Posh Isolation
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Finding People' is the newest recording from Croatian Amor, the morphing alias of Loke Rahbek.Visit product page →
With last year's Croatian Amor album, 'Love Means Taking Action,' we witnessed a transformation in the project, its wide-eyed gaze having stared deep into the news feed, reengineering its heartstrings. 'Finding People' takes this even further.An assembly of choral traces and transmissions, these four new tracks are the project's clearest move towards pop.
At the same time, this is perhaps the weirdest record yet from Croatian Amor, introducing a complexity that we have not previously seen. From the cut-up, granulated rhythm section and auto-tuned choir of the opener 'Sky Walkers', to the duetting ballad of 'Finding People''featuring additional vocals from new name Khalil'the record never rests for long.
The exploration is soothing, its search a tonic to the swarm of emotion it provokes.And while the four tracks on Finding People barely reach 20 minutes it still manages to present the sharpest vision of the project so far. Though filtered through cascading app windows, the amorous scenery at the project's core has not changed since its inception, even if there is a lot more green screen in the sequel.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1:Sky Walkers
2:Keepers
Side B:
1:Breathe Into Me
2:Finding People -
Great Many Arrows' is the 6th studio album from Damien Dubrovnik, the Danish duo of Loke Rahbek and Christian Stadsgaard. It is also the 200th release on their Posh Isolation label, marking 8 years for both the label and project. The label's inception came with Damien Dubrovnik's debut album, and since then the two have been inseparable. Without Damien Dubrovnik there would most likely have been no Posh Isolation, and vice versa.Visit product page →
'Great Many Arrows' is undoubtedly a high point in the varied discographies of both Rahbek and Stadsgaard. It is the most realized Damien Dubrovnik recording to date, and a standout in Posh Isolation's troves.As a record, 'Great Many Arrows' manages to translate the intensity of the duo's often unrestrained live shows in to carefully crafted studio productions. Unlike the pair's earlier and largely electronic recordings, the compositions on 'Great Many Arrows' set organs, cellos, violas, wind and other acoustic instruments against the backdrop of an electronic landscape.
The new toolset is as apparent on the surface as it is in the enclosed detail, taking the project further from its noise roots than it has ever been. This is not to say that Rahbek and Stadsgaard have traded ferocity for formal constraint. It is rather the opposite. While 'Great Many Arrows' is certainly the pair's most 'musical' work to date, its veneer of accessibility might also make it their most terrifying.
The strength of the recording lies here in the interaction between the melodic, acoustic instrumentation and the bulldozing electronics. Moments of beauty and light are transfigured into utter chaos and rage, the mesmerising change an expression of the equal and opposite form's natural sway as it beckons and slips between its own passing.
'Great Many Arrows' takes its name from a historic archery competition in Kyoto, Japan, in which archers would shoot as many arrows as possible for a 24 hour period. On April 26, 1686, Wasa Daihachiro from Kishoe« successfully shot 8,133 out of 13,053 arrows, averaging 544 arrows an hour, or 9 arrows a minute, becoming the record holder.
Tracklisting:
1. Arrow 1
2. Arrow 2
3. Arrow 3
4. Arrow 4
5. Arrow 5
6. Arrow 6 -
Much needed reissue of 'Brazil,' a collaborative work by three spearheads of Scandinavian electronic music today.Visit product page →
The original edition was presented in a limited run of four cassettes, boxed and with an accompanying book. This timely reissue comes as a remastered double LP set, inviting a new set of listeners to the work.
Four sides of uniquely textured summer ambience, industrial rhythms, synthesizer pieces, and piano works, complete 'Brazil.' The luxuriant melodic drones of Loke Rahbek's Hvide Sejl project converge with the percussive work of Varg and the largely acoustic work of Frederik Valentin of Kyo, producing a fragile beauty.
There is a sense of narrative to 'Brazil.' The work cryptically leads us through a small collection of moving panoramas. Keeping its distance, the storyline remains perpetually obscured. Like a crime unsolved, or a nameless love letter, as greater detail comes into focus the intrigue blooms. A multifaceted affair for multifaceted affairs.
"Things were somehow so good that they were in danger of becoming very bad because what is fully mature is very close to rotting."
