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viewing 1 To 16 of 16 items
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SODA 016LP
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Following releases on Sähkö Recordings and The Trilogy Tapes, Fever of the World is the Soda Gong debut by Memotone, the nom de plume of UK-based multi-instrumentalist Will Yates. As a collection, it is both intimate and expansive, like the feeling of gathering one's thoughts before setting off on a long journey or committing to an irrevocable course of action. Throughout, Yates' talents as both player and sound designer are on full display, as are the sonic signatures that have come to characterize the Memotone catalog: low-lit, ECM-inflected noir; evasive and evolving loop-based accretions; and mellifluous mosaics of keys, guitar, reeds, and percussion. It is patient and focused music, built around production techniques and compositional ideas that have been perfected both in studio and in live performance over a period of several years. "Catherine, On Fire" sets the scene, one of two languid, longform selections, and develops slowly from a spare, harmonic-laden guitar loop into a bed of rippling textural ambience and woozy clarinet filigree. Later, "The Bus" and "When the Bakery Has What You Want and It's Cheap" conjure images of rain-streaked windows, fanciful baked confections, and grey skies broken finally by sunlight. Warm, generous, and comfortable in its own skin, this is music that reminds listeners that when it feels easy to resign themselves to world weariness, they should pause for a moment and listen to the rustle of the leaves. The wind knows not to linger.
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SODA 015LP
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Trash Can Lamb is a new solo album from Akron, OH-based multi-instrumentalist Keith Freund. For the better part of twenty years, Freund has been producing intimate, shape-shifting music on his own and as part of collaborative projects such as Trouble Books, Lemon Quartet, and Aqueduct Ensemble. Here, he concocts a heady, homespun broth of analog synthesis, bit-reduced sampling, piano, standup bass, saxophone, and location recordings, arriving at a loose and evocative set of songs. Throughout the album, listeners hear eight-bit experimental delays mangling airy acoustic materials, denaturalizing them into primitive loop structures while retaining their golden-hued, melodic cores. The sputters, hisses, and croaks of handmade electronics nuzzle up to wistful piano and saxophone ruminations; the pure pandemonium of chaotic triangle wave patching and filtered noise settles into the serenity of a backyard dusk full of spring peepers. It's in the space between the ragtag and rough-hewn and the romantic and yearning that Freund situates these compositions; it's a peek inside a workshop that sits atop the trees, branches scraping on the windows, bluejays who just won't knock it off, a table fan spinning slower and slower, its cheap blades covered in dust. All music by Keith Freund, with contributions by Linda Lejsovka, G.S. Schray, Steve Clements, and Corey Farrow. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M. Art/design by Alex McCullough and Felix Luke.
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SODA 014LP
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Iggy goes West! Soda Gong welcomes back Kansas City-based musician Iggy Romeu with his latest collection as Mister Water Wet. Cold Clay from the Middle West is a (characteristically) sharp left turn from his last two records, with Romeu offering up a surprising and addictive mélange of crackpot Americana and smoky noir beat science. "Cold Clay Suite" opens the record, a five-part ride into the sunset that features Cooder-esque guitars, cat-gut fiddle, horse-hoof percussion, stadium organs, penny whistle, and bleary-eyed polysynth ruminations, among sundry other ephemera. Multi-instrumentalist Will Yates, known to most as Memotone, shows up three times on the album, lending clarinet, keys, guitars, banjo, sarangi, and vibraphone to these kaleidoscopic productions. It's a wild ride of a record akin to following a dotted bridleway on a crumpled old map, marvelously variegated and stitched together as only MWW knows how. Get along, now.
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SODA 013LP
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Atte Elias Kantonen is a composer and sound designer based in Helsinki, Finland. a path with a name follows well-received releases on Mappa and Active Listeners Club, and finds Kantonen expanding the scope of his dynamic and idiosyncratic practice. Here, he places his listeners within an auditive diorama, affording them myriad views of the microscopic landscapes contained there within. An oneiric narrative is established from the opening track, in which a heavily treated voice proposes a dialogue and introduces us to the wonders of the soundscape. This speaker appears at various points throughout the record, functioning as guide, confidant, and friend. Those familiar with Kantonen's prior output will immediately recognize the shapeshifting, 3D timbral constructions presented here, arrangements that are positively overflowing with glimmering, delicate, polyphonic detail. This is a record that invites and welcomes speculation about the nature of the quest that it sets its listeners out upon, with Kantonen offering up trail markings to provide (dis)orientation before turning them loose to explore the soil, moss, and tide pools.
