Orli
LORI002 EP

Intercepts is a brand new sub-label from London's Frequency Domain.Frequency Domain has soundtracked late-night astral travelling since 2015, releasing drone, ambient and offbeat electronics from the likes of Forest Drive West, Plant43, Datassette, Matt Whitehead, Anthony Child, Jo Johnson and Ali Wade.Intercepts indulges the parent label's more unruly and percussive leanings with a series of EPs drawn up from an anonymous pool of Frequency Domain artists and newcomers. Intercepts releases are served two at a time, with two separate strands - X and Y - each exploring their own sonic trajectory.The first 'Y' series EP delivers three tracks of urgent machine funk; a spannered slab of 170bpm Braindance hogs the A side, while two peak-time sci-fi electro cuts play out on the flip.

Robert Fleck makes his return after a lengthy spell on the side-lines, delivering a stellar EP packed with genre-bending purlers. Limited pressing!

Balmat’s second release comes from Hoavi, aka Kirill Vasin, a Russian electronic musician whose work approaches what might be familiar reference points—deepest dub techno, atmospheric ambient, liquid drum’n’bass—with a singular and refreshing point of view.We first became aware of Hoavi after coming across one of his tracks in a DJ mix by Leech, aka Peak Oil label founder Brian Foote; we began corresponding, which led to a massive zip file of unreleased tracks turning up in Balmat’s inbox. Music for Six Rooms has been culled down from that bounty, its disparate moods distilled into 10 profoundly immersive tracks that touch upon dream pop, dub techno, and new age, all swirled together into the headiest of ambient dreamscapes.Active since the early 2010s, when he founded his Shells Rattle label, Hoavi has released on a number of labels including floe, Snare Tapes, Fauxpas, and Minor Notes. In October, Peak Oil will finally release his album Invariant, recorded in 2019 and intended for release in 2020, then tied up in pressing-plant backlogs for over a year. Balmat’s Music for Six Rooms follows roughly a month later; we think that the two albums offer a wonderfully complementary view of Hoavi’s talents—one rhythmic, the other largely beatless, yet both of them sensuous in the extreme.Music for Six Rooms appears in two slightly different editions. The vinyl edition appears on a single piece of vinyl upon which some tracks have been subtly edited in length, to ensure maximum audio fidelity; the digital version features extended edits and runs some 18 minutes longer, in total, for a maximally immersive experience. All vinyl purchases include a download of the full digital album.

Idris Bena with the repress of his full length album on Forest Ill.x

Wound Without A Tear is a compilation of “Australian” Ambient and Experimental Music; an area so often overlooked and misunderstood because it does not easily fall into historical context. However, the fifteen years (1993-2008) the collection cites–a period of early 90s post-rave ethereality defined by pleasure-centred spaces (chill-out rooms) and the personal computer’s emergence as a popular tool for file-sharing and secondary-living in the 00s–is befitting of closer examination.The recordings were sourced from artists, labels, corrupted disk drives, CD-Rs, the WWW and archives of Melbourne’s 3RRR community radio station.During the 1990s, as new technologies emerged and mass digital culture flourished, artists explored the emergent possibilities of the Internet with a utopian fervour, viewing the web and its plethora of images and information as a site of boundless potential. In the 2000s, file sharing connected people around the world directly to one another, and this incorporation of online experience into material objects, meant there was an increasingly porous border between the online and offline worlds–if there remained a border, at all.What is remarkable from this collection is that so many people, working (mostly) on their own came up with such remarkably similar ideas. In most cases these similarities can be related to the inherent qualities of the medium, though often any distinction is decidedly blurred at the edges.The compilation seeks to make the works of these various artists available as a means of “demystification”. No specific destination is intended upon. Perhaps by the time you have reached the end, you will have forgotten where you began.Endnotes:How do you pronounce the title? Wound /waʊnd/ Without /wɪðˈaʊt/A /eɪ/ Tear /teə(r)/1. Wound. Furl. Twist. Wrap. Surround. To Move Back orForwards to a Desired Point.2. Tear. Interruption. Disruption. Imperfection. Rupture.3. Two words evoke a chain of events.

After three EP's in his own name, and one with Moreno Ácido at Holuzam, Diogo makes his debut 12” in the Discos Extendes series with “FINALMENTE!”. In a singular appropriation of the vast legacy of rave culture, Diogo crosses, along four tracks, a certain time span between the 90's and the 2020's, with all kinds of recycling and updates that the exercise entails. Syncopated rhythmic patterns, robust basses, junglist echoes, haunted voices or celestial pads make up a revivalist sound palette, here rearticulated beyond linear structures. “Até Segunda” sets the tone in territories close to Objekt's Theme from Q in a live sound design amidst sudden disturbances and rallying hooks. Tracks 2 and 3 stand out for their plot twists: “Ponto de Não Retorno” starts with a frenetic breaky maze before get immersed in a oneiric landscape, and “What?!” progresses gently within Vancouver coordinates to be opened to a schizophrenic rawness that, from there, completely remakes the track. “Errar É Ok” is an exercise of decompression, melodically woven, with a dreamy coda pointing to nostalgic horizons. Violet closes the EP with a muscular version of “Ponto de Não Retorno”. "Finalmente!" marks for this unstable balance between familiarity and strangeness, intuitiveness and disturbance, euphoria and immersion. Tracks for the dance floor, yes, with a twist, to be rediscovered as often as you like.