Injazero Records was formed by London/Istanbul-based music producer and journalist Siné Buyuka in 2015. It has to date released music by artists such as Heinali, Matt Emery, C. Diab and Hinako Omori.
|
|
|
viewing 1 To 9 of 9 items
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 014LP
|
Nairobi-based electronic musician/sound-artist Joseph Kamaru -- KMRU -- signs to Injazero for the release of his beautiful compendium album Logue, comprising works from his past years of self-releasing. KMRU is uniquely positioned between the rarely-married cultures of ambient and African musics, entwining his compositions with field recordings from his native Kenya and the surrounding countries of East Africa. Though the deep, tectonic slowness of his music can be compared to the work of Lawrence English, William Basinski, Stars of the Lid, Kamaru's core culture shines through in a pure and singular way. Found within Logue's pieces are radiant melodic antiphony commonplace in African music, and huge, spacious drones that reveal his love for ambient soundscapes, held effortlessly together by field recordings and analog synthesis. "Every track reflects an event, space or location," Joseph writes. "The pieces are developed from field recordings, improvisation and spontaneity." Formed of tracks written from 2017 to 2019, Logue represents an artist not only in command of his form but also willing to develop and evolve, ready to deconstruct and radically refocus his music to explore new contours of experimental and ambient sound-design. Some of the earliest compositions found on Logue -- 2017's "Jinja Encounters", for example -- represent Joseph's first trips outside his homeland and the experience of new sights and new climates, full of discovery and wonder. The synth line of 2018's "Argon" pops and bubbles, mimicking bright African melodic vibrancy while a churning, static distortion threatens to breach the surface, revealing a sophisticated, measured understanding of texture and timbral interplay. "OT", from late 2018, jumps with joyous calls and deftly panned arrhythmic percussion, a new subtlety of light and dark gained from experience and experimentation. Consistent across the entire album is intensely personal and powerfully intuitive expression, crossing continental divides with a singular elegance. KMRU is a young, recently debuting musician. He has self-released on Bandcamp for the past few years, and 2020 saw his first official, international releases, including the scintillating Peel album for Editions Mego. Resident Advisor listed him in their "15 East African Artists You Need To Hear" article in 2018. He appears regularly at the celebrated Nyege Nyege Festival in Uganda, and has also performed at CTM Festival and Gamma Festival. Clear vinyl.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 010LP
|
Pétra is a new collaborative music project from Brian Allen Simon (aka Anenon) and Chantal Chadwick. The duo's debut album, Aunis, incorporates electronic and acoustic instrumentation which draws the listener into dream-like soundscapes and blends ambient sounds, modern composition, and abstract vibrations. Primarily written, performed, produced, and recorded on the volcanic island of Nisyros, Greece in late 2018, Pétra means "stone, rock", and the name of the project was inspired by a chance encounter with the photography of Daniel Boudinet as well as the geological formations of Nisyros. With additional work on the album completed in Loire, France and Mexico City, Mexico, the music is a site-specific reaction to all locales and was arranged in a free-form variety of methods with an improvisational energy being the driving force. Compositions such as the reverberating "Aunis" rely on ethereal sounds and deep repetition, while the fluid "Landes" is a weightless moment of sonic beauty and emotional depth. Elsewhere, the reactionary "Fuzz" and the meditative, hazy sound explorations of "Obsidian" are hauntingly beautiful, while "Tavel" is reminiscent of the melodic repetition of minimalist pioneers like Steve Reich.
Los Angeles native Brian Allen Simon, aka Anenon, is a multi-instrumentalist and producer who has received critical acclaim for his work from the likes of Pitchfork, The Wire, The Guardian, and more. Since his 2012 debut Inner Hue, Simon has continually and consistently proven his status as an innovator by co-curating an ambient music series at The Museum of Contemporary art in Los Angeles, and releasing critically acclaimed records such as 2016's Petrol and 2018's Tongue.
Chantal Chadwick is a musician, dancer, and founder of Assortment, an agency that supports artists working in photography, motion, and sound with an independent publishing branch for fine art books. Prior to founding Assortment, she was co-owner of a small gallery in New York City focusing on emerging contemporary artists. She has been quietly making music under the name Bed for close to a decade, but Pétra will be her first release.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 009LP
|
Heinali is the alias of self-taught composer and sound-designer Oleg Shpudeiko from Ukraine. Having garnered rapturous responses to his earlier output and 2017's Anthem (INJ 004LP), Oleg continues to push the boundaries and experiment with altering mood and atmospheres of any space with abstract, yet deeply personal transmissions of ambient synthesizer work and subaqueous, minimal techno contortions. Iridescent consists of fragments of studio improvisation sessions recorded in 2016 and 2017, some of them recorded in one unedited take on a modular system and some layered and later morphed into compositions. Iridescent bares Oleg's style of sonic storytelling and austere, otherworldly textural embellishments that bring to mind Ben Frost, Akira Yamaoka, and Oneohtrix Point Never but also plants the seed for much more club-ready electro. "Starling Reprise I" is a scorching piece of ambient techno that conjures Four Tet, LTO, and Susumu Yokota's blissful, kaleidoscopic synth work whilst "Starling Reprise II" retains the frosty, steely ambience that has become Heinali's calling card.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 008LP
|
Exit Rumination is the sophomore album from Vancouver's C. Diab. A meditative sound exploration for bowed guitar, trumpet, and subtle tape manipulations that are iridescent of Colin Stetson, Tim Hecker, Arthur Russell, and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Exit Rumination is a beautiful intersection between leftfield ambient music, film score, post-classical solo cello, American folk music, and post-rock.