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. A Vase on a Table
2. & A Painting in a Room
3. Botany (Blonde)
4. Decades of Fashion
Side B:
5. Privacy
6. Over the Course of a few Weeks
7. Shoulder Dislocated During Intercourse
Side C:
8. Like Fruits in a Bowl
9. Left in the Sun (Men in Love)
Side D:
10. Women in Love
11. Brazil
12. Water Colour (Brunette)
13. Till the Flowers Wilt
Release Date: 27/10/2017 -
Aktuel Musik' is the second release from Kyo, a duet of Hannes Norrvide and Frederik Valentin.Visit product page →
Norrvide is best known as the protagonist of synth trio Lust For Youth, though his recent solo techno productions under the guise of Norin have also been met with critical praise.
Together with Danish music's enfant terrible, Valentin, whose musical history is as difficult to trace as it is to comprehend, Kyo is a project nourished by the orbit of two individuals around impassioned collectives.
Following on from their Posh Isolation debut, 'Potentiel Musik,' 'Aktuel Musik' presents eight pieces of emotive and luminesced experimentation. Utilising electronics, acoustic motifs, and aching instrumentation for'most prominently'woodwind and piano, Kyo softly unfold the structures that bind their work to the many genres being addressed.
Romantic synth lines submerge free jazz drumming, playfully scattering an appeal to the cerebral in the sensuous. The most brilliant aspect of this lies in one of the record's most pointed qualities: the incredibly subtle use of dissonance, which compresses the enveloping sense of introspection in 'Aktuel Musik' into diamond form. The whispered field recordings corral the moments of listless instrumentation into snapshots of a cosmic metropolis.
This is most keenly felt in the orchestral swells that fall away to reveal a soloist on a decaying pedestal, improvising their fate. These acts are invariably swept into dazzling marches that propel 'Aktuel Musik' with the gentle force of wide-eyed exploration.
Kyo's 'Aktuel Musik' carries the listener away with finesse, but always with the wit to withhold the destination. If 'aktuel music' is 'current music,' then what one may behold in Kyo's work is a new future. The present is beautiful.
Tracklisting:
1. Untitled
2. Untitled
3. Untitled
4. Untitled
5. Untitled
6. Untitled
7. Untitled
8. Untitled -
I Musik' is the third piece from Kyo, a duet of Hannes Norrvide and Frederik Valentin.Visit product page →
With each release the pair make a shift in the project's aesthetic equilibrium, forcing a new constellation of resonances, handing us a new beauty. 'I Musik' presents another wondrous movement in the narrative, like discovering a secret escalator that passes everything you want from a new angle.
The melodramatic pause that their previous album circled with enthusiasm is now considered from a greater distance. Perhaps it is because we have now arrived somewhere? There is a hopeful melancholia that has come with this distance, and it is put to use to describe a scene that feels as human as it is synthetic, as if the world you know is now behind glass. Futures imagined are being recalled, futures undiscovered are being explored'Norrvide and Valentin manage to encode a sense of endlessness to such processes quite casually.
The acoustic surfaces brush electronic reflections with an understated sincerity, all of which feels whispered to you by a familiar voice in familiar phrases. There is such a quiet future being invoked on 'I Musik,' yet we don't know what this quiet may come to be defined against, or if it will come to be defined at all. It's a stillness that isn't fully grasped, and it needn't be. This is its beauty.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Universal Audio
2. Azzurra
3. Darkblue / Seagrey
4. Life Digest
5. Adding Patterns
Side B:
1. Johanna
2. Urban Tactical
3. Windbreaker
4. Snap
5. Data Carriers -
The story of the passenger liner MS Scandinavian Star stays adrift. Tragic and complex, the details are out there in the electronic ozone, still yet to find closure.Visit product page →
From sea port to Ethernet port, Malthe Fischer's project navigates the themes of the narrative that unfolds to this day.
His debut album 'SOLAS' makes this journey with a series of heart-wrenching affairs in crisp detail. Appearing on Posh Isolation's recent compilation 'I Could Go Anywhere But Again I Go With You', Fischer's Scandinavian Star project here marked a long-anticipated return. Since his self-titled and widely loved cassette for Ascetic House, Fischer has been most prominent in the band Lust For Youth.
