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viewing 1 To 12 of 12 items
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LY 006LP
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An album of hypnagogic nocturnes that relentlessly searches for a sense of calm in the great unknown, Is Peace Wild? is German producer, drummer and visual artist Ludwig Wandinger's long-awaited debut solo full-length. He dreamt it up while unpacking the breakdown of a long relationship, working in hotel rooms during the downtime between a series of chaotic live shows. To help empty his mind, Wandinger developed a suite of soulful reflections that prioritize harmony over rhythm and clarity over trivial complexity -- music that confronts the eternal duality of romance and tragedy. Almost beatless and consistently sublime, Is Peace Wild? is punctuated by hypnotic lyrical contributions from multidisciplinary artist, poet and activist Yves B. Golden and producer and vocalist Evita Manji, both of whom bless the album with indispensable friendship and familiarity. With a series of albums and EPs under his belt already, Wandinger is a tireless solo artist and a prolific collaborator. Is Peace Wild?, though, emerges as Wandinger's most personal work to date. The title track opens the album, and Golden's voice breathes softly over Wandinger's warm, lulling arpeggios. This airiness doesn't last long: on the noisy, sombre "Vien," Wandinger interrupts his elegiac, organ-like synths with metallic crashes and distorted, rasping bass, weaving twinkling, pensive notes into the spaces in-between. The oscillation between darkness and light is remarkably even-handed, capturing the aching sense of longing -- or "Sehnsucht" -- that's at the core of German Romanticism. And it's even more evident on "Xhausted Form," one of the album's heaviest tracks. The album's illusory qualities are fully dilated on "Fire." Manji's hypnotic freestyle was recorded in a single take as they were lying in bed on the verge of falling asleep, and provides a quiescent counterpoint to Wandinger's muted trance vibrations. "The world is on fire drowning in its own fluids," they slur into the abyss, vocalizing playfully while Wandinger freezes the sentiment in vanishing 4/4 thuds and dissociated processes. This makes the baroque "Overlife" and the noisy "Eternal Image" all the more dynamic. On the latter, Wandinger creates a noisy, apocalyptic atmosphere for Golden's sardonic words, cooling his euphoric synths with hissing white noise and burnished cybernetic textures. Open-ended and tangled with emotional paradoxes, Is Peace Wild? can be interpreted in many different ways. For fans of: Aphex Twin, Kali Malone, Sarah Davachi, Kara-lis Coverdale, Tim Hecker, Sigur Ros, Laurel Halo.
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LY 005LP
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In the serene expanse of empty spaces, there exists a profound stillness that attracts contemplation. These voids, whether they manifest physically or within the recesses of minds, are spaces for the interplay of light and thought, where time perception is different, allowing for a deeper connection with the inner self. These are moments frozen in the endless flow of existence, a tranquil pause that invites listeners to reflect and to contemplate. The emptiness that permeates this mental space is a canvas upon which ideas are painted. The emptiness that pervades this cerebral realm becomes a blank canvas upon which ideas are woven into existence. Grand River and Abul Mogard's In uno spazio immenso, (translating to "in an immense space,") embodies the essence of this boundless expanse -- a limitless and eternal chamber where the boundaries of thought expand endlessly. For fans of: Caterina Barbieri, Alessandro Cortini, Perila, Sarah Davachi, Kara-Lis Coverdale, Raime, Drew McDowall.
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LY 004LP
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If there's one specific component that grounds Sky Flesh, it's focus. Italian musician and sound designer Marta De Pascalis flexed her technical muscle on 2020's Sonus Ruinae, layering various sounds and processes in an attempt to touch the sublime. In contrast, Sky Flesh is a single thought, composed using just one instrument: the Yamaha CS-60. A slimmed-down sibling to the gargantuan CS-80 -- the analog synthesizer used by Vangelis to create his iconic Blade Runner score -- the CS-60 was released in 1977, a few years before the MIDI protocol was introduced to help standardize production methods. MIDI would change the electronic music landscape completely, offering a level of control that De Pascalis consciously relinquishes, preferring to highlight expressiveness and timbre, elements more readily associated with acoustic instruments. The album arrives as much of the wider experimental scene busies itself with algorithmic composition and AI-assisted modeling; De Pascalis chooses to work instead like an organologist, harnessing the CS-60's mercurial magic to suggest deeper truths about our evolving relationship with machines. Using timbres that recall a time when electronic music still waved towards the future, De Pascalis' melodic content is rooted in early and Renaissance music, almost cleaving it from history entirely. Fittingly, Sky Flesh is released on acclaimed Italian composer Caterina Barbieri's burgeoning Light-Years label, the ideal platform for her labyrinthine, cosmic vignettes.
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LY 003CD
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Caterina Barbieri is set to release Myuthafoo, the sister album of 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation. Written at the same time, both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory, and emotion. And since she was set to re-release Ecstatic Computation on her light-years imprint (LY 002CD/LP/C-LP), it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. Barbieri had been touring excessively at the time, and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programmed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it aside, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the universe's origins; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From "Math of You", it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy, blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like "Fantas" before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is most generous and tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery Möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic and established physics. Meanwhile, "Sufyosowirl" is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. The closing track "Swirls of You" encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds like it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it can develop its own rules and gestures. Myuthafoo teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and the past, present, and future are part of the same essential narrative.
