—

The tracks on Room(s) were started on the spur of the moment, often whilst traveling and finished in the studio, with the notion in mind that great moments of inspiration are fleeting so it’s best to grab on to that moment when it happens and squeeze it for all its worth. Travis says of this process; “I feel like the energy of a song is lost the longer you spend working on it. This experiment in becoming less attached to my work essentially lead to a lot of songs that are connected sonically and aesthetically.”

On Room(s), this ‘spur of the moment’ energy meant that Travis’ productions have turned the 160 bpm footwork conventions inside out. Here he fills the usually fierce, stripped down form with elegant sun kissed and impressionistic songs, built from r & b, autotune and dance music history’s most exuberant stabs and kicks. Building on his background as a hip hop producer, he casually creates a beautiful new kind of high-speed detail-packed mutant pop that, like the early post-rave sounds of ambient jungle, is psychedelic, exhilarating and strangely relaxing in it’s fast-paced washes of synths and drums.
Listen to this entry »

Sam Baker’s Debut Album is 40 minutes of pure listening pleasure, a series of woozy, off-centre hip hop instrumentals drawing heavily on Baker’s love of electronic funk but never in hock to it. Intensely detailed and carrying considerable emotional weight, this is not Rap Beats Volume 2 but an album of fully-realised pieces of music which stand on their own without the need for an MC’s intervention.
Listen to this entry »

FourColor (Keiichi Sugimoto) uses computers, field recordings and laptop processed guitars, accentuating gradually evolving shades of sound that shift constantly in tone, in note, in colour and resonance, and which float along in warm, subtle and perplexingly complex, translucent movements.
Listen to this entry »

An astonishing suite that combines a stirring orchestral grandeur with chilly, cinematic ambience. The first half of the album is beautiful but a little bit harrowing, like having a bird’s eye view down on yourself as you trudge hopelessly across the loneliest Arctic tundra, but the later tracks let some light in. Jules is that rare thing, an ambient composer whose command of atmosphere is equalled by a strong sense of narrative and melodic progression. —Boomkat
Listen to this entry »

Summvs is the latest result of the unusual creative partnership between the oscar-prize honored film composer Ryuichi Sakamoto and the fine artist and electronic music pioneer Carsten Nicolai.

The name of the artists’ fifth collaborative release Summvs refers to the latin word ‘summa’ (engl.: sum) and ‘versus’ (engl.: towards) serving as a metaphor for the work being oriented towards a collarorative whole.

Passages of sparse yet emotionally charged and passionate piano solos are embedded in sine waves or reworked to establish new aesthetics of piano sound. Sparse percussions and throbbing bass pulses hover above and below – the music being contemplative and minimal at the same time.—Raster-Noton
Listen to this entry »

“Jennifer Lee aka TOKiMONSTA prefers to work late – or early, depending on how you look at it. Most of her music is made between two and seven in the morning, because at that time of night “my mind works in strange and mysterious ways.” Hence the title of this EP, a series of warm but decidedly woozy pieces of music, the soundtrack to the oddest, most beautiful dreams you’ve ever had.”
Listen to this entry »