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viewing 1 To 5 of 5 items
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12"
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KNV 006EP
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At its core, Organn is a record about love and duality. Taking inspiration from Isidore-Lucien Ducasse's poem "Les Chants de Maldoror" (1869), the record is antagonistic yet often drops its temper to reveal blistered beauty within the chaos. Such are the contradictory elements within the compositions themselves: widescreen claustrophobia; glimmering sludge; piercing VHS ambience. Visuals come courtesy of French mixed-media artist, Thomas Hauser. Hauser's imagery similarly evokes retro-grade surrealism and further insists on a narrative at work here, with obscured characters playing out alongside mantric piano, filmic Vox, and hyperspeed jungle.
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12"
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KNV 005EP
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Moving forward from 2016's well-received debut EP Becoming (N)one on Glacial Industries, v1984 releases his debut for Knives, the label founded by Jamie Teasdale (Kuedo) and Joe Shakespeare. v1984, aka Christopher Ramos, is of Korean/Filipino descent, and the title Pansori reflects his Korean heritage. It has the dual translation of a "gathering place for sound" and it specifically refers to traditional storytelling, which in turn is a neat description of the EP. Even when the music approaches noise its detailed and elegant rather than bludgeoning. Artwork by Berlin-based artist Maren Karlson.
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LP
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KNV 003LP
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Foxconn/Trios is a previously unreleased work originally recorded by d'Eon in 2012 during d'Eon's involvement with the Hippos in Tanks label. The first eight (of nine) tracks roll, stab, and skip through d'Eon's arsenal of sounds, presenting a more singular vision than d'Eon's previous releases. Their nearest contemporaries can be found in the studies of Mark Fell, post-Oversteps Autechre, late-period Oneohtrix Point Never, and the work of Lorenzo Senni. In d'Eon's words, the tracks "freely and irregularly travel both forward and backward in MIDI-time. By putting together small arrangements using low sample-rate soundfonts in a tracker, and by writing short loops that are legible both forwards and backwards, the MIDI information can be traversed in any arbitrary direction at any arbitrary intervals and still be harmonically and contrapuntally sound. Ordinary rhythmic patterns are inherently legible regardless of the firing order of events because of a snare's inherent role as the up beat and a kick's as the down beat. If all notes in a phrase and all chords in a progression work equally well with their neighbours before them and their neighbour after, the direction of the clock is irrelevant. If those conditions are met, a 32-bar, two- three- or four-chord pattern with a single melody is easily made into a fully through-composed piece of music that could continue for hours without any pattern repetition at all." The many facets of the sound begin to unfold at the end, when the ninth and final track, "Foxconn II," leaves the album's dominant technique behind and rewrites the material into an instrumental R&B track. Though d'Eon uses the same method throughout the first eight tracks, the simultaneous occurrence of complex harmonic progressions produces a plethora of moods and reveals d'Eon's ability to combine the radically novel and original with the familiar and more tangible. d'Eon cinematically takes elements from the past and, with an elegant violence, rapidly animates them into the future, shaping the path toward what's to come. This is the third release on Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare's Knives label. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Artwork by Tobias Madison.
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12"
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KNV 002EP
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Electronic music pioneer Jamie Teasdale, best known as Kuedo, makes a timely and luminous return with the sci-fi-designed Assertion of a Surrounding Presence, his first solo release proper since 2012, and the second issue on his fledgling Knives label after J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies (KNV 001LP, 2015). In 2015, a decade on from the groundbreaking sound engineering and designs of Teasdale's pivotal role in Vex'd, and five years since he emerged solo as Kuedo, his celebrated production style remains anterior to modern dance music and electronica, largely by virtue of unbending futurist focus and careful attention to detail. Here flanked by collaborations with erstwhile Vex'd partner Roly Porter plus Berlin's Phoebe Kiddo aka Mind:Body:Fitness and Canada's Egyptrixx, the next chapter in Kuedo's odyssey expands his sci-fi dimensions with ever-sharper contouring, gradients, and hyperreal specialization structured around recalibrated footwork, drill, and techno engines. Scaling from the vertigo-inducing opener to a finale of panicked gamelan drama, Assertion of a Surrounding Presence renders Kuedo's most affective, elaborate reflection of a nowness, divining a metaphysical, cybernetic zeitgeist in the vaulted reverb structures of his Ghost in the Shell nod "Eyeless Angel Intervention" or the trance fluid T-2000 tekstep momentum of "Boundary Regulation," while pursuing more tangled emotions and ethereal sensations in the recursive, hyaline gamelan cadence of "Border State Collapse" and "Event Tracking Across Populated Terrain." This follows right thru to the artwork by Melbourne, Australia-based Joshua Petherwick, who perfectly connotes the album's aesthetic and concept with a nod to sci writer Anthony Burgess's fictional conceit of Nadsat -- a cryptic systemization of order in a dystopian environment -- in his abstract yet acutely evocative geometries. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Artwork by Joshua Petherwick. RIYL Kenji Kawai, late '90s tech-step, Chicago footwork, and drill.
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LP
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KNV 001LP
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Kuedo and Joe Shakespeare's hugely promising Knives label debuts with the hyper-lucid constructs of J.G. Biberkopf's Ecologies, housed in suitably striking artwork by Joe Hamilton. Hailing from Lithuania, Jacques Gaspard Biberkopf has hatched a dramatic and immersive aesthetic, drawing upon cutting-edge instrumental grime, net phenomenology, and cyber-ambient sound design to patch collaged spheres working across club, theater, and digital radio contexts. As with the output of contemporary artists like T C F or Elysia Crampton, thru to his networked peers such as v1984 and Sentinl, J.G.B.'s music describes imagined topographies, scenarios, and environments in hyperreal detail -- emulating and accelerating the natural world in complex, crystalline bursts of code; a field trip into the representations of nature that emerge from the digital-social media scape. In six succinct pieces, he traverses a sci-fi soundtrack's worth of ideas and atmospheres between the perilous entrance of "Air. Coltan. Carbon. Lithium" and the deliquescent, hyaline geometries of closing peak "Weakness," with its poignant mantra, "every day, every night." Between those coordinates, he renders a world of sheer 3D gradients and dynamics, scaling the weightless, Ballardian grime chicanery of "Spirit" and impeccably timed lacunae of "Waters" before the narrative plunges vertically into the corrupted sim-stim proprioception of "Black Soil" and follows the gyroscopic slowfast tekno rollcage vectors of "Age of Aquarius." Accompanied by the hyper-natural sleeve art of Australia's Joe Hamilton, Ecologies is a very necessary look for anyone in pursuit of vivid, synthetic, and cinematic sensation from modern music. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton; limited pressing.
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