque breakbeat techno ballistics of "Roll Doll", the wide-eyed, doomy trample of "Organ" and the Stingray-meets-Colin Stetson styles of "Take One And Two" share space with full on EBM techno boosters in "Send" and "Mind Tear", while the roiling synth noise of "Mnesia" and the Drexciyan organism of "Through The Kitchen" diffract her vision into adjacent areas of experimentation that make for a murkily transfixing album experience rather than a collection of rave tools. It's a dead gritty course for lovers of electronic dance music that gets direct to the feet and leaves bits between your teeth. Cover design by Philip Marshall. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 300.
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IDEAL 197LP
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Simon Scott (Slowdive) debuts his Index alias with a visceral new sound that absorbs and transmutes political, ecological, and psychic dread into a caustic, dissonant style of noise sculpture for iDEAL Recordings. Recorded 2016-2019 in Los Angeles, Kainos sees veteran UK composer, field recordist, drummer, and mastering engineer Scott explore ongoing concerns of his oeuvre via a prism of formative musical influences from the post-industrial music of Coil, Throbbing Gristle, and early Black Sabbath, plus non-musical and conceptual inspiration from the turmoil of Brexit -- including recordings of the Houses of Parliament -- through to the radical feminist scientific writing of Donna Haraway, and the conceptual vigor of Luigi Russolo's Futurist manifesto, The Art of Noises. The album's title Kainos, from the ancient Greek meaning "new" or "fresh", characterizes Scott's efforts to glean something practical from this world's current state of chaos. When taken in context of its use in Donna Haraway's 2016 book, Staying with the Trouble: Making kin in the Chthulucene, and its central tenet that "our task is to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating events on a damaged earth", Scott's enacts a tectonic shift from bucolic sonic signifiers to signposts of the post-industrial world that could hardly be more apt at a time when electronic and ambient music are prized for their safe and sterile wallpaper qualities, rather than a potential to evoke and invoke more powerful feelings. Based around modular synth-mangled live stream recordings of the Houses of Parliament during the prelude to Brexit, Scott's compositions take these fractious debates as building blocks for the album's caustic improvisations and compositions, ranging from convulsive clangor to pulsating tracts of strobing distortion and gutted, lurching post-dubstep rhythms riddled with the voice of Slowdive's Rachel Goswell, before eventually resolving with a more spacious, textured sense of relief by the album's close. His results are chaotic and noisily abrasive in a way that holds up a mirror to the modern world, reflecting a putative state of unrest and agitation. In concept, this is nothing new for Scott, as previous release have variously explored ideas of climate change in Below Sea Level (2012) and FloodLines (2016, TONE 053CD), but the product this time is far more pointed, even aggressive, in its noisy insistence. Photography by Simon Scott. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 300.
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IDEAL 177LP
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Joachim Nordwall digests and mutates dub in unique industrial style on The iDEAList's almighty follow-up to a tape and 7" in this killer mode, bringing guest vocalists, JA's Nazamba and polymath John Duncan, for a deeply crooked ride worthy of rinse and repeat. Picking up where his raw Early Tactical Experiments In Techno & Dub left off in spring 2019, the rugged styles of Say Yes to No poses only slightly less risk of contracting salmonella with a more stewed and treated suite taking in proper songs starring Nazamba and John Duncan amid all manner of virulent, wayward electro-dub variation. As with his superb tape for Industrial Coast, that wicked 7" with Genesis P-Orridge, and even his recent albums as Joachim Nordwall -- Conventional Wisdom with John Duncan (IDEAL 182LP), and the collaborative CD Communication Is Key -- the iDEALIST naturally highlights fundamental links between dub and noise, the core principles of manipulating sound in space, with a critical blend of tactile playfulness and rigorous pressure. The two vocal cuts are outstanding in their own rights; "Bigga Boss" features Kingston-based poet and playwright Nazamba utterly possessing the opening shot with his baritone growl, rooting the LP at one pole, while John Duncan's equally compelling appearance on a similar riddim in "Tough Doubt" comes to epitomize the project's direct approach toward alloying and allying styles with alchemical suss comparable to The Bug, Ossia, or Andreas Tilliander. Vocals also spill out into the LP's other tracks, but here they're more textural and elusive, scudding thru "Everyone Fucking Relax" in a way recalling DJ Scud's thudding remix of Bong-Ra, or masticated into intelligibility on the amorphous dub-noise lurch of "Inner Space Dub (Insane Version)" and the LP's cataclysmic closer "Say Yes To Dub", which are all held tight in contrast with the more defined techno and electro-dub structures of the LP's club-ready highlights, "The Ecstasy" and "Shit Skull/Golden Mind". It's a hugely enjoyable album -- one that leaves bits in your teef and gets up in your head like a healthy dab of shatter. RIYL: Ossia, DJ Scud, Andreas Tilliander, Jay Glass Dubs. Mastered for vinyl and at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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IDEAL 184LP
