Space, as it is simply called, is a 38 minute piece released independently on KLF Communications by Jimmy Cauty. The piece is split up into 8 parts named after the planets of the solar system, minus the Earth. Approximate track timings are listed on Wikipedia, but the sleeve does not specify these. Also, according to Wikipedia, this was actually intended to be the debut Orb album, but Cauty removed Alex Paterson’s contributions and re-worked the material. Official copies of this album tend to fetch higher prices on Discogs and such, but if one does not mind the somewhat-illegality of acquiring an obscure 20 year old bootleg, it can be found starting much cheaper. Musicially, the album is not particularly ground-breaking, but nevertheless an excellent companion piece to the far more successful album Chill Out, which was also released the same year.
Implant Code was a group from Croatia that released this 4 track maxi-single for the Minus Habens label in 1993. The first track, “Hyperspace Enter” was featured on the first volume of the classic compilation series Dream Injection. It is mostly instrumental, except for a vocal sample from an unidentified reading of two lines from William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer: “Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind” and the phrase, “unthinkable complexity”. While this is the only release for the duo (it is credited to a third individual also, Vlado Knežević), a remix of “Pulse 01″ appeared on the compilations Body Frequencies and Outer Space Communications V. 2.01-T1. Both artists are hard trance / tech-house DJs and producers, with numerous releases throughout the 90s on various labels. DJ Mary is the more prolific of the two, with 5 12″ releases since 2004, and most recently two remixes for his new label, Audiometric Records. Mario K/K has a few releases in the mid-90s after this came out under a couple different aliases such as Syntax Morph and Future Shock Team.
Tracklisting:
1 Hyperspace Enter (5:28)
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2 Cerebroscope (4:47)
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3 Cybernauts (4:43)
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4 Pulse01 (6:08)
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On January 17th 2009 Andrew Lagowski performed as ‘S.E.T.I.’ after an invitation from the Loki Foundation label. Sound sources were ipod Touch running Orthovox, Bebot, synthPond, TTW and Noise.io Pro, a Korg DS10 synthesizer and Ableton Live-prepared granular/ambient space sounds.
Electronic pioneers Portion Control return in 2010 with a new album entitled Violently Alive, the second one for Sigsaly Transmissions. It seems like each new release, every year, by Portion Control gets better and this is no exception to the tradition. All the songs are tighter and more focused, highlighted by clear production. In addition to the full-length album, the digipak will contain a link for a bonus 2-track download on their website presented in wave format. All the albums are available directly from the band on the website, which you can mix and match different albums for a decent price at good savings. It doesn’t seem like they are selling copies of their first album of new output, Wellcome from 2004. Portion Control is also preparing a digital download of samples and loops, dubbed “Operator”. “un-easy stressed material from the PC machines”. The samples of the songs I heard from the album on the site are all excellent and I foresee this album getting a lot of air time on my headphones in the coming months.
Tracklisting
1. Icon
2. Relapse
3. Skull Kid
4. Amnesia
5. Blood Loss
6. Addiction Rising
7. Rise
8. Waste
9. Guided By Fear
10. Extraction
11. Stealth
12. Swollen
13. You Hold Me Down
This is a mix I made, my first one actually, in late February, using some new software I purchased called Torq Mixlab, made by M-Audio. It’s an excellent and inexpensive setup to learn to use and have fun.
I compiled the tracklist at random in about 20 minutes. I was getting ready for a root canal and wanted to listen to some ambient music to sooth myself. I picked a handful of tracks that I wanted to listen to and hit record. There’s a few glitches, such as hitting the pause button on the wrong deck, and picking a song that was too short which ran out and left a several second gap of silence until the next track. Overall, I enjoyed it.
I’m pretty unimaginative when it comes to picking titles and so forth, so since this was my first test on the Mixlab, I called it Ambient_Test1. A free account for SoundCloud allows for 2 hours of uploaded material, so I made this one an hour even. Eventually, I’d like to take some ideas I had from this and expand it into a full, proper mix. Maybe I’ll think of a cool title by then.
The tracklisting for this can be found on the Soudcloud page.
