Heavy The Eclipse is the Scottish techno duo’s second album, following 2017’s HTID: Heaven-Sent Tekno Impakting Dancefloors, Or Hardcore Till I Die, also releasedvia Electric Deluxe. It tells the story of a dystopian Glasgow 400 years into the future—”After numerous waves of social collapse, Glasgow, a once prosperous city thriving off an industry of trade and shipbuilding, had run to waste in lawless ruin,” the label explains. We’re told to expect “ravaged and warped breakbeats haunted by wailing euphoric noise, vivid and graphic reflections of fractured post-industrial hardcore, moments of poetry flashing within a thick impending fog.”
Heavy The Eclipse is streaming on SoundCloud, accompanied by this website.
Electric Deluxe will release Heavy The Eclipse on November 23rd, 2018.
Ghent-based Belgian record label Radio Martiko was founded in 2015 with a mission to release rare, forgotten or unreleased old music from anywhere and everywhere from across the globe. Their catalog currently features unearthed music everywhere from Greece and Belgium, to the Middle East and even Peru. Building on the success of their last release, a reissue of Hany Mehanna’s 1973 seminal bellydance album The Miracles of The Seven Dances in January, they return in September with a very special double album release.
First up, is the official soundtrack album for the 1969 movie عائلات محترمة (Respectable Families) by Abderrahman El Khamissi. For those of you not familiar with El Khamissi, he was a prominent Egyptian poet, novelist, composer, screenwriter, theatre and cinema director and radio personality. He was also the man credited with discovering cinematic icon Soad Housny by giving her a role in 1959 picture Hassan and Nayima.
The four compositions that make up the soundtrack traverse areas of Tango, Twist and cha-cha-cha music yet with a unique and abstract twist to each one giving them an element of darkness and perhaps even psychedelia at times.
The second album is a nine-song compilation featuring various artists pieced together by Radio Martiko from the archives of iconic record labels like Sono Cairo, Disques Sharara and Misrphon. Entitled Zamaan Ya Sukkar, the album capitalises on the Western influences that swept through the MENA region during the 60’s, particularly Cairo and Beirut. The album features music described by Martiko as ‘Egyptian Exotica’ due to its obscure juxtaposition compared to traditional music of the time.
Zamaan Ya Sukkar starts out with a catchy Franco-Arabic song entitled “Fatouma” by an obscure artist named Selim El Baroudi, and goes on to feature songs from legendary names like Mohamed Fawzi, ElThoulathy ElMareh and Soad Mohamed, along with lesser known figures like Nubian singer Magda Ali, Sayed Salameh and Qanun player AbdelFattah Mansi.
Both albums are great for laidback listening sessions, especially if you happen to be interested in the music of the past decades, particularly the 60’s, given the lack of exposure they receive musically compared with the 70’s onwards.
Radio Martiko will release Original 1969 Soundtrack by Abd el-Rahman el-Khamisi & Zamaan Ya Sukkar – Exotic Love Songs from the Egyptian 60’s in September.
The two techno producers have previously released collaborative EPs titled The Lotus Eaters in 2016 on Lucy’s label Stroboscopic Artefacts and 2018 on Rrose’s Eaux, but this is the first time they’ll release music under the joint name.
With Desatura, Lucy and Rrose explore themes of physical density, emptiness, and space, creating sonic objects which can be rotated and viewed from multiple perspectives. Eschewing the typical instrumentation of techno, the duo use synthesized sound and feedback as fundamental sources to generate both textural and percussive elements. A sense of tension and weight emerge from sources that cannot be easily pinpointed. The resulting album forms a complex narrative from a paradoxically simple and restrained set of sound sources. A mysterious and profound accomplishment.
Listen to “Anchor.”
Stroboscopic Artefacts will release Desatura on October 5th, 2018
Compiled by Belgian DJ and eclectic connoisseur Lefto, ‘Jazz Cats’ showcases the next generation of Belgian jazz artists including the psychedelic jazz-fusion collective BRZZVLL, the outrageous BeraadGeslagen, radical experimentalists Steiger, electro-acoustic pian trio De Beren Gieren and futuristic funksters, STUFF.
Undeniably, jazz has been seen a revival in the last 5 to 10 years. It was never far away, be it hip hop, trip hop, dance music – it was Always present, but for at least a decade, it got lost in ‘fusion’, mixed with different gernes of music, most of them influenced by jazz at the origin.
Jazz was always that gerne that represented the era of our parents or grand-parents but the music got picked up by a new generation of artists and musicians who would perfom jazz and hip hop covers that played true to the original sounds of jazz. Artists from around the world to Belgium, band like BADBADNOTGOOD and STUFF. have brought jazz to basements, bars and clubs where a young and open-minded crowd in search for inspiration would gather to dance to organic music.
Today, we see a resurgance of jazz, unsupported from the traditional radio play but picked up by press, promoters and specialized shows. The jazz music lover (in many of us) is living in a exceptional time.
Growing up around jazz, my father would wake me up with it and he would take me to dark and smokey bars around town where jazz was played every week, so it’s with extreme pleaseure that i present to you some of the best present and next generation jazz cats this little country has to offer.
Spiral Deluxe is the band creation of Jeff Mills that consist of Keyboardist Yumiko Ohno, Bassist Kenji “Jino” Hino, Keyboardist Gerald Mitchell and Percussionist and Drummer Jeff Mills. The formation of a “Super” Band had been in planning Axis Records for many years and now its here! Each member of the quartet brings each of their vast musical experience to the equation that creates a pathway to the future of Electronic Jazz. Out Sept 2018. Video by Les Films de Morphee.
See full length video version of “Paris Roulette” From Spiral Deluxe album “Voodoo Magic”.
Axis Records will release Voodoo Magic on September 7, 2018
Arabstazy Showcases the Sound of North African & Middle Eastern Electronic Music.
Arabstazy, a multidisciplinary project dedicated to assembling boundary-pushing electronic musicians of North African and Middle Eastern backgrounds, takes its name from a portmanteau of “Arab” and “ecstasy,” and the combination of those two words offers a clue to the group’s mission. The Lyon, France-based Tunisian producer Shamseddine Omoku, aka Mettani, started the collective as a live project, an outgrowth of his record label, Shouka. His aim was to create a new, multifaceted live experience for audiences, while also reassessing the cultural identities of artists with backgrounds in the MENA region, battling the false Western tendency to treat those countries as a homogenous whole. While Arabstazy’s music bears the region’s unmistakable sonic fingerprint—the twang of an oud, distinctly non-Western scales, some unmistakably Arabic singing—it pairs them with chunky electronic beats and fat basslines.
“The aim is to give what we believe is an accurate image of what the electronic music production in these countries is,” says Mettani, who mostly met and organized Arabstazy’s growing roster online. “The basic statement is that these countries are all very different—so different that it’s hard to find the connection between them. Simplification, especially when it comes to identity, is very dangerous.” Read more.
Shouka will release Under Frustration Vol. 1 on July 13, 2018.