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On their riveting debut collaboration, Merzbow (Masami Akita) and Posh Isolation's Vanity Productions (Christian Stadsgaard) transmute worries about ecological disaster into a torrent of spirit-gnawing, experimental noise that surpasses the sum of its parts. Both hailing from places with a lot of coastline vulnerable to sea level rises, Masami Akita from Japan, and Stadsgaard in Denmark, Coastal Erosion sees them grasp the nettle of impending doom with typically gauntleted grip and an unswerving intensity that speaks to clear and present concerns. While perhaps not the most obvious bedfellows for collaboration, the artists patently share an emphatic empathy for the situation that resonates through their music, where human forces of emotion intersect elemental chaos in a pair of poetically tempestuous, even harrowing works. Merzbow's visceral, primal roar sustains a perpetual force of attrition that constantly threatens to overwhelm VP's widescreen, panoramic pads on both of the LP's monolithic tracts. But it's due to their democracy of vision that they speak as one, rather than over each other. In the A side's 18 minutes of "Erosion Japan", they connote the frothing might of the Pacific tide encroaching and destroying towering walls of steel and glass with an arrestingly Ballardian quality to their instrumental description of violence and anguish. The B side's 17 minute "Erosion Denmark" follows with a more pensive arrangement of low-lying, unyielding drone frequencies smeared to stereo extremes and overlapped with spirit-penetrating shards of distortion, limning the prospective submergence of the Danish peninsula and its archipelagoes with a Thunbergian seriousness and intractable logic. Taken as a profound warning or as an elegy for Anthropocene extinction, Coastal Erosion is a frighteningly powerful statement that leaves its message like the murky stain of flood waters inside the mind. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Edition of 300.
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IDEAL 192LP
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2021 limited repress. Double LP version. Kali Malone presents a new album featuring nearly two hours of concentrated pipe organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code. It's a major new work with ultimately profound emotional resonance. The Sacrificial Code takes a more surgical approach to the methods first explored on Organ Dirges 2016-2017 (ASCETICKALI). Over the course of three parts performed on three different organs, Malone's minimalist procedure captures a jarring precision of closeness, both on the level of the materiality of the sounds and on the level of composition. The recordings of The Sacrificial Code involve careful close-miking of the pipe organ in such a way as to eliminate environmental identifiers as far as possible -- essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces are then further compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse -- an approach reminiscent of Steve Reich's words, "by voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind." With its slow, purified, and seemingly austere qualities, The Sacrificial Code guides you through an almost trance-inducing process where you become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness. As such, it's a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self-restraint -- a stunning realization of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigor which gradually reveals startling personal dimensions. It has a perception-altering quality that encourages self-exploration free of signposts and without a preordained endpoint -- the antithesis to the language of colorless musical platitudes we've become so accustomed to. Features additional organ pieces performed by Ellen Arkbro. Art and photography by A.M. Rehm. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker.
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IDEAL 192CD
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2021 repress. Kali Malone presents a new album featuring nearly two hours of concentrated pipe organ pieces governed by a strict acoustic and compositional code. It's a major new work with ultimately profound emotional resonance. The Sacrificial Code takes a more surgical approach to the methods first explored on Organ Dirges 2016-2017 (ASCETICKALI). Over the course of three parts performed on three different organs, Malone's minimalist procedure captures a jarring precision of closeness, both on the level of the materiality of the sounds and on the level of composition. The recordings of The Sacrificial Code involve careful close-miking of the pipe organ in such a way as to eliminate environmental identifiers as far as possible -- essentially removing the large hall reverb so inextricably linked to the instrument. The pieces are then further compositionally stripped of gestural adornments and spontaneous expressive impulse -- an approach reminiscent of Steve Reich's words, "by voluntarily giving up the freedom to do whatever momentarily comes to mind, we are, as a result, free of all that momentarily comes to mind." With its slow, purified, and seemingly austere qualities, The Sacrificial Code guides you through an almost trance-inducing process where you become vulnerable receptors for every slight movement, where every miniature shift in sound becomes magnified through stillness. As such, it's a uniquely satisfying exercise in transcendence through self-restraint -- a stunning realization of ideas borne out of academic and conceptual rigor which gradually reveals startling personal dimensions. It has a perception-altering quality that encourages self-exploration free of signposts and without a preordained endpoint -- the antithesis to the language of colorless musical platitudes we've become so accustomed to. Features additional organ pieces performed by Ellen Arkbro. Art and photography by A.M. Rehm. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker. Triple-CD version includes bonus material.
