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Ruptured
Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun & Jad Atoui 'Ghadr' Vinyl LP
£26.99
Ruptured
Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun & Jad Atoui 'Ghadr' Vinyl LP
£26.99
Release Date: 20/12/2024
On Ghadr, Sandy Chamoun, Anthony Sahyoun and Jad Atoui play with chaos. Built on group improvisation, surges of coruscating electronics and distortion meld with vocals that, while stemming from a background in classical Arabic singing, seek to reroute tradition. “We explore rhythmic structures that don’t have specific time signatures,” says Atoui about his and Sahyoun’s use of synthesis to embrace the tension between order and chaos.
“Sandy’s approach to singing isn’t necessarily very rigid either. We felt a common inspiration.” The album, whose title imperfectly translates to ‘Treachery’, began on a residency in Switzerland while the trio were touring Europe (Chamoun solo, Atoui and Sahyoun as their duo NP). It was later finished in their home city of Beirut. The five tracks are built on vibrant circuits of guitar and modular synthesis, the former often acting as a trigger for the latter’s volatile output.
Chamoun’s vocals blend her background in classical Arabic music with free-singing, using tradition as a foundation for exploration rather than standards to follow. Apart from “Hayawanon Ghader (treacherous animal)”, all the songs’ lyrics pull from the archive. Opener “Taha Layl” interprets a Bedouin folk song. “Bihali” is based on a tenth century poem by Abou Firas Al-Hamdani. “Al Moulatham” quotes an Instagram post by Yousef Al-Domouky about the war in Gaza.
“Al-Samaa” uses a text from contemporary Lebanese poet Paul Chaoul.“I’m working with my references, and with the music,” explains Chamoun. “It’s a playful place with my history and now.” About the album’s title, Chamoun explains: “On this planet, the only thing that’s happening now is treachery. It’s the headline of our days.” Terror in Gaza, its shockwaves through the Middle-East and its place in longer histories loom over the record.
However, while Ghadr reflects the present moment, it isn’t consumed by it. The trio agree the album reflects tenderness as much as anger. It’s audible in the effortless swings between abstract and soaring. The way Chamoun’s lyrics put ninth century odes to a bird and ancient Bedouin love songs next to personal reflections by Al-Domouky or Chaoul on real world tragedies.
Sonically and lyrically Ghadr is music of possibility and potential. The five tracks travel through unbounded terrain rather than along fixed paths. “I don’t like to pull the listener in one direction,” Chamoun continues. “You need to play with your imagination and not stick to one story and one meaning.” While the record reflects their state of mind as residents of Lebanon, and the uncertainty that entails, Sahyoun suggests they’re striving to reach beyond it. “We try to access parts of our subconscious and see what dimensions it has outside of what we’re witnessing day to day. When we play, there’s a rhythm between the three of us.
We feel each other sway,” Ghadr is the first release under the name Chamoun/Sahyoun/Atoui, but the trio’s connection is deeply rooted. Sahyoun and Chamoun are members of ecstatic rock collective Sanam. Atoui and Sahyoun’s explorations of synthesis, solo and as NP, are long-running. On Ghadr these histories form something new. A charged record which faces the world as it is while offering glimpses of something else. (Written by Daryl Worthington) Listen here –
Tracklisting:
1. Taha Layl
2. Bihali
3. Al-Moulatham
4. Hayawanon Ghader
5. Al-Samaa wal Nabaat wal Ghaabaat wal Zaytoun wal Laymoun wal Lawz wal Tin
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Visit product page →Release Date: 13/12/2024
2LP Deluxe Gatefold w/24pp Booklet & Obi
Steven Wilson is no stranger to composing music that appears to counter everything else before it in his catalogue. Bass Communion, his long running solo electronic project, is no exception to this perverse streak that apparently likes to turn all expectations upside down. The Itself of Itself, Bass Communion’s first album for 12 years, skillfully pays testament to this. Long established as a purveyor of mostly atmospheric or ambient textures, the seven cuts that represent The Itself of Itself take detours from this approach in order draw as much from musique concrete, noise music, abstract electronics and uneasy listening.
Whilst still rippled with the same shades of light and dark that can be found throughout all of Bass Communion’s work, The Itself of Itself reveals a fascination with analogue sounds and, more importantly perhaps, ‘unwanted’ analogue artefacts like tape hiss, wow and flutter, static noise, and sonic break-up, taking the music into a space at once different yet familiar. ‘Apparition 3’ presents a stark nod to Wilson's established command of shifting textures steeped in penumbral gauze, while ‘Bruise’ is akin to a space probe adrift and headed towards a white dwarf as all communication is reduced to a disturbing and indecipherable crackle.