His hand is also across much of Posh Isolation, having mixed and mastered a number of releases. 'SOLAS' shares some of the floaty, melodramatic electronics of Lust For Youth's most elegant moments, but it's a different flavour of heartbreak and intrigue being pushed by Fischer in his solo work.
A symphony of disembodied voices trail across 'SOLAS'. Gesturing toward longing and hope, and occasionally struggling to get out of the misty collage of stumbling rhythms, it's as if we are listening to a form of wonder being mechanized before us.
The surface of Fischer's work is dense in detail, but falling for and fixating on the smallest thing often blossoms the most treasured effects. Minor acoustic instrumentation is precariously balanced against thickets of cut-up recordings and samples, the hybrid charge of the synthesizers holds everything together without letting anything recede.
As soft as 'SOLAS' feels, it stays sharp and bites at times, even through four-to-the-floor whispers. There's a memory of something communal in it all, and this is what holds on.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Candi
2. Alang
3. MARPOL
4. Santosh
Side B:
5. Relic
6. Gas Cutter
7. SOLAS
8. Regal V
Release Date: 14/12/2018 -
This latest work from Vanity Productions is a turbulence steadied to rest with care, and marks a critical high point in the project's evolution.As the nom de plume of Posh Isolation's co-founder Christian Stadsgaard, there is a deeply private yet fiercely empathic quality to 'Only the Grains of Love Remain.'Visit product page →
Pirouetting between his collaborative work with Loke Rahbek as Damien Dubrovnik, as well as The Empire Line with Varg and Iron Sight, to name just Stadsgaard's most recent activity, the inwardness reserved for Vanity Productions is perhaps a necessary step. That the emotive experimentation should generate such a touching soliloquy is an arresting watermark, presenting 'Only the Grains of Love Remain' as the most eloquent work of the project to date.
Following on from 'Mardini' last year, 'Only the Grains of Love Remain' takes a delicate and determined route through the terrain of Vanity Productions. Mapped with musique concrète's metrics, there is an uneasy sensation between guilty revulsion and cosmic longing captured in the moments of harmony.
Dissolving these small bursts of clarity-through-agony is however not a matter of exploring intensity with volume, or other such devices and motifs. With an almost bitter precision, Stadsgaard continually spikes the grounding compositional elements with unnervingly distant patterns of crisp synthetic alloys. Where weighted, gothic passages are undone into peaceful plateaus, and there is a sense of coveted respite from the body's adrenal chemistry.
Temporality is suspended, enough to solicit reflection. As the work coasts the mesh of decision/indecision, witness/actor, falling/flying, however it strikes, one gets the sense that the after-image of noise being articulated is in the end giving way to a greater cathartic broadcast that 'Only the Grains of Love Remain' documents: life, love, and thought.
Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. The Silk of Life
2. The Crack in Everything
Side B:
3. Blue Eyes Reflection
4. Only the Grains of Love Remain
Release Date: 13/10/2017 -
After "Star Alliance"'s initial release as a limited six tape-box set late last year, it was apparent that there was a need for a reissue, which now comes in the form of this remastered double LP set with a selection of the best work and even a few new tracks added.Visit product page →
The story is the same but the narrative has been sharpened. Over the last few years, Varg has manifested himself, not only as one of the most productive new voices in European electronic and techno music - with countless releases and projects - but also as one of the most interesting of the lot.
Completely free from any concern of genre notions towards his music, he moves freely between fields and does this in such a fluent way that it is hard to think of anyone that can match him. With the music that makes up "Star Alliance", it is clearer than ever before that Varg - while being an extremely talented techno producer, at the same time is much more than that.
"Star Alliance" has tracks of spacious acid standing next to heavy industrial rhythms, piercing abstract modular synth work, beautiful soundscapes, piano pieces and field recordings. And while the techniques, qualities and styles differ with almost every track, they stand perfectly together and shape a beautiful narrative.
Thematically "Star Alliance" deals with movement. The heavy melancholia that is present throughout the entire release, reminds us that when traveling to any destination, we will have to leave somewhere else behind. "Star Alliance" that takes its name from a point system between airline companies has a sort of sad restlessness about it.
Wherever we are traveling to, it is clear that we won't be there for long; the people are faceless and the cities nameless, The airports, night clubs and company blur, but Hilton always looks like Hilton and Ecstasy is called Ecstasy everywhere.