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IDEAL 189LP
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[sold out] The time-stopping tract of In Demons In! is a naturally elemental drone collaboration between eminent experimentalists Jim O'Rourke and CM Von Hausswolf for their eternal admirers at iDEAL Recordings. Offering a transfixing peek behind the curtain of pure black hole drone dynamics, In Demons In! finds the American in Japanese exile and the proclaimed monarch of the imaginary kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland meeting on common ground after 26 years of international correspondence. Initiated in Tokyo 2016 and completed over the following two years in Japan and Sweden, the uncompromisingly adventurous results are galactic in scope and viscerally metaphysical in presence, conjuring scales of abyssal bass and diffused, atomized, abstract dark matter that make the listener feel like a speck of stardust floating in infinity. Using sound as a magickal tool for psychic transport and to finely model notions of the metaphysical that typically elude human comprehension, the near 40-minute work feels to collapse billions of years into a glacial moment. Location recordings made in Kathmandu lend a barely-there iridescence, like microbial filaments flickering in the endless darkness, to their plunging, subharmonic basses and vaporized mid-upper registers, where spectral forces comb thru the piece, only very gradually altering the weightless keen of its planetary mass and mental traction. Ultimately, and fans are likely to agree, In Demons In! amounts to a vitally definitive entry in both artists' catalogs, marking right up there with the most abstract wonders of O'Rourke's electro-acoustic Steamroom volumes, while manifesting some of the most fascinating results from Von Hausswolff's ongoing investigations into drone music's paranormal properties. In other words: it's Grade A+ zoner music. Master and cut by Dubplates & Mastering, Germany. Pressed on neon yellow vinyl. RIYL: Roland Kayn, Jaap Vink, Deathprod. Edition of 500.
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IDEAL 182LP
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Venerable avant-garde composer John Duncan follows his prized cycle of cover versions Bitter Earth (2016) with Conventional Wisdom; a truly beguiling new suite of original, stony avant-blooz songs produced in collaboration with iDEAL boss Joachim Nordwall, and marking another high point in both of their catalogues After coming out as a vocalist to memorably striking effect in 2016, Duncan compounds the effect with Conventional Wisdom, placing his original lyrics in stark arrangements ranging from shortwave radio-streaked dark ambient settings and Mika Vainio-esque isolationism, to deathly dubs driven by Nordwall's rugged rhythms in a style that heavily recalls Jay Glass Dubs' Epitaph LP (2019). An original and close associate of LAFMS co-founder Tom Recchion, and collaborator with everyone from Chris & Cosey to Asmus Tietchens, Merzbow, and Andrew McKenzie (The Hafler Trio), Duncan is well versed in the art of fucking with music. Doing so since the '70s, it's only in recent years that more "typical" song structures have crept into his style with most transfixing effect, gathering the attention of many who previously weren't necessarily exposed to his music. Whether stemming from a perverse pleasure in twisting popular music, or a matter of changing with age (65), we're just not sure, but either way Duncan is now coming out with some of the most broadly appealing, yet incomparable work in his 50-year-wide catalog. Aided by Joachim Nordwall, the pair convene a set of songs every bit as fascinating, eerie as the cover image of a birdcage mask bound in barbed wire. The title track emphasizes the stark mystery with nothing more than meditative vocals, gamelan strikes and daubs of shortwave, before "Hard Swallow" catches him huskily channeling Lee "Scratch" Perry at a spooky distance, while the disembodied dub tropes of "Soft Eyes" come uncannily close to aspects of Jay Glass Dubs, and "Say No" says it in the bluntest, most bluesy terms. The most desiccated, strung-out material however is saved for the B-side, with the sferic resonance and stereo-strafing vocal of "The Joke" planning out into the cracked hush of "The Beautiful Attempt", before he and Nordwall effectively duet in the finale "The Red Hot Alternative", where Nordwall also supplies pranging percussion and Coil-esque synth abstraction. RIYL: Pere Ubu, Jay Glass Dubs, Coil, Pan Sonic, Scott Walker. Mastered at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 300.
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IDEAL 187LP
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The first vinyl release between Carl Abrahamsson and Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Loyalty Does Not End With Death is the final part of a spoken word trilogy initiated in 1990 with the Psychick TV & White Stains side At Stockholm, and proceeded by their Wordship album (2004) as Thee Majesty & Cotton Ferox electing to use their own names for this final part of a 30 year wide series, the duo intend Loyalty Does Not End With Death to be received without the connotations of their other projects. It's the sound of two cosmically-traveled minds crossing paths after a long time to chew over the bare essentials -- love and magick -- via vibrant poetry and beautifully charged forms of ambient music. In nine parts they conjure a warmly meditative music, where Abrahamsson's characteristic, playful tones, cut-up electronics, and gentle rhythms comfortably lay the bed for Genesis, who inhabits and enlivens the pristine scenes like an observant dark interpreter, translating the incomprehensible and revealing the divine through their psychedelic prism. The spellbinding results were recorded in New York and Stockholm 2017/18 and could feasibly have occurred at any point between 1990 and now. They are blessed with a pacing, intuition and timelessness that pays testament to an enduring creative friendship, taking the form of writing, interviews, photographs and films (Change Itself (2016)) for nearly 35 years.