Between the other five cuts we witness fragmented, garbled and buried voices, vast vacillating banks of grainy hum, what sounds like the dying gasps of an oboe, spooky swirls from an indiscernible source, swathes of tape hiss, moody drones, and spiralling slivers of noise. Meanwhile on the title track, a mellotron flute rusts and collapses in on itself in a way that renders it the very antithesis of the one deployed on ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’.Everything adds up to a dynamic listening experience where unease, dread and comparatively claustrophobic torrents of sound make (un)natural bedfellows to moments of enchantment and serenity.Above all, The Itself of Itself sees Steven Wilson cutting his teeth on an album that’s at once cinematic and moody whilst proving him to be a master in electronic music craftsmanship.
It’s an album that might surprise some of those who have thus far been paying attention to his work as Bass Communion, but setting out to please everyone was never part of his raison d‘etre. The Itself of Itself catches Bass Communion spreading its weatherbeaten wings to embrace new strategies and a strong desire to journey elsewhere.Arriving in a wonderful Carl Glover designed deluxe cover also comprising a 24pp. booklet of his photographs and an obi strip, this version of The Itself of Itself arrives in December on Lumberton Trading Company as a 2LP pressed in an initial run of 1000 copies.Tracklisting:
Side 1
1. Unperson 10:34
2. Apparition
3 6:04Side 2
3. Bruise 13:19
4. Blackmail 7:24Side 3
5. The Itself of Itself 10:24Side 4
6. Study for Tape Hiss and Other Audio Artefacts 11.58
7. Apparition 5 02:46 -
Visit product page →Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
Waking the Dreaming Body is the follow-up to Tucson artist Karima Walker's 2017 standout album Hands In Our Names, which garnered praise from Pitchfork, MOJO, and Bandcamp. The album includes dense harmonic arrangements of synthesizer, guitar, piano, percussion, field recordings, tape loops and Karima's dulcet singing voice.
The final result is a 40-minute dream-narrative of her conscious and subconscious minds that oscillates between the rich textures of her ambient work and the melody and poetry of her melancholic, Americana-tinged songwriting, their ebb and flow recalling liminal states of half-sleep where images and emotions are recalled and forecasted from the previous night's dreams. Night falls in regular intervals throughout the album, forming a natural dialogue between waking and dreaming. Landscape has always played a huge role in her work.
Throughout Waking the Dreaming Body, Walker's uncanny sound design evokes the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest. Close your eyes while listening to "Horizon, Harbor Resonance," the thirteen-minute instrumental at the album's center, and watch the shifting desert landscape in your mind's eye; from the babble of flash flood runoff to the slow parade of cumulus cloud shadows across the red earth, cactus and creosote, and then, moving backwards in time, the thunderous eruptions of ancient volcanoes that pushed the Tucson Mountains skyward. As indicated by the video for 'Reconstellated', Waking the Dreaming Body holds a deep connection to the environs in which it was created, the delicacy, grandeur and terrifying enormity of the American Southwest.
The mountains, rivers and starry skies of Walker’s desert home are referenced in nearly every song she sings on the album, simultaneously grounding the action and imbuing it with a sense of otherworldliness.
"A perfect balance of beauty and abstraction" Mojo 'Rising'
"Exquisitely crafted" GoldFlakePaint
"Hands in Our Names illustrates what she does best as a composer: She looks at the familiar from different angles, and stares intently at everything until it feels new again" 7.4 PitchforkTracklisting:
1. Reconstellated
2. Softer
3. Interlude
4. Window I
5. Window II
6. Horizon, Harbor Resonance
7. Waking the Dreaming Body
8. For Heddi
9. Uncovering -
Visit product page →Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
“Everyone’s hoping that nobody sees/all our little efforts at dignity” This last line of the title track from Cindy’s fourth LP Why Not Now? works as a slogan for Karina Gill's evolving musical vision.
Her music is simple out of necessity and introverted in delivery, but the songs contain vivid worlds and are quietly ambitious. With this latest batch, Gill pulled the process of making Cindy music even more inward. “Some of these songs were first recorded as demos alone in my basement. I think that process set the tone for the record…Maybe it set up a kind of starkness,” she says.
Moving on from the fixed quartet that performed the first three albums, Gill worked alongside original keyboardist Aaron Diko to develop the songs and they enlisted players from the ever-blossoming SF pop scene to realise her minimalist vision -- members of Flowertown, Telephone Numbers, April Magazine, Famous Mammals, and Sad Eyed Beatniks to name a few.
