Posh Isolation

"Body Sculptures is a contemporary project that brings together five unique voices in European experimental electronic music today. The formative element is the collaborative pact between Sweden's Northern Electronics and Denmark's Posh Isolation. Last year marked both Body Sculptures' debut live performance 'a highly notorious set at Berlin Atonal Festival 2015' as well as their debut recording, The Base Of All Beauty Is The Body.

The disparate elements that have come to inform the project thus far are further refined and encoded in their new LP, A Body Turns To Eden. The aesthetic singularity of the project is owed to the distinguished backgrounds of the five contributing artists. Each perspective entails a varying set of working methods and sonic preferences, though it is the sensitivity with which the diversity of these practices are framed in Body Sculptures that assures the project its own space. Infamous for his caustic, pneumatic techno under the moniker of Varg, Jonas Rönnberg is the co-owner of Northern Electronics and is involved in the projects Ulwhednar (with Abdulla Rashim) and Dard æ Ranj FrÃ¥n Det HebbershÃ¥lska Samfundet.

Erik Enocksson is a highly regarded Swedish composer who has scored countless independent productions. His orphaned soundtrack to the film Apan, remastered and reissued by Posh Isolation last year, was widely and favourable received. Frederikke Hoffmeier's industrial and experimental project Puce Mary has been the subject of much veneration in recent years.

The frenziedcorrosiveness of both her recordings and live shows are increasingly charting the limits of intimacy. Ossian Ohlsson is from the industrial outfit Vit Fana, and has appeared across a number of compilations spanning both Northern Electronics and Posh Isolation.

Loke Rahbek is the co-founder of Posh Isolation. As a member of Damien Dubrovnik and Lust For Youth, as well as under the moniker of Croatian Amor, he has developed a reputation for engulfing performances and compositions.

The combinations of acoustic and electronic instrumentation, the soiled traces of genre, and the mixed modes of experimentation, are here pitched as an eternal requiem, letting the play between the project's orthodox and unorthodox methods reflect a sharp fatalism.

Each song presents familiarity and intimacy within an aura of claustrophobia. And as if out of a cruel awareness of this fact, unease blooms into a comforting form. A body turns to Eden as a conscience turns to an ideal confessor, A body rolls from a pyre / a conscience longs for a blasé saint."

Tracklisting:
1. Breath of Wind Sows the Seed
2. A Body Turns To Eden
3. Feet Into Soil
4. On the flowers Face
5. The Pyre
6. Turning Field
7. Turning Field ll Sunflower
8. Scorched Earth
9. A Collection of Ceramic Vases (Yves Saint Laurent buried in the Garden of his Marrakesh home)

Boli Group is a new ensemble spearheaded by Copenhagen based composer and producer Asger Hartvig. Responsible for some of the most fearless and intriguing works to come from the city in recent years, Hartvig is as imposing as he is mysterious, and his debut release for Posh Isolation makes no concessions.

Hartvig is perhaps best known for his work with the group Synd Og Skam. And though less known, Brynje 1&2 is just as exceptional. Taking both technology and classicism as allegories, each group charts routes in and out of pop music, somehow arriving at an observer's distance to the distinct stylistic choices in the process.

The label Visage has published the best of this, and the logic has certainly been carried into 'Boli Group LP,' the latest offering from Hartvig and his distinguished ensemble of Nina Cristante, Holger Hartvig, Thea Thorborg, and Cæcilie Trier.

There is a nearly unendurable fragility to 'Boli Group LP.' It's as if Hartvig has let the complexities of his themes stand in mourning; his narrator taking a moment to themselves behind sunglasses, exhausted for the rose-tinted lens of the prepared script.

The album is willingly dramatic, though it never plateaus into melancholia. Hartvig pirouettes at the edge with the sorrowful string arrangements and the pristine timbre of the piano, the immediacy of the acoustics always binding the listener tightly to the risk. Pastoral and meditative, the electronics don't tamper with the delicate fabric being woven. They always register as supportive and understated. The synthetic hum, occasionally yielding a doleful melody as it does, manages to imbue a naiveté to this contemporary and subtly idiosyncratic chamber music. Though the track titles lead us on, in time the examination the album provokes is that of the tension in transparency.

The album's secret, barely kept through the minimalism, is its distinct folk noir quality in holding it. "boli group creating new chamber folklore embracing the playing of instruments, not the played, but that which is playing for the sake of future focus and edit into the very minerals of instrument, intuition, emotion, fragility underlying, the warning, always pulsating acts of drama, wet leaves, asphalt, pan to right, agriculture and electricity poles a container ship, lonely in horizon hoping for a clear thought, but everything existing as conspiracy the sound of a search, uncertain and always asking, for certainty is false, showing sceneries changing permanently and forever narrating, like a panorama of grey clouds, keeping humidity levels high, heating up before the release of water and lightning investigation for folk instruments.