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IDEAL 186LP
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Jean-Louis Huhta's Dungeon Acid turns out a devilish debut album proper of Detroit-inspired techno and 303 extrusions, plus sidewinding psychedelic dance music, recorded, and edited between 2010-2019 for his pals and admirers at iDEAL Recordings. Synonymous with Gothenburg's iDEAL Recordings for the past decade, Dungeon Acid has become the most vital of drummer and producer Jean-Louis Huhta's many projects, following a musical arc since the '80s which has seen him variously play with crust punk group Anti Cimex (and tour the UK alongside Napalm Death in a van with no seats), become a member of cult Swedish rave band Lucky People Centre, play ritual rock tribalism with The Skull Defekts, and duel with electro-acoustic heavyweights such as Zbigniew Karkowski and CM Von Hausswolff. Yet, for all his stylistic versatility, Huhta's heart has consistently been found in tough, driving, and psychedelic strains of house and techno indebted to Detroit since the '90s, and that inspiration comes out in unexpected ways across his first Dungeon Acid album proper. Working within this square but malleable meter, Huhta's playfully deep character burns through in his persistently detailed tweaks and hypnotically layered productions, where he's unafraid to push into the red or lower the tempo and croon like a shaman conducting ancient rites. In nine parts, he effectively joins the dots between the psychy, punkish dance trax of Börft Records and the Motor City mechanics of Underground Resistance, generating a singular, machine-borne but organic flow with big highlights between jelly-limbed acid opening, through to steely warehouse hammers, a slow and skudgy hymn to nose drip dynamics, and two belting barrels of warped Biker Bar funk that would surely make the grade in the 313 any time between the early '90s and now. Dungeon Acid is brilliant testament to the art of marrying mutually exclusive bedfellows as much as it is a masterclass in dare-to-be-different house and techno, all done with hard-won skills, natural personality and warmth, with history and future at the front of the mind. RIYL: Underground Resistance, Börft Records. Includes insert. Vinyl mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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IDEAL 175LP
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Joachim Nordwall marks 20 years of his iDEAL label with The Black Book, a blinding sweep of original material from JASSS, Stephen O'Malley, Ramleh, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, Carlos Giffoni & Prurient, Ectoplasm Girls, JH1.FS3, JS Aurelius, Autumns, John Duncan, and many more. The story of iDEAL starts out in London 1998, when Nordwall was living the hardscrabble life: working in an underwear shop near Liverpool Street station; living in a filthy Bayswater apartment; scoring industrial records from the Music and Video Exchange; getting drunk in cheap pubs, and dreaming of starting a new record label and platform. He called it iDEAL, and 180 releases, 20 years later, it has become an invaluable node for non-standard, wayward expressions of modern electronic noise in all its mutable variation. iDEAL's success and longevity may well be down to the way that Nordwall treated it as a social and artistic home, offering a place where mutually exclusive styles could bed down away from the mainstream or the genre police, and feed into a much larger, work-in-progress definition of fringe music. The Black Book extends, in the spirit of the label, an idealized compilation of disparate possibilities connected by a sense of musical mystery and chaotic energy. To focus on just a few highlights, the ever unpredictable JASSS makes a notable inclusion with the serene vignette of LP opener, "Parental Youth", while Jim O'Rourke unfurls 17 minutes of gloaming post-industrial drone with "In Regards". Label friend Jonathan Uliel Saldanha contributes the tense, searching horns of "Siren Frontier", and Ectoplasm Girls cook up the grim, thrumming electronics of "Neuropean". John Duncan parses the airwaves to find the curdling organism of "Shortwave6", and Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary) and Jesse Sanes seduce with the narcotic drone-pop of "At The Bottom Of The Night" as JH1.FS3, alongside a powerful rhythmic oddity from Stephen O'Malley, a stark death rattle from Trepaneringsritualen as Týr × Reið × Vend with "nd þau né átto, óð þau né hfðo", and Norn Iron's Autumns "Lose It" on a mucky acid 'floor swill. Cover design by Philip Marshall, mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Also features: Pact Infernal, Vanity Productions, Mokira, Dungeon Acid, Coppice, and Drew St Ivany.
