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LP
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OF 004LP
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$29.50
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 4/4/2025
Chris Ryan Williams (trumpet and electronics) and Lester St. Louis (cello and electronics) work together as HxH (H by H). Their skills have seen them move smoothly across various situations, constantly carving out new terrain and working in new configurations of musicians at a rapid pace. While worth reading, their biographies capture only a part of their complex rhizome. The project is a direct response to all their activity with others and more importantly all their future leaning sonic desires. Their debut album Stark Phenomena is both their first studio recording and their first physical release. The album released by KMRU on his growing label OFNOT. It's an ideal introduction to their sound world and their approach. HxH describe their music as "electroacoustic," but until recently the presence of Black musicians in this field has been greatly overlooked and largely ignored, making this phrase only partially appropriate. What HxH do really is to always be unpredictable. Chris and Lester bring together techniques from across the sound spectrum of electronic music and also draw on their deep backgrounds in jazz, improvisation, classical and noise scenes to create a sound that is true to them. After all, these two have worked with the likes of Bennie Maupin and the music of Black Fluxus artist Ben Patterson. Their rhizome is deep. One of the ways that their unique approach manifests is in their merging of both acoustic instruments and electronic instruments in real time. This is something few have managed to do -- but their spontaneous leanings work in both complex and accessible ways because of their deep understanding of landscape crafting. Their approach makes it tempting to compare their music to Sun Ra jamming with Laurel Halo -- a comparison that would be only partly accurate. KMRU notes: "I think there is an in-between layer on this record. I was first caught by the 'Pyrex Vision' track which organically flows between monologue, subtle field recording, and instrumentation. It's such a beautiful track, evoking deep emotion through simplicity. Stark Phenomena effortlessly glides in between imaginative mosaics of sounds -- free yet complex -- unlocking memories within its layers."
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2LP
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OF 003LP
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"When KMRU accessed the sound archive of the Royal Museum of Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, it catalyzed an auditory response in the form of the album Temporary Stored. The album listened back to listen forward -- to reckon with the collective inheritance of colonial (sound) archives. Temporary Stored II serves as an artistic and curatorial extension of the original album, inviting other artists to lend their critical ear to museum archives holding recordings of African songs, traditions and practices. With KMRU, Aho Ssan, Lamin Fofana, Nyokabi Kariuki, and Jessica Ekomane draw upon their listening experiences as global contemporaries navigating a world in flux -- ecologically, economically, and politically. Each artist brings a selection of sonic fragments out of dormancy, channeling (in)audible traces into a contemporary cultural and political paradigm. Temporary Stored II sensitively responds to historical archives whose sounds have been restored and made more accessible through digitalization, despite still being the copyrighted property of European institutions. It develops an emergent language to engage with the vocal, rhythmic and syllabic intelligence rooted in these sonic repertoires, grounded in reimagination of sonic records as seeds for a sounding future. Listening back to these recordings is one way to recover the loss of listening traditions, orality and modes of transmission. In these sonic mediations, Lamin Fofana, KMRU, Jessica Ekomane, Nyokabi Kariuki, and Aho Ssan account for the archives with care and criticality. Inscribed in this album are 'black waveforms as rebellious enthusiasms,' which in the words of Katherine McKittrick 'affirm, through cognitive schemas, modes of being human that refuse antiblackness while restructuring our existing system of knowledge.' The album asks us to listen to colonial pasts and imagine the sound of our epistemological futures. It is a sonic retort; a playback to history and its colonial processes of extraction and accumulation. Temporary Stored II is a reminder that the labor of listening back is a continuous process of reassessing what has been lost, captured and refused." --Bhavisha Panchia
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LP
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OF 002LP
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Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is Blake's far-reaching canvas on No Sound In Space, a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rather than find himself snared in its traditional aesthetic constraints. Transforming its characteristics with effects and subtle processes, he layers sustained tones and intimate improvisations, creating richly visual polychromatic utopias teeming with unknown life. Since 2011, Blake has been most known for being the guitarist and a music director for Lana Del Rey, notching up three songwriting credits on her acclaimed Ultraviolence full length. He sees his solo work is a form of escapism, a place where he can experiment and find comfort and catharsis outside of expectations and formal structure. The album was written instinctively, and Blake made sure he didn't force anything, letting go and getting out of his own way, listening intently as sounds and textures materialized organically. His collaboration with Kenyan sound artist KMRU, who runs the OFNOT label and contributes to two of the tracks on the album, occurred similarly organically. Blake was moved to reach out to KMRU when he caught a performance of Natur at Los Angeles' Zebulon in 2022, leading to a prolonged back-and-forth. This is the first release on OFNOT that's not by KMRU himself; the label emerged last year with the release of KMRU's own Dissolution Grip, and Blake's debut immediately expands its sonic universe. Alongside the playlists, Blake also provided KMRU with the tracks' raw stems, which KMRU began to edit and expand in his Berlin studio. Blake is constantly searching, and fills his unoccupied space with warmth, perception and sensitivity.
