Rhyw
Loom High

XOLOT is a mexican-french duo composed of Vica Pacheco and Apulati Bien, both sound and visual artists based in Brussels. They present on Promesses their debut release: 'XOLOT', an eponymous 6 track EP where Vica’s warm voices and neo-bolero flow melt with Apulati’s cold and evolutive beats. The result is 6 ovni songs somewhere between de-construct dancehall, minimal trip-hop and glacial R’n’B. XOLOT creates music in order to celebrate love, life and death. Their debut EP will be out on the 11th of June in digital and limited edition white vinyl (with a handmade silk-screened cover, designed by Eliott Grunewald).

Foul Play is definitely a suitable title for this EP as Kessler has brought the big guns to the tea party for this one. Really getting to the heart of what Holding Hands is all about I love how straight up in the face these bangers are.Expect a lot of gun fingers and shouts of “this one’s a stinky wiiiiiiinky” when these get dropped in the club. That’s probably the best way of describing the vibe here...

More info soon.

UCC Harlo and NY Graffiti team up for the second release on Peace Anthem Records. Alternating between bleary-eyed impressions and tightly articulated expression the artists forge a path laden with plangent sound, muted color, and circular forms. Ketamine-paced grooves, baroque miniatures, hazy-humid sonics, and dub inflections populate this domain. Each delivers one original and a remix of the other’s track.

After two archival releases, Raakvlak appears in the frontline of contemporary sonics, and it is the French collective Organizatsiya that gets the label’s feet wet.Vlug, Dutch for rapid, is a work marked by a sense of being in transit. Bent under lockdown circumstances and corresponding feelings, all tracks were created in a car (!) and on the road throughout various places in Europe. Haunted by good old escapism, yet already too remote from anything to really drive away from. This translates to a dreamlike album that provokes the past and the present by taking elements of both, and stirring it up until something in-between comes out. The organic and the digital blend effortlessly, as acoustic guitar and bass sit next to intelligent electronix and similar FX. Sometimes this takes centre stage, while at others it forms a natural canvas for spoken words.On Akzident and Een Lied Voor Jou these words are provided by that other lyrical maverick, Rik van Boeckel, whose archives had been subject of Raakvlak’s second release Deze Hoofden Praten. Here too, old and new blend, into an in-betweenness that forms an entity of its own.

Mannequin Records is elated to present for the first time on vinyl the reissue of Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici’s first video soundtrack, originally released in 1984 as an audiotape in less than one hundred copies. Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici (literally Mundane Mechanical Youth) or GMM was one of the most unclassifiable audiovisual experiences to emerge from Italy in the 1980s. Maurizio Dami a.k.a. Alexander Robotnick, a pivotal member of GMM, was responsible for the group’s music output.Founded in 1984 by Antonio Glessi and Andrea Zingoni in Florence, GMM was an art collective whose production represents the quintessential expression of postmodern transmedia hybridity. GMM pioneered the genre of computer comics, created video installations, developed “multiple identity” performances, and was involved in fashion, media, and music productions, and later on produced cyberdelic environments, artificial reality projects, and proto-memes.Alexander Robotnick’s first contribution to GMM was this soundtrack for the group’s eponymous first video, the animated version of a computer comics they coincidentally published on legendary Frigidaire magazine. Restored by Dami and reissued here for the first time by Mannequin Records, the composition was also split into two “suites” and released as an audiotape distributed by Materiali Sonori, also responsible for other releases by both Robotnick and GMM.Determining in this work is Dami’s adoption of the alphaSyntauri, also known as the first affordable digital synth (priced less than $2000 when it was released in 1980), which was playable through its own software, “alphaPlus,” on the Apple II computer. The same computer was used by Glessi to “draw” the 3-bit strips scripted by Zingoni recounting the joyrides of the Giovanotti Mondani Meccanici, three merciless cyborgs in black suit and sunglasses dividing their time between nightclubs, rapes and murders.As Robotnick, Dami developed an innovative formula of Italo disco that was attractive to the dance floor yet at the same time highlighted the expressive properties of the instruments he used, notably Roland drum machines and Korg synthesizers. For the soundtrack of GMM’s videos and installations, he left aside the danceable synth rhythmics in favor of ambient sounds that produced rarefied atmospheres, psychological tensions, and enhanced states of consciousness.Dami’s scores for GMM’s artworks could be associated with Italian avant-garde music of the 1970s and 1980s, ranging from composers who adopted electronics flirting with pop and songwriting to minimalist musicians exploring seriality and drones, including Franco Battiato, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Francesco Messina, and Riccardo Sinigaglia. Analogies could also be traced with the playful and humanizing approach to personal computers that characterizes the music output of Marcello Giombini and Doris Norton.The futuristic escapism of minimal synth and ambient music’s psychological nature is infiltrated by drifting harmonics typical of new age, as if in search of a spiritual dimension of technology. Characteristic of the postmodern ethos of GMM Suite, in line with the humanizing approach to technology that is at the base of GMM’s computer comics, is the melancholic take at speculative dystopias in which human beings would find themselves increasingly trapped into identity crises: a true cyborg’s melodrama.Limited edition of 500 copies, (orange vinyl)