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SODA 012LP
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Actoma is the new full-length record by New York-based musician James Emrick. Emrick may be best known for his work with Kinet Media, handling sound design and scoring for a number of their projects. He utilizes an array of granular and feedback processes within Max/MSP environments to arrive at an idiosyncratic form of computer music that feels willfully opposed to operating within the sediments of the genre. Techniques such as real-time granulation of samples, Shepard tones, grain diffusion, and complex windowing allow Emrick to dramatize his source material in fascinating ways, and each moment of Actoma teems with widescreen textural allure. Perhaps Emrick's greatest accomplishment is creating a music that remains rigorously committed to severe levels of abstraction while avoiding sterility and coldness entirely. It is a strange and otherworldly landscape indeed, but there is a consciousness there to perceive and record it. Die-cut sleeve, gloss laminate finish; 45rpm; includes download code; edition of 300.
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SODA 011LP
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Following releases on West Mineral and Lillerne Tapes, Iggy Romeu's inimitable Mister Water Wet project makes its Soda Gong debut. Top Natural Drum feels like a double entendre ode to digging culture, drawing equally from the plant life in the dirt and the grooves in the stacks. Tracks like opener "Soak" concoct a haze of resonant ceramic/wooden percs, skittering drum programming, and addictive yet diffuse melodic and harmonic textures. Dusty-fingered nodders like "Caged at Last", "Classicfit," and "Gossamer Hits Softly Spun" harken back to the glory days of instrumental hip-hop and downtempo, sounding a bit like transmissions from some lost Landspeed Records or Mo' Wax comp, or like field recordings from the courtyard at Scribble Jam that have been infused with the slippery sonic signatures and sleights of hand that define MWW productions. What links these two distinctive tonal registers is a sort of lingering warmth -- warmth like the saturation of natural dye or sunlight on a brisk, clear Midwestern autumn day. Written and produced by Iggy Romeu. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Felix Luke and Alex McCullough. Die-cut sleeve; gloss laminate finish; includes download code; edition of 500.
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SODA 010LP
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Australia-based musician Mark Gomes presents the debut full-length under his own name for Soda Gong. Alphane Moods finds Gomes employing strategies that will be familiar to listeners of his work as Blue Chemise -- elegiac, loop-based modes of composition and a predilection for concise etude forms -- that manifest here with a strikingly different scope and intent, shifting from expressive abstraction into more conceptual terrain. Over the course of fourteen widescreen tracks, he navigates the gap between nostalgic and futurist sensibilities, concocting elusive, romantic, and sanguine settings that feel both plucked from the past and beamed in from a time still to come. Gomes describes his approach on the record as a "practice of 'constructed ambience', deploying sounds and track titles with pop-psychological associations of escape." The result is a vivid, cinematic album that splits the difference between the worldbuilding retrofuturism of the best vaporwave music and the shadowy, homespun tape vignettes for which Gomes has become well known. Written and produced by Mark Gomes. Master and cut by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Alex McCullough. Includes download code; edition of 500.
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SODA 009LP
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New solo album by Eric Lanham (aka Carl Calm) of the Caboladies. Over the past fifteen years, Florida-based multi-instrumentalist Eric Lanham has quietly generated a diverse and remarkable body of work both as a solo artist and in group settings. From the disorienting drone/collage ecstasies of Caboladies, his trio with Christopher Bush (Flanger Magazine) and Ben Zoeller, to wildly divergent solo flights under both his own name and as Carl Calm, Lanham's carefully meted out recordings display the talents of a chameleonic composer who is as capable a sound designer as he is unconcerned with trend in experimental electronic music or notions of prolific-ness. Objet Dirt arrives ten years after The Sincere Interruption (SP 021LP,2012), his excellent long-player for Spectrum Spools imprint. Captured live, these compositions are brimming with kinetic, elastic, off-grid rhythms, an articulate and enigmatic language that restlessly darts around the stereo field. Of the collection, Lanham says "I haven't made a single piece of music that sounds like this since and it is hard to imagine doing so again." If this is the case, the 20+ minute closer is a formidable final document. At once chaotic and tightly controlled, it is a torrent of coiling low-end, submerged and stretched rhythms, and seething high-end filigree that is as indebted to the hungry ghosts of free improvisation as it is anything resembling techno. Includes download code; edition of 300.