What are their songs and where will they go, over time, woven together like a piece of fabric created to stand against the lethal winds'

Tracklisting:
Side A:
1. Overture
2. How To Play
3. Monsanto Folk Song
4. Toxica A5: Moringa
6. Garden Picture

Side B:
7. Tension In Three Stages (Drama)
8. Tension In Three Stages (Country)
9. Tension In Three Stages (Nautic)
10. Summit

Release Date: 04/05/2018

Finding People' is the newest recording from Croatian Amor, the morphing alias of Loke Rahbek.

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

The World' is the debut album by Croatian Amor, following a long row of limited tapes on Posh Isolation. 'The World' utilizes the same method of collaged melodies and real sounds, as the project has done up until now, but on the debut LP the pieces feel more thought out.

The album runs like a soundtrack on which the actors'voices were never cut from the score, field recordings and synth blends together in a beautiful yet nauseating audio pool. Transit, plastic interior, insomnia, pornography and being alone. Being alone in large groups of people, being alone in thousands of years of civilisation, being alone in a lover's bed copulating.

Euro magic, bubble-gum industrial, 1989.

Tracklisting:
1. LA Hills Burn At The Peak Of Winter
2. Olympia Dies Soon
3. Generations
4. The Lovers
5. New Year
6. Stockholm

about / a (feverish) narrative involving / touching upon Elon Musks (cancelled/) failed robotic lander mission to mars, Michael Jackson's final moments on stage and current personal life (motherhood)' Search as one might for an adequate charm to safely light 'Red Dragon,' Cæcilie Trier's evocations tend to outpace us at every step.

The album's fever-dream story flicks through the recent past and the present. Elon Musk's extraplanetary desires cross with maternal notes. Michael Jackson, too, is watched over. The terse titles that greet us in Trier's solo work are a wry sleight of hand.

CTM, standing for Cæcilie Trier Musik, marks the impersonal boundary where intimacies are developed, trampled, and searched through.

On her new album for Posh Isolation, produced with Asger Hartvig, aka MC Boli of Boli Group, the drama is composed and enduring, like a plot twist that lasts a life time.

Trier is a Copenhagen based cellist, singer, and composer, with her classical training apparent across her many and varied projects and collaborations. Having received critical acclaim from the earliest moments of her career, Trier's previous album 'Suite For A Young Girl' was nominated for the prestigious Nordic Music Prize in 2017.

'Red Dragon' keeps Trier's voice central to the affairs. The instrumentation wades in and out of focus from stage right and left. And as often as we are caught in the songwriting's pirouettes and glances around the vocals, the splintering effect of the production impresses an inhuman déjà vu with regularity.

This is especially felt in the electronics, sound bites, and digital ephemera that dress the songs. The bareness of the strings and guitars act as a peculiar balance, keeping us close just as we get a sense of the distance from which we are permitted a view.

'Red Dragon' features appearances from Coco O, Frederikke Hoffmeier (Puce Mary), Soho Rezanejad, and Dawda Jobarteh.

Tracklisting:
1. Red Dragon
2. Paloma pt.1
3. Paloma pt.2
4. Fool
5. Spender
6. Swarm
7. Stages
8. Minna
9. Isles
10. Fever
11. The Falcon Preset
12. Rehearsal

Release Date: 14/12/2018

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.

'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.

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

The Pale and the Colorful is the first album of Internazionale presented on vinyl by Posh Isolation after a near flood of limited tape releases both through his own remarkable Janus Hoved label and through Posh Isolation.

The Pale and the Colorful is a logical summary of Internazionales work up to this point and is the prime example of the sensual synthetic meditations he has come to be known for.

The clear pop sensibility to his compositions are clouded with noises and ambiguous field recordings and it is somehow hard to really figure out if the music intends to lift us up or hold us down.

What is certain is that no Internazionale release up to this point reaches the level of this new album.

Tracklisting:
1. Bells Of Addiction
2. Ruby Heart
3. Initials
4. They Taught Us To Count The Days
5. Protection Glass (Love Is The Cure)
6. The Pale And The Colourful
7. Ivy Covered Windows
8. White Peacock

The Water We Drink' is the debut album from Khalil, a close confidante of Posh Isolation, and naturally a project close to the heart. With an iridescent shower of auto-tuned vocals and encrypted synthetic forms, Khalil presents a luminous route into a future of cadences pitched to a crushing intensity.