The collective sounds fill out the record perfectly with John Cale-esque viola on ‘August’, lo-fi fairground organs, and a tasteful full-band sound that crops up throughout. ‘A Trumpet on a Hillside’ is the most triumphant Cindy has ever sounded, all ascending chords and a wedding march melody tumbling out of an old synth. Still, some of the best moments are Gill alone, as on ‘Playboy’, just naked guitar and voice, and when the forlorn whistling solo kicks in, it feels like the loneliest star is imploding in a distant galaxy.
While the dream-pop tag is probably still relevant, this isn’t algorithm-fed genre ambience. Gill’s vocal/lyrical presence can be as gently momentous as Leonard Cohen or as intellectually potent as any ’79-’80 Rough Trade post-punk. “In writing a song”, Gill says, ”all the disparate parts of being me momentarily correspond, like car alarms and party music momentarily matching beats.” Cindy’s Why Not Now? is that muffled street symphony inside a passing daydream.Tracklisting:
1. Why Not Now
2. Standard Candle #3
3. Earthly Belonging
4. August
5. Wednesday
6. A Trumpet On The Hillside
7. The Price Is Right
8. Playboy
9. Et Surtout
10. Standard Candle #4 -
Visit product page →Few copies in stock with minor wear on sleeves, pictures can be sent upon request.
Over the course of her career, spanning three-plus decades, Laetitia Sadier has never shied away from the hard topics, or stopped advocating for the possibility of self determination and emancipation in the face of the powers that be, conscious or unconscious.
This is an essential part of the foundation she co-built with Stereolab, showcasing her spiritual, scientific and sociopolitical inquiries. She’s continued this process with Monade and under her own name and as a writer/singer/and musician whose every album acts as a report on her journey of the self through time, space and the collective.
On Rooting For Love, the report is set alight by the heat of a turbulent world, collapsing institutions and Laetitia’s fully engaged process of expression as well as orchestration. The opening number, “Who + What” elucidates the central issue of the album: a call for a collective striving for Gnosis – an inquisitive outlook that will lend clues to the traumatized civilizations of Earth, allowing us to evolve away from millennia of alienation and suffering and towards the achievability of healing.
The musical arrangements help to embody the layers of the issue, as with “Who + What”’s combination of organ, synths, guitar, bass, trombone, drum programming, vibraphone and zither, all working along intricate paths of chord and tempo changes. Leading from the inside is the implacable presence of Laetitia Sadier, herself interacting with a vocal assembly of men and women billed as The Choir.
The regular reappearance of The Choir throughout Rooting For Love is a reminder of this music being one of a people in critical mass, in addition to an evolution that continues to deepen the rich harmonic fields in which Laetitia plays. Past wounds are addressed again and again in the libretto, as the music provides a transformational balm to aid the healing process.
The melodic funk of bassist Xavi Muñoz leads a Chic-adjacent slink to the occasional dance floor vibes and no-wave rockouts, while Hannes Plattemier and Emma Mario take turns in mixing the tracks and informing the far reaches of the material, with vibes, additional drum programming and synths alongside a talented cast of players and singers from Laetita’s Source Ensemble and beyond. Whether drawing inspiration from Zen Shiastu training, or the lyrics of Véronique Vincent, (lyricist and singer for Aksak Maboul, and once upon a time, lead singer of the Honeymoon Killers), Laetitia faces the truth without flinching.
The shadows, whatever stuff they are made of - individual and collective, present and ancestral - need to be recognized and acknowledged, because the more we heal within ourselves, the more undivided we become in the face of looming Neo-fascist/Neoliberal narratives polluting the inner and outer landscapes. As with the cover image of the winter tree mirrored by the word patterns of Rooting For Love, Laetitia maintains that how we heal the world that’s coming, and what we make of it, will be a co-creation.
The quality of our imagination, the orientation we give our thoughts and the capacity to bring love to ourselves and the world are a first step. Alongside of her collaboration with Modern Cosmology, last year’s incredible What Will You Grow Now?, as well as her continued tours with a reformed Stereolab, Rooting For Love finds Laetitia back in the world, once again urging all our grounded inner alignment and heart power to make us better equipped for creating what’s to come.Tracklisting:
1. Who + What
2. Proteiformunite
3. Une Autre Attente
4. The Dash
5. Don’t Forget You’re Mine
6. Panser L’inacceptable
7. The Inner Smile
8. La Nageuse Nue
9. New Moon
10. Cloud 6
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