"Soaring bowed melodies . . . mired in ancient grainy tape sound . . . [Canada's] folk-inflected epic musics sound totally fresh in C. Diab's hands." --The Wire
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 007LP
|
Matt Emery's music is described by The 405 as "ebbing from soft whispers to an ocean of sound that would calm even the roughest of seas." Their words are apt. Though learned and erudite, Empire, a record that echoes the grandeur and myriad complexities of Greek mythology, is experienced less in musicality but in mood. From the swooping strings of the album's title track to the fluttering piano of "Effervescent", to the intensity of "Orpheus", it is evident that Emery has a heavy heart. There is melancholia, jubilation, tension, beauty, dark ambience, all deftly navigated within its various movements. Emery's profile as a composer has benefited from several placements across cinema and television, accumulating an incredible 30 million views on YouTube for his GoPro online ads. His music was used for the trailer of Anton Chekhov's Seagull play (1895) at Regents Park Open Air Theatre in June and July of 2015. Other placements include trailers for the British Academy's Literature Week in 2015 and 1883 Magazine's "Life Less Ordinary" -- a behind the scenes photo shoot amongst many others. And despite Empire being his debut album, previous self-released singles have received radio play across many of the BBC's music stations, KEXP, and Amazing Radio.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 006LP
|
LTO is a member of mysterious electronic collective Old Apparatus. Their music -- anonymous, dark, ghostly, subterranean -- was reminiscent of garage and grime scenes, but sheened with a nocturnal miasma and a fierce intellect. Acclaim for Old Apparatus is widespread, with very positive reviews coming from The Wire, Dummy Mag, The Quietus, Gilles Peterson, among plenty more. Storybook combines gentle, dulcet synthesis with deep percussive lines, piano dexterity, and alien-landscape sound-design, softly echoing in-and-out of the space, like Katie Gately remixed into Brian Eno's ambient records, or the poise of Max Richter filtered through Chris Clark's production lens. It has fluidity and elasticity, a human-ness that enwraps the mechanical parts. A highly accomplished pianist (indeed, a piano teacher in his civilian life), LTO's astute musicality is the foundation stone beneath the magic and abstractions of Storybook. 180 gram vinyl.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 005LP
|
Adrift is the beautiful debut album from UK composer-pianist Steve Gibbs. Acting loosely as a reissue of Gibbs's hugely popular Bandcamp release of a similar collection of pieces (2014), this expanded, re-mastered, heavyweight vinyl edition paints a clear picture of a composer mastering his form. That Gibbs's music has already been used in various film, TV, and dance productions, is testament to its immensely evocative qualities. Gibbs has clocked over one million plays on his SoundCloud page and has been recommended on social media by Ólafur Arnalds, Lowercase Noises, and Fabrizio Paterlini. Passages of soft microsound comparable to Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto's duet albums or Mika Vainio merging with lusher cinema-scapes akin to Clint Mansell and Max Richter. His instrumentation -- piano, strings, gentle electronics, occasional guitars -- is used with a similar sense of vision as Goldmund, Ólafur Arnalds, Dustin O'Halloran, Stars Of The Lid, and the piano solos of Arvo Pärt. 180 gram vinyl. "What just happened!? Emotion and ambience at its best, its very best... I'm overwhelmed... A masterpiece." --Echoes & Dust
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 004LP
|
The second physical release for the newly-launched Injazero Records is the solo LP from Kyiv, Ukraine-based sound designer, Heinali, aka Oleg Shpudeiko. Crushing waves of distortion reminiscent of Ben Frost or Oneohtrix Point Never surround radiant sound-design in the mold of Jon Hopkins or Andy Stott. Pulsing, fluttering synth-worlds, like those of Emeralds or Popol Vuh, orbit through a galaxy of texture not unlike Clint Mansell's Moon score (2009). Heinali recently constructed the acclaimed soundtrack to PlayStation's 2016 videogame Bound. Much of his commercial and commissioned work for film, television, and dance (dating back to 2009) evokes the string-orientated subtlety and tenderness of Ludovico Einaudi, Max Richter or film score great Hans Zimmer. "A truly complete work, a story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and like all good stories, it leaves you with a sense of joy, the joy of knowing you have just experienced something unique and beautiful." --A Closer Listen "Achingly, longingly beautiful." --Terrorizer "Its brilliance lies in its authority to get inside your heart and suspend you in awe." --Sea of Tranquility. Comes on 180 gram, red vinyl.
|
|
|
Artist |
Title |
Format |
Label |
Catalog # |
|
|
LP
|
|
INJA 003LP
|
No Perfect Wave is the proper debut album from Vancouver's C. Diab. A meditative sound exploration for bowed guitar, trumpet and subtle tape manipulations that brings to mind Colin Stetson, Tim Hecker, Arthur Russell and Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack (1966) in equal measure. No Perfect Wave hits a strange and beautiful intersection between left-field ambient music, film score, post-classical solo cello, American folk music and post-rock. First physical release for the newly-launched Injazero Records, run by two ex-FatCat staffers. 180 gram vinyl. "There's a melancholic, broken beauty in C. Diab's music... think Godspeed You! Black Emperor at their least bleak." -- Vancouver Weekly.
|
|
|
|