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SODA 008LP
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Soda Gong presents Support Surfaces, the new record by Alexi Baris, a musician hailing from Vancouver, British Columbia. Baris's methods are patient and deceptively rigorous, trading in sonics that are at once organized and organic. Synthetic and acoustic elements are presented in sonorous states of perpetual flux, carefully amalgamated into structures of fertile ambiguity. His is a diligent and painterly approach to sound design and arrangement, in which tiny events are magnified and brought up close, and expansive gestures are repurposed and shifted in scale. There is an abiding quality to these compositions, sounds that have been hung in the air with remarkable restraint and left to float there, defined by texture, tone, and their own entrancing spatiality. All music by Alexi Baris. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork and design by Alex McCullough. Includes download code; edition of 300.
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SODA 007LP
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Motoko & Myers is the collaborative project of Bay Area-based duo Wonja Fairbrother and Daniel Letson. Colocate follows their 2018 debut release on the Open Hands Real Flames imprint (Bass Clef), further developing their distinctive style which combines melodic, pop song structures with live improvisation and odd or no-meter approaches to rhythm and timing. It is a collection of bright, addictive listening, full of tracks that manage to feel at once hooky and aleatory, naive and rigorously arranged. Recorded and assembled sporadically over a period of several years, the album's idiosyncratic palette was achieved through much technical and methodological eccentricity: "4-handed" collaborative keyboard playing; 12-bit sampling and archaic presets; field recordings of cicadas in Louisville, Kentucky and church bells in Freiburg im Breisgau. The album's nine tracks exude a homespun quality that is rare to find in contemporary electronic music -- hazy, warm, and disarmingly organic. Artwork with gloss laminate finish; includes download code; edition of 300.
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SODA 006LP
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Under their Exael moniker, Berlin-based producer Naemi makes highly imaginative music that can be seen as a study in contrasts -- precise, hyper-detailed drum programming sits atop fuzzy, organic pools of ambience, virtuosic futurism is wrung from a falling apart laptop. Following a string of excellent releases, both solo and in group settings, Flowered Knife Shadows features eight productions that feel like the full realization of the project, demonstrating the artist's range and knack for vivid, pressurized productions. From the dexterous, chops-flexing "Koch Metish" to the sanguine "Reality's Sweetheart", Naemi's clarity of vision and instantly recognizable aesthetic are delivered here with remarkable potency. Frost on the window, whispers in the dark. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork by Alex McCullough. Follows releases on Motion Ward, Experiences Ltd. and Huerco S.' West Mineral Ltd. Edition of 300; includes download code.
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SODA 005LP
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With Contemplative Figuration, Broshuda pushes his amorphous, impossible-to-pin-down music in exciting new directions. Stitched together in various European cities over the last few years, it is the artist's most dynamic and ambitious release thus far, drawing equally from musique concrete, beat research, ambient, tape collage, and spoken word. Episodic in nature, the collection functions well as a sort of impressionistic travelogue, with romantic, hazy atmospheres coaxed from borrowed equipment, serendipitous recording sessions with old friends, and even a drum sequence programmed with Mario Paint, among other curios and sleights of hand. Broshuda deftly wrings bonafide cohesion and balance from these disparate source materials, tools, and locations, as on opener "Kakigori," which allows a snaking harmonic drone the space to evolve before exploding it into a sort of seething, dubbed-out pointillism. Later, "Lied Fuer Hase" concocts a potent, humid atmosphere of beautifully evolving acoustic piano loops and elegant narration. Taken as a whole, Contemplative Figuration is a weightless, transportive record, one that is bursting at the seams with ideas, mischief, and a restless spirit. New album by Broshuda after releases on Haunter Records, Phinery Tapes, and Sonic Router. Features Elen Huynh, Mo Chan, and Manta. Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis. Mastered by Helmut Erler at Dubplates & Mastering. Includes download code.
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SODA 004LP
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A Typical Night in the Pit is a collection of new music by Los Angeles' Nick Malkin. It is an album that finds the artist absorbed in the density and chaos of the urban complex. It is unquestionably an "LA album", but not the LA of hi-fi listening bars and twinkling, Instagram-ready new age. Rather, Malkin navigates something more akin to the LA found in the films of Robert Altman or Alan Rudolph -- overheated, tense, hazy, frayed -- with blue-lit, nocturnal compositions that at times recall Mark Isham's noirish scores for those subversive (anti-)Hollywood pictures. Enlisting a revolving cast of LA experimentalists, Malkin has assembled a record that is as chameleonic as it is cohesive, offering up vignettes ranging from the skewed MIDI-jazz of "Sixth Street Conversation" to the skulking menace of "Estacionamiento Privado", before giving way to the wide-eyed, cloudy closer "View From Two Perspectives". C'mon, let's go in here and get outta this heat. Artwork by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis. Malkin released as Afterhours on Not Not Fun and is part of the LA Vampires. A Typical Night in the Pit follows Malkin's tape on Geographic North (2018). Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering. First edition of 300 copies; artwork with gloss laminate finish.