Things have been quiet since the last album that Front Line Assembly has released, 2006′s Artificial Soldier. Rumors have come out about the forthcoming FLA album, tentatively set for a spring 2010 release date on Metropolis. Improvised Electronic Device will feature a collaborative track entitled “Stupidity” with Al Jourgensen of Ministry. Jourgensen will contribute vocals and lyrics to the track, dedicated to the memory of Wax Trax! Records founders Jim Nash and Dannie Flescher. Artist Dave McKean, who did past artwork for Front Line Assembly and Fear Factory, will provide the artwork for the album and its first single, “Shifting Through the Lens”. I’m not entirely certain if Rhys Fulber will be involved with the record, perhaps as a producer, but I’m sure more details will become available soon. I haven’t kept up too much on Front Line Assembly’s recent material so much and personally, I look forward to a return of the era of the 90s, from Caustic Grip to Hard Wired, (we’ll largely forget about Millennium, alright?). Overall, I’m interested in seeing how it turns out.
New stuff from the Principles of Flight camp. The end of February saw the download for their set at Australia’s Rainbow Serpent Festival on Jan 23, 2010. It clocks in at about 91 minutes and is available for streaming or free-download from soundcloud.com. Dark, pounding psytech.
Also announced, on April 9th, a two-track digital download EP will be made available. Five minute samples are available to hear on Myspace and soundcloud.com.
Principles of Flight most recent album, Chaos Opera, is still available at many online retailers.
I figured I would come out of my self-imposed blog exile with the sad news that Dannie Flescher, one of the co-founders of the influential Wax Trax! Records has recently passed away from complications and illness related to AIDS. Concidentally, or perhaps not, Jim Nash also passed away in 1995, sometime after Wax Trax! filed for bankruptcy and was bought out by TVT. I discovered Wax Trax! myself sometime before that, I believe, after the release of the boxed set in 1994. Prior to that, I only knew of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but it was also a high school friend who turned me on to KMFDM and Front 242. After this, I found the boxed set in a local record store and my life was pretty much changed from then on. I tried to buy everything I could get my hands on, minus the vinyl, of course, since I never owned a record player. The Wax Trax! Black Box was also instrumental in introducing me to more experimental music beyond electronic dance to bands like COIL and Controlled Bleeding. It would be quite simple to say that, for me, without Wax Trax!, this blog would have never existed in the first place. Though the label has been long gone, still 20 years past its heyday, the music that was released then still stands up as some of the finest electronic dance / industrial ever, and will never be forgotten. So many classic acts had their record sleeves graced by the iconic power-lines logo. RIP Dannie and Jim.
A Decade Dreaming is the newest release from Toronto-based ambient duo, dreamSTATE, and also the first since 2005′s Passage. dreamSTATE has made this available as a free-download in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Ambient Ping, a long-running fixture in the Toronto ambient scene and features a selection of dreamSTATE performances from over the years. Starting with the most recent track “Premonition”, recorded on August 18, 2009, A Decade Dreaming spans 12 tracks back to at least 2001. While I do not have any information on the final 3 tracks of the album, they did put together a “liner notes” page that is updated on a regular basis with track information as well as exclusive pictures. Recommended for all fans of ambient music, this release presents a wonderful historical record and would come highly recommended even if it wasn’t free.
Tracklisting:
1 Premonition (5:10)
2 Soundscape For Richard Wright (4:47)
3 Jharna Revealed (4:12)
4 Laika’s Last Orbit (5:08)
5 Nocturnal Passage (4:28)
6 Elinvar (7:30)
7 Sandstone (5:11)
8 Universe City Line (5:23)
9 Processional (4:35)
10 The Storm Within (4:55)
11 Premillennial Landscape #1 (4:10)
12 Premillennial Landscape #2 (5:02)
T.H.D. (Total Harmonic Distortion) started life in the early 1990s as a duo between Shawn Rudiman and Ed Vargos. They released their debut album, Mechanical Advantage, in 1993 on Denmark’s Hard Records. Avowed jokingly as a “Front Line Assembly-ripoff”, the album allowed T.H.D. to be signed domestically to Cleopatra Records, then on to Pendragon Records in 1997 and 1998. Rudiman moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and became active in the city’s techno scene as a producer and sought-after live musician, playing in various spots in the U.S. and overseas. In 2009, 10 years after the release of the last T.H.D. album, Rudiman has resurrected the T.H.D. name for two digital releases on Tom Shear’s (Assemblage 23) label 23 db. As the 90s T.H.D. releases moved farther away from their EBM / industrial beginnings, so does the new T.H.D. expand upon the material that came 10 years ago. While The Evolution of Our Decay is available as a paid-download, Subconscious Drip is being offered for free and is a good way to sample T.H.D. material for those who have never heard it before. Considering that the original CDs from back in the day are most likely out-of-print, this would be the best place to start.