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IDEAL 164LP
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2020 relist, last copies; black vinyl. Monstrance documents Mika Vainio and Joachim Nordwall reshaping guitars, drums, and incendiary electronics at Einstürzende Neubauten's Berlin studio back in 2010. The results were originally issued by Touch in 2013 with this new double-LP edition arriving on Nordwall's iDEAL Recordings label five years later as a posthumous tribute and reminder of his erstwhile collaborator. It's one of Vainio's most crucial and absorbing collaborations; moving away from ice-cold electronic precision and into a more visceral re-rendering of metal. In a sort of fantasy regression imbued with the spirit of their shared heroes -- Einstürzende Neubauten -- Mika returns to the instruments he cut his teeth on way back in the '80s, manning electric guitar, drums, and effects, while Nordwall takes control of electronics, electric bass, Hammond organ, and vibraphone, with both arriving at a mutually primal conclusion of distortion and fiercely charged electro-acoustic air. The first side's "Alloy Ceremony" comes on like an Earth death march (especially if played at 33rpm), before the furnace blast of "Live At The Chrome Cathedral" settles to the sepulchral croaks of "Midas In Reverse'. In the second part, the duo communicate in reverberant, hollow knocks, and guttural bass waves on "Irkutsk", leading to a moment of raw, staggering poignancy with the shimmering primitivism of "Praseodymium", leading each other in acres of negative space, with needled strings creating a fine tension that dissolves into the funereal, floating tones of "In The Sheltering Sanctus Of Minerals" in a sort of blue, etheric and almost ecclesiastic resolution. All the track titles allude to metal (in the material sense), which gives you a firm sense of the hard, grey tonal palette the duo worked with. But Nordwall and Vainio generate such an impressive array of music out of this ascetic approach that we can't really think of much in either of their extensive repertoires that sounds much like the hour of music they created here. It's one of Vainio's most impressive and unique collaborations outside of Pan Sonic, an essential exploration of silence and noise. Mika Vainio: Electric guitar, effects and percussion; Joachim Nordwall; Electronics, bass, organ and vibraphone. New artwork by Philip Marshall. Mastered at EMS, Stockholm by Daniel Karlsson.
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IDEAL 303LP
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Black vinyl version. EVOL shuts the game down with Ideal Acid, a killer 20-minute rinse through 303 acid cherries pitted and sequenced, tweak-for-tweak, into the wildest acid track ever made. No hype, this record is the maddest belter in EVOL's extensive catalog, taking their obsession with Roland's squelchy grey box to an ultimate, logical conclusion that leaves dancefloors turned utterly inside-out and begging for track ID's. Produced in Barcelona and further product tested between Stockholm and Manchester, Ideal Acid is the kind of idea that has been floated in raves, smoking areas, and afterparties for the past 20 years but has never been executed with such precise method and inexorable effect, until now. Taking way too many classics to mention, EVOL modulates their mutual variable, the Roland TB-303 bass line, in a cascade of liquified riffs that last anywhere between one beat and a few bars before shifting to the next pattern, and so forth. The cumulative effect of elastic undulation is mind-bending and body-jacking in the extreme, yet uncompromisingly crafted at the immediate service of the rave. It feels as though much of EVOL's practice to date, from mixes for FACT and Reel Torque, to their experimental objetcs for Alku and blasts for Presto!?, Diagonal, and BUS have been leading to this point: the ultimate acid rave tool. Mastered and cut to vinyl at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
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IDEAL 171LP
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Ectoplasm Girls' Nadine Byrne lures listeners into woozy mental states on Dreaming Remembering, her soundtrack to a short film of the same name, providing a solo follow-up to A Different Gesture: Collected Soundtracks 2011-2012 (2014), and her first outing since Ectoplasm Girls' New Feeling Come (2016), which were both issued by Joachim Nordwall's ever-adventurous iDEAL Recordings. One of three Stockholm-based Byrne sisters along with Tanya, her partner in Ectoplasm Girls, and Ambra, who has recently provided EG's live visuals, Nadine Byrne operates at the intersection of intuitive sonic and visual arts. Where Ectoplasm Girls tend to a bewitched sort of industrial experimentation, Nadine's personal work is defined in terms of its relative, mutable electronic sleight of hand, with vocals handled by the mysterious Sarah Kim. As the title connotes, Dreaming Remembering is about intimate reflection and the space between awareness and uncertainty of recollection. In that noumenal gooch, Nadine works an incredible freeform, uncluttered sound best resembling the illusive nature of dreams and their elusive memory. In her mind and out of her machines, they feel out a spectrum ranging from mirage-like vignettes like "Atlas" through to curdled proto-techno buzzes and grubby drone intonations with wickedly possessed vocals. Extracted from the visuals, they patently work well as a dissociated body of work in their own right, with a cumulative effect that mesmerizes and unsettles throughout the album, bringing you out at the other end in a way that feels like you've just walked out of a darkened cinema into dusk, with the strange effect of the preceding visuals and a story you can't untangle still lingering like a pleasurably strange mental fug that's hard to shake or decipher. Singular sound and vision somewhere between Laurie Anderson, James Ferraro, and Ryan Trecartin. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Edition of 500.