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LP
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OF 002X-LP
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Red color vinyl version. Blake Lee has always been fascinated by the unknown, and space, in its isolating, mysterious vastness, embodies this theme immaculately. The open void, captured so memorably by Stanley Kubrick in 2001: A Space Odyssey, is Blake's far-reaching canvas on No Sound In Space, a cinematic meditation on the cosmos that's painted in nuanced, emotionally sincere colors. The Los Angeles-based composer has been contemplating his full-length debut since 2021, using his guitar as a sonic paintbrush rather than find himself snared in its traditional aesthetic constraints. Transforming its characteristics with effects and subtle processes, he layers sustained tones and intimate improvisations, creating richly visual polychromatic utopias teeming with unknown life. Since 2011, Blake has been most known for being the guitarist and a music director for Lana Del Rey, notching up three songwriting credits on her acclaimed Ultraviolence full length. He sees his solo work is a form of escapism, a place where he can experiment and find comfort and catharsis outside of expectations and formal structure. The album was written instinctively, and Blake made sure he didn't force anything, letting go and getting out of his own way, listening intently as sounds and textures materialized organically. His collaboration with Kenyan sound artist KMRU, who runs the OFNOT label and contributes to two of the tracks on the album, occurred similarly organically. Blake was moved to reach out to KMRU when he caught a performance of Natur at Los Angeles' Zebulon in 2022, leading to a prolonged back-and-forth. This is the first release on OFNOT that's not by KMRU himself; the label emerged last year with the release of KMRU's own Dissolution Grip, and Blake's debut immediately expands its sonic universe. Alongside the playlists, Blake also provided KMRU with the tracks' raw stems, which KMRU began to edit and expand in his Berlin studio. Blake is constantly searching, and fills his unoccupied space with warmth, perception and sensitivity.
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LP
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RU 001LP
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The inaugural release on KMRU's own fledgling OFNOT imprint, Dissolution Grip is an ambitious project that emerged from his studies at Berlin's prestigious UDK. Guided by Jasmine Guffond at Berlin's Universität der Künste (better known as UDK), KMRU looked at waveforms -- the visual representation of sound itself -- and embarked on a process where he would write scores from the shapes, gradually turning the scores into raw synth sounds. Each sound is birthed from one of KMRU's field recordings, but none of those recordings are audible in their original form. The album's opening side "Till Hurricane Bisect" is a 15-minute epic that evolves at its own glacial pace, carefully transforming blustering wind sounds into gasping drones, glassy oscillations and choked distortion. Cosmic and meditative, it's a testament to KMRU's skill as a sound engineer and patience as a composer, combining the gentle world building of his acclaimed Editions Mego album Peel (EMEGO 289CD/LP, 2020) with the rumbling energy of Limen, last year's collaboration with Aho Ssan. On the title track, KMRU takes the opportunity to flex his orchestral muscle, conducting a cast of warbling synth tones into a durational symphony. Starting as quietly as a whisper, Dissolution Grip expands at its own pace until it's a dense wall of harmony, powerful but never completely overwhelming. It is music embedded with a rich sense of place that informs us of KMRU's past and present, and signals where his musical philosophy might take us in the future.
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