Cosmo Rhythmatic

Tunes Of Negation

Like The Stars Forever And Ever

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Shackleton's open-ended musical project Tunes Of Negation featuring Takumi Motokawa, Raphael Meinhart, and a guest appearance from Heather Leigh is back on Cosmo Rhythmatic after its acclaimed debut last year. While Shackleton's output has often attempted to cross all musical borders, the newest manifestation of Tunes of Negation suggests themes of impermanence, rebirth, and transcendence with a fiercer dedication than ever before. In attempting to balance shadow with light, 'Like The Stars Forever And Ever' runs from sombre or gentle passages to dissonance through to uplifting finales and the whole range between. As always, Shackleton's music feels ceremonial and narrative, at once commenting and facilitating the journey of all entities engaged in ritual listening. The fragility of life and the awareness of an inevitable end are transcribed musically in all their discordant, fearful, and mournful aspects. However, this does not at all make the album an overtly gloomy, depressing affair. In every track, the music ends up soaring towards a sense of ecstatic dissolution. A representation of a bewildering cosmic love in the transient, mortal nature of all things. A re-assimilation of energy towards new forms. There are no attempts to solve ultimate mysteries though, rather celebrate mystery in all its power, beauty, and contradictions. Shackleton's ever-masterful embroidery of tonal and atonal percussions, of acoustic and electronic organs, of electronic sound design and physical ambiance, is—as always in his style—organized in compositions in which hypnotic repetition is the basis for evolution and ultimate change. The feast of life, death, and...

Shackleton & Zimpel

Primal Forms

Cosmo Rhythmatic

"Sam Shackleton, returning to Cosmo Rhythmatic after his outing on the label as Tunes of Negation, and Polish clarinetist/multi-instrumentalist Wacław Zimpel have joined forces for this debut collaborative release. Both artists boast a track record of successful collaborative projects, the two have united after being introduced by mutual friends, in wake of a shared interest in minimalism and a broad set of influences rooted in different musical traditions. Joining Zimpel’s demanding multi-layered experience in avantgarde jazz with Shackleton’s mathematical, esoteric lyricism, the pair have used all the tools at their disposal, aiming at a new form of ritual trance music. This fierce fusion of styles brings out the very best in each other, showing unique clarity and force.”—Boomkat

Vladislav Delay

Rakka

Cosmo Rhythmatic

It’s been 5 years since “VISA”, Sasu Ripatti’s latest release under his iconic Vladislav Delay moniker. Time of the study, of exploration and reconstruction, a time in which his sound, his methods, and practice have never ceased to evolve. It is now time for a new release which he titled Rakka, and it only makes sense for it to find a home on Cosmo Rhythmatic. Ripatti makes it very clear that Rakka is not a ‘nature recording’, though it is inspired by the time he spent in the wilderness above arctic circle and tree lines, and the feelings and thoughts that traversed him while there. The music on the album is thus directly inspired by the arctic tundra: the elemental struggle to survive or thrive, the living creatures’ fight for existence. The raw, undefined, uncontrolled and uncorrupted power that exists within it. Ripatti remakes these values into music, in monumental yet humble forms. Reductionists though not minimal, setting each part to prove its meaning, stripped from the meaninglessness of hooks and melodies. Sounds feel like carved off the flesh, leaving the bones bare. Beats emerge as ripples, as the motion of isolated forces, thwarting with the icy textures and backgrounds and trembling with strenuous energy. A truly extreme ecosystem of sound, unleashed in the album as much as in the new Vladislav Delay live set, visually given life by Ripatti’s wife, artist Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF).

King Midas Sound

Solitude

Cosmo Rhythmatic

“Woe are King Midas Sound on ’Solitude’, their crushingly desolate new album, auspiciously cued for a Valentine’s Day release on Shapednoise’s Cosmo Rhythmatic label.  A meditation on loss, narrated by Roger Robinson and produced by Kevin Martin (The Bug), ’Solitude’ sees KMS gut out their sound following the bittersweet shoegaze-dub blooms of their ‘Edition1’ [2015] collaboration with Fennesz, resulting in a starkly noirish elegy to extinguished romance and love in the endtimes. Combining the grown-up, confessional vulnerability of Robinson’s lyrics and dreader-than-dread delivery with the most stripped back arrangements in Kevin Martin’s entire catalogue, the duo drill deep into emotional sufferation with simultaneously suffocating yet somehow beautiful results. Over the course of 12 songs, they glacially limn a coming-to-terms with a loss that has been enforced or unexpected, and ultimately arrive at the starkest conclusions with cinematic effect. ’Solitude’ pushes King Midas Sound’s pessimism to heart-rinsing degrees. Staging Robinson in a series of vantablack scenes veiled by smoky, minimal synth-lighting, the poet processes irrational and incessant feelings of rejection and loneliness. From the aching desolation of ‘You Disappear’ to the unflinching realisations of ‘X’, the ache imparted by Robinson’s lyrics is only amplified by his quiet stoicism, while Kevin Martin finds power in a sense of deferred gratification and his embrace of negative space. The effect is nothing less than transfixing in the physicality of Robinson’s descriptions and the detached nature of Martin’s sferic electronics on ‘In The Night’, while pangs of lush optimism lend an exquisite contrast to...