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IDEAL 170LP
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Vain marks the prodigal return of Venezuelan artist Carlos Giffoni to the avant-electronic music scene he was instrumental in shaping with the seminal, hybridiszng No Fun Fest and No Fun Productions label, which was home to debut releases by Oneohtrix Point Never and Noveller, and classics from Haswell and Prurient during the late '00s to early part of the '10s. Carlos's first new release in six years, Vain was drawn from hundreds of hours of improvisations made at Carlos's Malibu studio, the final LP describes a tumultuous narrative in affective abstract swells and pulsating rhythms that trigger curious sensations and emotions ever familiar to his variegated, extreme, yet essentially organic output. Despite not releasing anything for the past six years, Carlos still sounds like he lives and breathes electronic music. Where those "noise" artists who originally played at No Fun Fest and released on his label have arguably carved out major career paths from myriad mutated genres, Carlos's music still feels captivatingly ancient yet advanced and uncannily hypnotic. In a cascade of minimalist Arps and cloud dynamic harmonies, the album's story starts in the vortex of "Vain's Face" and sweeps through the granular flux of "The Desert" to a staggering piece of noise techno dissonance in "Erase The World", which calves away into the curled plunge of "Hands" and the anxious needling of "We Pay The Price". At the mid-way point it turns lusher with the pulsing and coruscating kosmische tang of "Stop Breathing", leading to the metric complexities woven into "Faith And Pain" and the heightened high-register sensitivities of "I Can Change", whose shatterproof hyaline steeples ultimately deliquesce into the shimmering beauty of "Sun Rain". With hazy resolution and ambiguity of effect, the record works its magick in memorable style. Like the best abstract sonics of Peter Rehberg or Keith Fullerton Whitman, an intuitively applied formula of geometry, rhythm, tone, and timbre add up to inexorable effect, rendering the closest possible connection between the machines and the artist's pathos. For synesthetes and attuned listeners, the effect is likely to conceive new colors on the mind's eye and move them to finer states of emotive response. In others words: it's a seriously good listen. Cover painting by Wiley Wallace. Master by Al Carlson; Cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin. Edition of 500.
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IDEAL 160LP
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2018 repress. Jasss makes her head and body-turning album debut with Weightless, an absorbingly stark and spiky set of industro-dub concerns, riddled with heavy inspiration from African rhythms, jazz and concrète electronics. After a trio of acclaimed 12"s for Berlin's Mannequin and Amir Alexander's Annunaki Cartel since 2016, iDEAL Recordings now give Jasss room to consolidate and expand her grizzled dancefloor structures to a full-length episode that brutally dovetails with Joachim Nordwall's unforgiving but compelling take on contemporary noise and industrial musics. Very much an antecedent of Spanish industrialists, such as Diseño Corbusier, Xeerox/Krishna Goineau, or Mecanica Popular/Randomize, Jasss firmly builds on that heritage with a uniquely pensive balance of percussive suss, synthetic bite, and reverberating spatial dynamics that makes her music heavy-as-sin and deliciously deft with it, patently forgoing industrial music's angry guy glare in favor of far more feminine and Latinate pressure systems. She does so with an aching, puckered patience in the opener, "Every Single Fish In The Pond", escalating from a lone cymbal motif and location recordings to a pulsating darkroom boldness by the end of an incendiary scene-setter, before really getting her fangs in with the clenched but driving EBM torque of "Oral Couture", recalling a spiked Toresch or CTI hovering at the darkroom's entrance. From here on in a dream sequence of events take place, morphing from febrile, hash-induced triplet pirouettes in "Danza" through the martial free jazz/industrial cut-up of "Cotton For Lunch", to a definitive apex of sprung, stepping cyber-goth in "Weightless", with a pause for Alberich-like reflection on "Theo Goes Away", but the voodoo rises once again with the druggy swagger of "Instantaneous Transmission Of Information", and her stoic, blunt-edged mauler, "To Eat With Dirty Hands". It's rare to hear industrial music done with such variation and individual distinction as "Weightless", making it shine in a field so often associated with greyscale and monotone signatures. RIYL: Christoph De Babalon, Klinik, Toresch, Mecanica Popular, CTI. Artwork by Pan Daijing. Master and cut by Matt Colton. Comes in a gatefold jacket; Edition of 600.
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2LP
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IDEAL 136LP
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Stephen O'Malley on Fuck Fundamentalist Pigs upon its initial release in December 2015: "On 8 January 2015, the day following the Charlie Hebdo murders in Paris (the city I have called home for the last eight years), I started a week-long tour of Norway. During this jaunt I faced the toxic reality daily of the horrible blossoming events intermittently via television. . . . The Trondheim concert on 9 January (depicted here) happened on a particularly intense day in this timeline... and was personally a true example of the purging power of immersion in music. Through a web of emotions resolving distance, disintegration, the intense power of the moment and the brutal fundamentalist, cultural and psychological aspects behind. . . Like most of us I have also sometimes fallen for the constant baiting toward anger, outrage, paranoia and fear in the daily life, often but not always misdirected, but it is not debilitating by any means. It's clear that as an experimental guitar player I have absolutely no political power (or even ability to articulate in those forms) but it's important to take the opportunity to say 'fuck you' in these situations. To the fascist and fundamentalist movements. To the absurding of the worst sides of monotheistic belief systems. And not only the perpetrators behind these events but also on other sides including the reactive and opportunistic. Those with most to gain are the underlying authoritarians in our own societies who have opportunities to implement and increase their control even further for their gains. The 'security' changes we face in fact may also result in yet further increase in the loss of liberty and freedom. The reactions aimed toward increased separation of cultures, xenophobia, nationalism, and especially racism are highly regrettable. I hope these recordings offer a small sense of solace in the time, even for the few hundred who hear them. . . . For the concert on this record we had a massive backline with beautiful vintage Hiwatt amplifiers, and two PAs (including a Funktion One) in the small venue Blæst, the night hosted by Nymusikk. . . . This record is actually the third part of a trilogy of live solo guitar records we intended to be released on iDEAL during spring 2016." Mastered and cut by Matt Colton; Edition of 700 (hand-numbered).