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LY 003LP
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LP version. Black vinyl. Caterina Barbieri is set to release Myuthafoo, the sister album of 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation. Written at the same time, both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory, and emotion. And since she was set to re-release Ecstatic Computation on her light-years imprint (LY 002CD/LP/C-LP), it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. Barbieri had been touring excessively at the time, and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programmed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it aside, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the universe's origins; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From "Math of You", it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy, blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like "Fantas" before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is most generous and tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery Möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic and established physics. Meanwhile, "Sufyosowirl" is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. The closing track "Swirls of You" encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds like it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it can develop its own rules and gestures. Myuthafoo teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and the past, present, and future are part of the same essential narrative.
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LY 003C-LP
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LP version. Red vinyl. Caterina Barbieri is set to release Myuthafoo, the sister album of 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation. Written at the same time, both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory, and emotion. And since she was set to re-release Ecstatic Computation on her light-years imprint (LY 002CD/LP/C-LP), it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. Barbieri had been touring excessively at the time, and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programmed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show. If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it aside, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the universe's origins; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From "Math of You", it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy, blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like "Fantas" before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave. The album's title track is most generous and tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery Möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic and established physics. Meanwhile, "Sufyosowirl" is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. The closing track "Swirls of You" encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds like it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it can develop its own rules and gestures. Myuthafoo teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and the past, present, and future are part of the same essential narrative.
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LY 002LP
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LP version. Black vinyl. Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri's career-defining album Ecstatic Computation, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years. The reissue features a beautifully reworked version of the original cover art. Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artifacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged. Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand. CD version includes a previously unreleased song. LP versions available on black vinyl (LY 002LP) and silver vinyl (LY 002C-LP). "Caterina Barbieri uses music to bend time and space around her. It's a warp-speed jump where everything seems to move slower and faster all at once." --Pitchfork
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LP
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LY 002C-LP
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LP version. Silver vinyl. Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri's career-defining album Ecstatic Computation, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years. The reissue features a beautifully reworked version of the original cover art. Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artifacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged. Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand. CD version includes a previously unreleased song. LP versions available on black vinyl (LY 002LP) and silver vinyl (LY 002C-LP). "Caterina Barbieri uses music to bend time and space around her. It's a warp-speed jump where everything seems to move slower and faster all at once." --Pitchfork
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CD
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LY 002CD
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Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri's career-defining album Ecstatic Computation, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years. The reissue features a beautifully reworked version of the original cover art. Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object-oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism. Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artifacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged. Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand. CD version includes a previously unreleased song. "Caterina Barbieri uses music to bend time and space around her. It's a warp-speed jump where everything seems to move slower and faster all at once." --Pitchfork
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LY 001CD
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The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".
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2LP
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LY 001LP
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Double-LP version. The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".
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2LP
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LY 001C-LP
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Double-LP version. Silver vinyl. The musical vortexes of Caterina Barbieri rewire time and space. Listening to the Italian composer and modular synth virtuoso has felt like traveling at light-speed and slow-motion all at once since 2017's breakthrough Patterns Of Consciousness. 2019's acclaimed Ecstatic Computation pushed even further with the lead single "Fantas". Far beyond any new age trope or modern synth trend, her music stands alone in its ecstatic intensity and cataclysmic emotional impact. Marking the debut album on her new label light-years, Barbieri now delivers her most profound work yet -- a journey through inner-space as vast as a universe and as intimate as a heartbeat. Spirit Exit is Caterina Barbieri's time machine, primarily composed with a modular synth rig she thinks of more like a mechanical fortune teller. Whereas previous releases were constructed on lengthy tours, capturing only snapshots of continually evolving works, Spirit Exit represents the producer's first album fully written and recorded in her home studio amidst Milan's two-month pandemic lockdown in 2020. It was during this extended isolation she found inspiration from female philosophers, mystics and poets spread across time, but united in their strength at cultivating vast internal worlds. St. Teresa D'Avila's foundational 16th century mystical text The Interior Castle, philosopher Rosi Braidotti's posthuman theories and the metaphysical poetry of Emily Dickinson act as thematic anchors throughout Spirit Exit. Spirit Exit crystallizes Barbieri's densely layered, blindingly bright synth arrangements while introducing stunning new elements that feel as if they've always belonged. Strings and guitar flawlessly thread into the composer's web of modular patches, while her revelatory singing voice often cuts right through them. Melodies remain Barbieri's great passion and obsession and on Spirit Exit they grow as large as planets before cracking into atoms. The sweeping "At Your Gamut" perfects the producer's dramatic, slow-burning openers, but in her first ever use of sampling, it later gets crushed, accelerated and unrecognizably transformed into the ghostly hook surging through "Terminal Clock". As the album closes on "The Landscape Listens" -- a song that approaches death with all the gentle grace of Brian Eno's "An Ending (Ascent)".
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