Vainio, Mika & Franck Vigroux

Ignis

Cosmo Rhythmatic

“A stunning set of previously unheard posthumous recordings from Mika Vainio aided and abetted by Franck Vigroux. Haunting, cinematic, extreme electronic panoramas of the highest order…Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux’s brutal yet filigree electronics come to light in ‘Ignis’, which finally discloses the further, etheric results of recording sessions that made up their ‘Peau Froide, Léger Soleil’ album in 2014, their celebrated previous collaboration for Cosmo Rhythmatic.Posthumously issued following Mika’s untimely death in 2017, Ignis taps into the pair’s mutual respect for unsound and proprioceptive allusion, operating at liminal levels of tonal and spatial perception in a six track LP that leaves the project with a sense of unresolved tension.Since Pan Sonic ceased operations in 2009, Mika found one of his sharpest foils in French multi-instrumentalist Franck Vigroux. They embarked on a lengthy creative process, articulated through studio and live performances, resulting in the powerful Peau Froide, Léger Soleil album and further recordings planned for a 2nd release. The end results of these efforts are collected on Ignis, a set of six parts paying tribute to a mutual fascination with what lies at and beyond the threshold of sonic comprehension. Where their previous effort traded in a mix of colossal, pendulous industrial funk and abyss-baiting doom, this one fully embraces the void in all its glorious mystery.From a trail of icy bleeps, Brume lures us into cathedral-like ice cave dimensions with breathtaking cinematic effect, before the antechamber of Ne te retourne pas highlights those supposed dimensions with streaks of phosphorescing...

Loizou, Sophia

Irregular Territories

Cosmo Rhythmatic

“Staggering volley of hyper junglist killers from Sophia Loizou on a new EP of pressurized subs, hoover and percolated vocals taking us somewhere between Lee Gamble’s classic Diversions, Metalheadz Blue Note Sessions and some forward Arca x EVOL collusion. TIPPED!!!  Sophia’s first release since the much acclaimed Singulacra [Kathexis, 2016], Irregular Territories provides a definitive example of Loizou’s sound as it firmly asserts her music in a rarified hauntological rave headspace that meticulously explores an exploded deconstructionist style that she’s developed since her 2014 debut Chrysalis.  With one foot in late ‘90s halcyon daze, and another toeing the future, Sophia combines a lust for the ruffneck with a sharp mind for complex structural integrity and inventive aesthetic. Synching fragmented beats with human gasps, choral synths and richly ephemeral textures, she bridges temporalities and dimensions in a way that recalls an auditory DeepDream composite formed from millions of eyes-shut moments at Metalheadz sessions.  Album opener Loop of Perception quite literally takes off like a jet engine in the rave, while Memories of Angels conjures and sustains a lump-in-throat suspense through unresolved pads and hide ’n seek breakbeat edits, before it all comes together, gelled by wide, pressurized subs in Shadow Box.  The brief vignette of hoover and percolated vocal motifs in Frozen Dust opens up the B-side like some Arca and EVOL collusion, and The Interior Life of Another feels like a jungle inception of 4Hero’s Parallel Universe, leaving the poignant Morphogenesis to sum up the metaphysical...

Die Angel

Entropien I

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus and Oren Ambarchi break down to the soul of noise for the latest release on Cosmo Rhythmic. RIYL Pan Sonic, Mika Vainio, KTL...  Ilpo Väisänen (Pan Sonic) and Dirk Dresselhaus (Schneider TM) retitle themselves die Angel for Entropien 1; their eighth LP of electro-acoustic music together, and the duo’s debut for Shapednoise’s Cosmo Rhythmic label. Accompanied by skilled improvisor Oren Ambarchi on two tracks, die Angel model a complex physicality through raw, elemental inputs, exploring a flux of reactive feedback processes and mutating, unstructured sonic states generated from crackling fusions of electronics, drums, electric guitar and field recordings warped and riddled with FX.  Taking its title from both the Finnish word and German plural for entropy - in physics, the measure of thermodynamic disorder within a system - Entropien 1 renders seven examples of their kinetic systems in elusive action, keening from arrhythmic mulch to sloshing brownian motions and a brilliantly towering 15 minute exploration that tips into billowing, white hot feedback with scintillating effect.  The amorphous results document and describe a freeness of energy travelling from body to machine and diffused across alternating acoustic environments. Each player works as controlled, external variables which act upon and interact with the different acoustic conditions to tempestuous impact, convulsing between squashed, recursive diffractions in Roha, to the sublimated roil of jazz drums and electric guitar wail in Terminen Kevät, before harnessing sloshing feedback chaos in the combustible, diaphanous two parts of Entropia...