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LP
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IDEAL 154LP
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Andreas Tilliander (Mokira, TM404) returns with a plunging set of skewed techno dubs for the mightily on-form iDEAL Recordings label, his first new release for the label since the Bias Line 7" in 2010, and the Hateless album released in 2010, both released under his Mokira moniker. Andreas Tilliander has gone some way to making his studio a bastion of dub music within his home city, Stockholm ever since emerging with the Cliphop for Raster-Noton in 2000 and subsequently releasing a whole slew of influential releases for labels including Mille Plateaux, Type, Kontra, and Skudge. With the heady churn of Compuriddim dispensed under his own name, Tilliander returns to the site of some of his earliest outings, Joachim Nordwall's iDEAL Recordings, with a clutch of warped and murky dub ecologies, firming up as some of the most absorbing iterations of his adroitly smoked-out sound. iDEAL Recordings were first turned on to Tilliander's music via his Ljud LP for Mille Plateaux (2001), and have established an occasional yet crucial relationship ever since, resulting in highlights such as the Dutty & Digital 12" (2004) and the Bias Line 7". The Compuriddim set is the newest and most intoxicatingly textured addition to that collection; six tracks strong in pursuit of an elusive electro-acoustic Geist that lives between the wires of his classic hardware, in the late night air of his studio. In keeping with the classic tenets of dub production -- less-is-more efficiency, constant movement within space -- he executes a sort of psychoacoustic telekinesis with the six parts of Compuriddim, skanking from the spiraling loops of drip bass and drums overlaid with windswept melodica in "Twilight Circuit", to a grumbling but charming dub techno stepper on "Mokirian Tekno", then letting it all go loose and floppy with the sloshing Afracid deviation of "FR777 Skank". "Open Up The CV/Gate" meanwhile kicks off the B-side at a bendy slow/fast bent lodged somewhere between Tin Man and Aphex Twin's slow mo Analord (2005) or Cheetah EP (2016) tracks, followed up by the ragged dub chord stagger of "Return Of The Super Tape", and the sweetest number, "Syncussion Discussion", a bottom-heavy but dainty whorl of 303 dialog seemingly detained for the most squashed and strange corners of the night or morning after. RIYL: Peder Mannerfelt, Frak, Tapes, Pole.
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LP
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IDEAL 050LP
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Wolf Eyes' Nate Young's Regression series has provided some of the most compelling dread-electronics spewed out by the North American underground in years, with instalments released by Demdike Stare's DDS label and Aaron Dilloway's Hanson, as well as NNA Tapes and others. It all began back in 2009 with this first volume issued by Joachim Nordwall's Ideal label, an incredible set that's now being released on vinyl here for the first time ever. Young is one of those artists whose output is instantly recognizable, his take on primitive electronics is both innovative and unnerving, and in recent years has really dominated the stylistic direction pursued by Wolf Eyes. It's a kind of creaky, bare-boned deconstruction of classic horror scoring jolted by noise and industrial motifs, sounding somewhere between Demdike Stare's early work, John Carpenter, and Mica Levi's by-now-classic soundtrack to Under The Skin (2014). You could neither classify Regression as a noise record nor an ambient one, instead the synth dissections and tape treatments more closely reference early electronic music. "Trapped" offers little of the claustrophobia suggested by its title, although the continual woody knocking sounds and filthy oscillations do engender a sense of unease, while "Dread" brings to mind the Desmond Briscoe soundtrack to Nigel Kneale's The Stone Tape (1972). "Under The Skin" returns to the more esoteric, intangible sound designs that characterized the album's opening, writhing around in a spluttering, tactile fashion that's at once sonically rather beautiful but deeply sinister, modulating through grisly synthesizer gestures while more textural, percussive sounds flood through dub-style tape delays. Young has an uncanny ability to make sonic extremes sound incredibly seductive, and this volume is perhaps the most engrossing exposition of that unique ability. Cut at Dubplates & Mastering. Edition of 500.