As the new project of Nikolaj Vonsild, best known for his pop endeavours in the synth quartet When Saints Go Machine, as well as his acoustic duo Cancer, Khalil is his strongest vision to date. The collaborative platform for Vonsild's searing angelic/alien vocals is produced with Simon Formann, better know as Yen Towers and formerly of Lower (RIP), along with Villas Klint.

With water we feel differently. Indifferently of course, it approaches our sense of touch quite unlike any other matter or form. It slips and caresses, appealing to a sensuality so intuitive it barely registers beyond its immediacy. It's an urgency that always arrives. The ocean tells us so on the shore; a perennial pleasure, a forgivable obsession. That the coast, its container, the edge of where we safely stand and where water waits, is a form just as much as it is a dissolving place, then considering a design such as that of an Evian natural spring water bottle amounts to staring at the stars.

Thematically, Khalil draws constellations and cites emotive signals with this kind of deep union between form and touch. Finding perhaps a place undiscovered.Across the album the impulses of the romantic lyricism are diverted through artificial mechanisms and unnatural vocal terrains.

Set against a melodic chorus of fractured pop, there is a certain sense in which the aching wane of Khalil feels like an ensemble of identities grasping for a form as water may grasp for land.If there's reason to feel that bottled water is a portable piece of something greater than ourselves, then Khalil distributes high definition pop tropes with the same logic. The radio is an ocean, and Khalil's longing a hydrating force.

Tracklisting:
1. Trapper
2. Rest My Head Against A Wall Of Water
3. Gigds
4. Submit So Deep
5. Estate Straight Line
6. Herat
7. Always Wanted To Ride In A Place Like This
8. Natures Envy
9. Sculpture No Solid
10. The White Hoodie I Wear Because I Love You

I Musik' is the third piece from Kyo, a duet of Hannes Norrvide and Frederik Valentin.

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 Female Form is the second collaborative record between two of Copenhagen's most prolific experimental music personas. Frederikke Hoffmeier's Puce Mary project is known from several solo records on Posh Isolation and her collaborative releases with Sewer Election, as well as almost countless shows and performances all over the world.

Loke Rahbek is probably best known for his work as half of Posh Isolation and his projects under the aliases Croatian Amor, Damien Dubrovnik, Lust for Youth, VÃ¥r and an impressive body of work manifested both as records, performances and strange places in between.

Together they have previously released The Closed Room'on Posh Isolation in 2011 and now, four years later, they are ready with the second record of their planned trilogy. The Female Form was recorded partly in their shared studio in Copenhagen located inside the venue and studio complex Mayhem, and partly at the historical Electro-Acoustic EMS studio in Stockholm.

Thematically the record deals with intimacy and the (im)possible relation of the sexes. It is obvious that the two artists have grown vastly, both as composers and lyricists since their last collaborative effort. Still, it feels like The Female Form'follows where 'The Closed Room'left of, walking a path in between industrial, drone and electro acoustic music.

The room is still closed, the doors are shut and windows covered, whatever insight the listener is granted is the kind of insight you get peeping through the keyhole or the crack between the curtains. Every motion is obscured and the outcome uncertain. Still, the seven pieces that form 'The Female Form'is a demanding and intriguing venture into the two artists'world, even if we are left at the doorstep with the door closed in front of us.

Tracklisting:
1. Swim
2. A Body Reimagined
3. Swim ll
4. Liquefying of the flesh
5. The Female Form
6. With Complete Will
7. Closure

Valentina Tereshkova' is a record from Swedish musician Mats Erlandsson.

Erlandsson is based in Stockholm where he works as an engineer at Elektronisk Musik Studion, commonly known as EMS, and is an active part of the concert and festival planning of events like Nordberg and Sound of Stockholm. 'Valentina Tereshkova' is his debut album.

On 16 June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman to fly in space.
She spent 2 days and 22 hours alone in space, manually operating the Soviet spacecraft Vostok 6.

Erlandsson's 'Valentina Tereshkova'is a record made up of 5 pieces of electroacoustic music. It would be easy to argue that the Valentina of the Soviet space mission and the one of Erlandsson's record are different characters all together, however there is a feeling of spatiality in Erlandsson's music that one could speculate is not unlike that of being in a vessel like Vostok 6: a small room surrounded by infinite space, and maybe most importantly, a room that allows for just one person.

Erlandsson is a craftsman, a quality most keenly felt in the focused structure of his drone pieces. It is reflexive, heavy-hearted music that almost cynically dissects itself for the listener; the pieces themselves apologise for their melancholia with their compositional brilliance.