Simbiosi

Indastria EP

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Simbiosi rip out their first 12” proper on the Cosmo Rhythmatic label after leaving a wide berth since their debut 3LP shockout, Elements for Actress’ Werk Discs imprint in 2015 and a subsequent appearance on Actress’ DJ-Kicks mix.  In a fiercely condensed session of hardcore techno thistle and knackered throbs, the Indastria EP slugs like a rusty Italian motor with a wonky cam shaft, constantly threatening to spin out of control with each gear shift but kept on course by way of backstreet-mechanic engineering.  It’s grim and remorselessly underground material, banking the escalating NPLGNN-style filtered noise of HRD90 at the front and cycling thru the bombed-out doom core trample of Indastria to the depressive collapse of Eve with its carmine horror pads on Side A, then spluttering out the tarry churn of Dicentra and chaotic inverted bass drum pressure of Teiwsjh to round out the B-side and leave no doubts behind their primitive intentions.

Osborne-Lanthier, Jesse And Grischa Lichtenberger

CSLM

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Dense, crushing electronic works from Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Raster Noton's Grischa Lichtenberger, featuring three deadly reworks from Rabit, Low Jack and Gabor Lázár.  Conversation Sur Lettres Mortes is a physically affective conceptual album revolving around the relationship between Berlin’s Jesse Osborne Lanthier & Grischa Lichtenberger and the archaic apparatus of old cathode ray televisions and VHS units. It was first conceived as a live project for the Mutek/Elektra festival 2014 at the MAC in Montréal, QC Canada, and now lands heavy on Cosmo Rhythmatic - the label curated by Shapednoise with his buddies D. Carbone and Ascion.  The project should surely resonate with anyone who grew up in a household with at least one of those old beasts - you know the ones; monolithic black boxes that would own a corner of your living room or wherever, heck you may even still own one. Based on a series of conversations (excerpted in the liner notes) discussing the sets’ obsolete status and the schism between tradition and trade, the A-side holds six cranky, skudgy and rhythm-driven creations framed by that familiar, ghostly, whining timbre of the cathode ray tube that would persist behind anything that was playing, or which would become distorted when you had to “tune” your set using baffling arrays of fiddly knobs like some modular boffin, when all you wanted was to watch some garbage without “snow” or streaking lines across the monitor.  However, a few samples of dialogue aside, it’s not a mere exercise...

Vainio, Mika & Franck Vigroux

Peau Froide, Leger Soleil

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Sheathed in some of the best album artwork of 2015, Mika Vainio and Franck Vigroux reveal the buzzing and psyched-out electronic sculptures of 'Peau froide, léger soleil' on Shapednoise's Cosmo Rhythmatic label. The latest and arguably most powerful in a long line of collaborations between the Finnish producer and his peers aesthetically finds him closest to the crushing electronics + processed guitar equations of 'Life (… It Eats You Up)' (2011) or 'Kilo' (2013), but also with a couple of brilliant runs into vocodered, sidereal electronics that really set this record apart. Three years in the making, following a live collaboration in Paris 2012, 'Peau froide, léger soleil' is an exercise in sensitive intensity and spatial scale, seamlessly mapping Vigroux's alchemical guitar process into Vainio's free swaggering structures and tonal extremities. From the deep freeze intro and craggy peaks of opener 'Deux', they take in the ice palace designs of 'Mémoire', which first reveals the strange voices that come to haunt the rest of the record, emerging from the buzzsaw blasts and subbass waves of 'Souffles' like the ghost of Bruce Haack, or creeping like hyaline spectres from the microtonal gloam of 'Ravages'. However, if you're after out-and-out Vainio wreckage, they excel at that too with later trax such as the white-out guitar storm of 'Parabole', and certainly in the finishing move of funked-up electro bass riffs and banking amp buzz entitled 'Le crâne tambour'.  Effectively it's the heaviest you'll hear from this icy and bloodied corner of the...

Black Rain & Shapednoise

Apophis

Cosmo Rhythmatic

Crushing celestial tech-noise objects from Black Rain (a.k.a. Ike Yard's Stuart Argabright) with Shapednoise and Demdike Stare's Miles Whittaker. 'Apophis', so named after asteroid 99942 which poses an uncertain threat to humanity, was written and realised over summer 2014 and supposes four cuts of destructive electronics describing a potential, eschatalogical event and its aftermath in grim and unflinching detail. Black Rain and Shapednoise are clearly steeled and ready for what may come, from 'Metal Home's' premonition of rubbling noise forces and slivers of electronic salvation, to the thunderous, scudding speedcore mass of 'Autonomous Lethality', or the double-timed serpentine lash of 'Interceptor' proving they've come to terms with our potential extinguished existence. Likewise, we've always imagined Miles came from some parallel cyberpunk dimension just outside Burnley anyway, so his Ramen reshape of the latter makes sense, hammering away its angles until it exudes sludgy, effluent hardcore techno tropes. Definitely one for Mad Max characters, techno freaks and noise creeps!