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3LP
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IDEAL 149LP
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Mannerlaatta ("Tectonic Plate") is Mika Vainio's soundtrack for a "74 minute Lettrist film made entirely without a camera" by Finnish film maker Mika Taanila; his third following their previous collaborations: 2002's A Physical Ring and 2015's Return Of The Atom (the soundtrack was released by Blast First Petite in 2016 as Atomin Paluu - PTYT 086CD/LP). The music was written very early on in the film's two-and-a-half year development, and subsequently held a strong sway over the rhythm of the film's editing and visual narration - which takes place as a series of black and white images made from photocopying various travel documents, which were later photographed onto 35mm reversal film in a darkroom, and overlaid with text by poet Harry Salmenniemi. As Vainio tends to use a set-up of a homebuilt kit, unchanged from his very earliest productions, each new release is effectively a subtle alteration/refinement of his brutalist but tactile process of creation. And, going by that timeline of events, we'd speculate that Mannerlaatta was conceived somewhere in the wake of his staggering Kilo (PTYT 076CD/LP, 2013) and the much sweeter Konstellaatio side as Ø, which is roughly where its aesthetics also lie. The 50 minute score breaks down to six sections, each exploring the full frequency spectrum of his patented, greyscale tonal palette, largely swerving a fixed rhythmic meter to occupy a weightless, out-of-reach mid-ground that seduces us headlong into his chasmic designs and best suits the black and white film imagery. Key to the recording's appeal - as with most Vainio gear - is that peripheral sense of spatial dynamic and his unpredictable manipulation of amplitude; whether dangling the listener over abyssal sub-bass dimensions, needling with icy prongs, or occasionally alleviating the tension with teasing pads which evaporate back into the æther as though they were never there, ultimately leaving the listener at rapt and at his mercy for the duration. Mastered by Denis Blackham; Cover design by Nullvoid.
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LP
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IDEAL 135LP
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Limited 2017 repress. End Ground forms the 3rd and final installment in a series of records documenting the solo prowess of Sunn 0)))'s Stephen O'Malley released on Sweden's iDEAL Recordings. It was performed on electric guitar thru Sunn model T amps, and captured on zoom H4 at Centre Cultural Suisse, Bad Bonn Carte Blanche, Paris, France, on October 18th, 2013. In solo mode, stripped of his usual accomplices and collaborators, O'Malley is no less than an elemental force. His durational meditations absorb and consume with steady-handed wave after wave of charred, sustained, and sub-harmonized chords casting the mesmerizing minimalist practice of La Monte Young into the physicality of Black Sabbath's original, heavy metal die. The A-side/first half of this 45 minute performance features O'Malley tentatively coaxing out languorous riffs which turn the air around him to a pensive, vibrating mush. As the 2nd half dawns he begins to deliver more crushing blows, drawing out and subsiding the chords with a patented, gut-wrenching and vivifying power that transcends rock, avant-garde, minimalism -- all of that -- to awaken dormant senses not usually experienced with other musics or concise temporality. As with many of the most affective heavy drone recordings by Sunn 0))), among others, a modicum of patience is required in order to attain the right state for reception, but once your mind and body are malleable, the impact is deliciously visceral, primal and whelming. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Individually hand-numbered edition of 700 copies.
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CD
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IDEALREC 018CD
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"Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words never seem to stay in one place for too long. He's always on the move. From the dark and cold ambient of the first, self-titled CD-R, via the faint, minimal crackle of the split album with The Hurt I Feel Is My Hurt to where we are today on this brand new CD on iDEAL Recordings. A rusty, decaying mix of concrete sounds found in and around Gothenburg and Sundsvall, manipulated snippets from the history of recorded music and traditional instruments treated in a not so traditional way. Slow melodies, forgotten atmospheres, and a very sensitive personality of sound. Thomas Ekelund, the man behind Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words, shows us the darker areas of his mind. This is music that makes you feel. This is abstract music but with very concrete feelings hidden within. The 50 minutes of 11 Instances of Dead Letters+Words may be seen as a collection of moods, emotions and states of awareness or just a series of tracks assembled over the course of one year. Listen, and make up your mind what -- if anything -- it's all about. This is ambient music, and it shares some thoughts with Brian Eno's Discreet Music philosophies. Echoes of the late 80's Hafler Trio, minimalism which you can track down to Alvin Lucier and others, the drones -- like a punk-version of Phill Niblock. There we might have it! Dead Letters Spell Out Dead Words might be the anarchy in today's sound art."
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CD
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IDEALREC 016CD
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"Henrik Rylander was the drummer of the infamous and influential garage rock outfit Union Carbide Productions. But this is pretty far from where he is now. This is extreme music made through an extreme process. Feedback is the only sound source here. And it's surprisingly varied and rhythmic. Post-techno meet industrial music. Pan Sonic or CoH is somehow connected to Rylander's sound, maybe even Radian."
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