Aircrash Bureau were F. Schmidt (electronics), Stephan Klaus Kessler (voice & programming) & Michael Will (electronics & drums), a short-lived German trio active in 1989. This group should not be confused with a more recent Aircrash Bureau from Sweden, which is a progressive trance/house project. After the release of this lone 12″, two songs, “120 BPM” and “Time to Die”, made it onto the Zoth Ommog compilation Body Raptures. Stephan Kessler had one other techno / industrial release in 1990, under the artist name Art Academy, but then later became involved in the acid / jungle scene in the 1990s and since then has also released hard house and trance material under a variety of psuedonyms. The embedded audio are from the actual 12″ release, while the download contains the tracks from Body Raptures, an A.B. remix of “Exhibition” (from the first Technopolis compilation), and a rare Razormaid remix of “Exhibition”. All are in 192 kbps.
Tracklisting:
1 Machine
2 Exhibition
3 Exhibition (Remixed by A.B.)
4 Time To Die
5 120 BPM
6 Exhibition (Razormaid mix)
Aircrash Bureau – Machine
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Aircrash Bureau – Exhibition
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Die Krupps is a long-running German band that released their first material in 1981 and whose sound has changed drastically over the years. Starting out as a kind of noisy synth-pop (comparisons could be made to fellow Germans Einsturzende Neubauten and KMFDM), Die Krupps would move through EBM / industrial territory, before settling in on a strong electronic / metal crossover in the 1990s. The mini-album Entering the Arena, from 1985, is the band’s only release for a 7 year span from 1982 – 1989. Entering the Arena may be some of the band’s most accessible material; a mixture of mid-80s synth-pop and EBM. It is also one of the few albums that has been un-re-released in the band’s recent period of activity, which includes re-issues of much older material. Die Krupps, of course, was much maligned in the 1990s with their metal period (their line-up included one-time Heathen and current Exodus guitarist Lee Altus). Particular scorn was heaped upon A Tribute to Metallica, which saw the band included in a similar style of heavy electronic metal with the likes of Ministry and KMFDM. Die Krupps went on hiatus in 1997 after the release of Paradise Now and resurfaced 10 years later with new live activity and an anthology entitled Too Much History. This anthology is not simply a reissue of old material but fresh re-recordings of songs from the past, including a new song. To date, the most recent Die Krupps release is Volle Kraft Null Acht, issued in March 2009. This CD contains remixes of older material by artists such as KMFDM, Leather Strip, Funker Vogt, Thomas Heckmann and more. There has been no information about the possibility of new material being released, nor has there been a mention of a possible re-release of Entering the Arena, as the previous two editions from 1993 remain out-of-print.
Tracklisting:
1 Risk (3:52)
2 The Rise & Fall (5:30)
3 Communication Breakdown (3:00)
4 Risky Soul Version (6:32)
5 Gladiators (5:24)
6 Your Voice (5:35)
7 Communication Breakdown (Don’t Speak Mix) (3:09)
8 This Day Is Not The Last (3:53)
9 Risk (Operatic Intro) (3:50)
10 Risk (Metallic Outro) (3:17)
Die Krupps – Risk
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Die Krupps – Gladiators
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Different Mixes was released by a German electro-techno label called BOY Records in 2005. BOY has been known for releasing material by other artists such as Time Modem, New Scene, and many more. Contrary to its title, it is not in fact the complete collection of MCL, nor is it even the complete collection of different mixes. The bulk of the CD is 6 remixes by Razormaid, as well as 5 different remixes of the song “New York”. Several alternate mixes from early releases were not included, and all by two tracks are included from the LP Code Numbers, and those mixes are indeed different than those on the LP. While I am a big fan of this CD, I feel that the loss of several other tracks in favor of over the half of the running time being remixes of the same song sort of hurts the collection. I really wish someone would just give Code Numbers a proper CD release with some bonus tracks. However, as it stands, this is the only available MCL CD release. Code Numbers was supposedly re-released a few years back, but I’ve yet to find evidence of this fact. If it is in indeed true, that the CD re-release is much rarer than the actual LP itself. Copies of Different Mixes have turned up on Ebay and various sites, but I recommend the store below. I am unaware of how many copies they actually have in stock, but the link will remain until I find that they have run out.