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SODA 003LP
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Soda Gong presents a razor sharp collection of rigorous and imaginative new music from Moscow-by-way-of-St.Petersburg-based musician and producer Flaty (Evgenii Fadeev, aka АЭМ Ритм-Каскад). Generic TARGZ places Flaty's precipitously complex drum programming and keen ear for atmosphere and space at the forefront, offering up a dynamic array of techno, ambient, generative footwork, and other tougher to pigeonhole rhythmic experiments. It is a dizzying and cohesive document in which ethereal productions, such as "Praaai" wherein a bewitching vocal pad hovers over delicate, pin-prick percussion, sit comfortably alongside tightly controlled chaos, as with the synapse-knotting "Thread" and heavy-hitting "Horn of Plenty". Over the past few years, Flaty has released a wealth of diverse and uniformly excellent music under monikers such as AEM Rhythm Cascade, Dada Ques, and Wrong Water. He is most closely associated with the influential GOST ZVUK label, but his work has also appeared on imprints such as 12th Isle, Muscut, and his own ANWO Records. Although Flaty serves as his primary alias, Generic TARGZ is only the artist's second full-length under the moniker, following 2016's New Suggestions, a high-water mark in the impeccable GOST ZVUK catalog. Flaty recently produced Kedr Livanskiy's album "Your Need (2MR 043CD/LP/LTD-LP). Mastered by Rashad Becker at Dubplates & Mastering. Artwork and design by Alex McCullough and Niall Wynne Lewis. First edition of 300; artwork with gloss laminate finish.
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SODA 002LP
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Kaspi & Stride is a new project from Justin Tripp, best known as one half of the Georgia equation. The second release on Alex Cobb's Soda Gong, sister label to Students of Decay, Leanings has its origins in rigorous yet laid back studio sessions, dual personal practice sensibilities that seem to get at Tripp's creative ethos as well as any descriptors might. The material here was born out of collaborative studio sessions with multi-instrumentalist Jimy Seitang (Conga Square/Stygian Stride) - the "Stride" of K&S. The music from these sessions has been reworked and recontextualized by Tripp to form the eight tracks found on the record. These compositions are heady and diverse, anchored by infectious drum patterns and intricate electronics, capably occupying a somewhat hard to define space between club-ready and home listening. "Vishing" throbs with a wide-eyed intensity, infused with the type of deceptively rudimentary synth stabs and bass swells that wouldn't be out of place on an early Hype Williams record. With contributions from Mary Lattimore and Jon Leland, "Kaptoxa" charts a more ethereal, if no less dizzying, course. Indeed, this is an album that navigates dense, tactile passages and airy, celestial planes with aplomb, making a case for Tripp's prowess as both composer and arranger with equal priority. The most important thing is to keep moving. Edition of 300, die-cut center hole on backside, includes download.
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SODA 001LP
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"Hui Terra. The dreamlike shape of the half-heard word, abstracts with faint impressions of bucolic landscape, or handfuls of translucent and brightly-colored gemstones that hold odd, elusive, asymmetrical form. This enchanting, gently surreal debut album from Alex Cobb's Etelin project explores the power and playfulness of impulsive action diffused through electro-acoustic and ambient sound. This music was created with digital synthesizers and a sampler in the four months immediately following the birth of his first child, a hazy period marked by a lack of regular sleep and a diet of INA-GRM, Nuno Canavarro's Plux Quba (1988), and Microstoria's Init Ding (1995) records that appeared to produce both stimulating and soothing effects on a newborn's nascent consciousness. Recorded and arranged at all hours, this is an album that reflects on moments of tumult and fragility. Cobb sews small sharpnesses and surprises into its movements to uncover different aspects of each sound source, doubling as hypnic starts cast to advance and vary the narrative in subtle and unexpected ways. Sound and atmosphere manifest in eccentric, alchemical fashion, as though forming in processes of sublimation -- solids dissipating into vapor -- and deposition -- clouds resolving and dropping to the ground in piles -- to an obscure and domestic rhythm. There's the purveying sense of moving within the boundaries of small, hermetic ecosystem. This is underscored and doused by a slow, blooming sense of warmth; growing joy without bombast. Even the more startling textures conceal this same truth and emphasis, such as the alien, sour salt-butter electronic babble in "Little Rig", largely sampled from Cobb's son's voice at just a week old. It is emotional music -- devoted, affectionate, and playful." --Matthew Kent, February 2018. Edition of 500, includes download.
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