Tracklisting:
1 Communicate (Atomic Part Mix) (6:02)
2 Satellite (Original Mix) (5:05)
3 New York, New York (Double NY-Mix)
4 New York, New York (Dancefloor Cut Mix) (5:10)
5 Communicate (Razormaid Mix) (7:21)
6 Satellite (Razormaid Mix) (7:31)
7 Power Plant (Razormaid Mix) (6:08)
8 Stranger (Razormaid Mix) (6:26)
9 New York, New York (Razormaid Mix) (6:26)
10 New York, New York (Razormaid Remix) (6:44)
11 Microchip League (Humatic Mix) (5:44)
12 New York, New York (Midnight Mix) (6:10)
From ektoplazm.com: Shapestatic is Chris Johnson (AKA Kri) and Alex Falk (AKA The Bastard) from the Appalachian Mountains of the southern United States. Typifying the growing Psytrance scene in that region, Shapestatic’s debut release Metaphim on North American record label Gaian Mind is a bombshell collection of raw, energetic, and passionate tracks meticulously put together with not a moment of sound wasted. Metaphim combines in-your-face bass lines with gritty, acid-drenched synth strata, tight percussion, tweaked-out samples, and purposeful harmony. Hard-edged and very psychedelic, yet still bouncy, positive, and musical, Shapestatic bears a sound which is wholly unique to America. Metaphim will keep your body moving well into the first rays of dawn! Metaphim by Shapestatic is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States license. Gaian Mind originally released this album on CD in 2007 and have been gracious enough to offer it up for free and legal download here on Ektoplazm. If you enjoy the release be sure to show your support by purchasing a physical copy from the T.O.U.C.H. Samadhi web shop.
Space, as it is simply called, is a 38 minute piece released independently on KLF Communications by Jimmy Cauty. The piece is split up into 8 parts named after the planets of the solar system, minus the Earth. Approximate track timings are listed on Wikipedia, but the sleeve does not specify these. Also, according to Wikipedia, this was actually intended to be the debut Orb album, but Cauty removed Alex Paterson’s contributions and re-worked the material. Official copies of this album tend to fetch higher prices on Discogs and such, but if one does not mind the somewhat-illegality of acquiring an obscure 20 year old bootleg, it can be found starting much cheaper. Musicially, the album is not particularly ground-breaking, but nevertheless an excellent companion piece to the far more successful album Chill Out, which was also released the same year.
I figured I would come out of my self-imposed blog exile with the sad news that Dannie Flescher, one of the co-founders of the influential Wax Trax! Records has recently passed away from complications and illness related to AIDS. Concidentally, or perhaps not, Jim Nash also passed away in 1995, sometime after Wax Trax! filed for bankruptcy and was bought out by TVT. I discovered Wax Trax! myself sometime before that, I believe, after the release of the boxed set in 1994. Prior to that, I only knew of Ministry and Nine Inch Nails, but it was also a high school friend who turned me on to KMFDM and Front 242. After this, I found the boxed set in a local record store and my life was pretty much changed from then on. I tried to buy everything I could get my hands on, minus the vinyl, of course, since I never owned a record player. The Wax Trax! Black Box was also instrumental in introducing me to more experimental music beyond electronic dance to bands like COIL and Controlled Bleeding. It would be quite simple to say that, for me, without Wax Trax!, this blog would have never existed in the first place. Though the label has been long gone, still 20 years past its heyday, the music that was released then still stands up as some of the finest electronic dance / industrial ever, and will never be forgotten. So many classic acts had their record sleeves graced by the iconic power-lines logo. RIP Dannie and Jim.
