Ecstatic Recordings

Spivak

You Win Again

Ecstatic Recordings

Bursting with bittersweet, memorable songs, Maria Spivak follows her spectacular and highly sought-after debut album with this new LP for Ecstatic, operating at the intersection of blazed synthpop, folk and shoegaze with a sparkling Drexciyan dimension. Real strong gear that comes highly recommended if yr into anything from Cocteau Twins to Junior Boys, Jonnine to Jessy Lanza. One of those records that feels like a god-sent breeze at the peak of a mediterranean heatwave, on ‘You Win Again’ Maria Spivak builds on the charmed pulse of 2020's 'Met'a To P'eib = Μετά Το Ρέιβ' and its 2021 follow-up 'Rare Backwards' to assemble nine tightly-wound songs that hover at the intersection of shimmering wave mutations and sunset love songs. It's a highly satisfying mix that oozes longing and regret, revealing itself on opener 'Mid Week Ritual' where Spivak's gently auto-tuned voice rides the kind of lonesome acoustic guitar you’d expect to hear on a Grouper record. On ‘My Loneliness is Healing Me’, she transports the countrified charm of The Breeders’ ‘Title TK’ to the Cypriot wilds, exclaiming in the most sardonic terms that “I hate the winter, and all it does, to all my friends, and everyone I've ever met” over two minutes that reek of wistful sentimentality. 'Golden Boy' offsets jerky rhythms against Spivak's resonating voice like some blessed outtake from Junior Boys’ classic ’So This Is Goodbye’ - the kind of tune that drips with nostalgia from the very first listen, while ’Risk &...

Not Waving

The Place I've Been Missing

Ecstatic Recordings

Luminous and reflective ambient pop opus from Alessio Natalizia on a career-defining outing as Not Waving, featuring contributions from Romance, Marie Davidson, More Eaze and Spivak, plus a posthumous appearance by occasional collaborator Mark Lanegan, R.I.P. Poised and heartfelt, ‘The Place I've Been Missing’ feels like the culmination of Natalizia’s almost two decades work as a producer, songwriter, prolific collaborator and label founder, bringing together ostensibly disparate stylistic elements gathered on his travels over the years. Comfortable in both colourful pop and downcast modes, here these two ends of his repertoire come together in a way that’s perhaps eluded him in the past, marked by the passing of time and the joyous - and then suddenly painful - undulation of life as we get older. It’s that sense of ambiguous hopefulness, of joyful melancholy, that flows through the album’s veins, where the unforgettably hooky, heartbeat-shaped ‘Fool’ sits alongside the FM synths x trills anthem ‘Running Back To You” with Romance, and the trip hop swoon of ‘Again and Again’, featuring Spivak. In the spaces between, Natalizia paints in bluer shades: 'Never Let Me Go' is a nebulous scramble of purring chorals and epic, Hollywood strings; 'The Distance Between' clicks rickety piano improvisations into minimalist repetitions that dissolve into slow moving field recordings; and 'Waiting For You To Notice Me', finds More Eaze’s fluttering AutoTune gliding over a delicate piano that's brushed into a dense, harmonic crescendo. Although it’s not made explicit, it’s not...

Celestial

Listen To The Sky

Ecstatic Recordings

After emerging from seemingly nowhere in 2021 with a beautiful debut album of smudged bliss, Celestial reprise their blend of ambient psych blues on a second album for Ecstatic, this time guest-starring label enigma Romance. Celestial nested a lowkey classic with their first album ‘I Had Too Much To Dream Last Night’ in the hot summer of 2021. ‘Listen to the Sky’ is its spiritual successor, venturing a palpably rawer sound porous to AGFA tape infidelities, imbuing their music with the kind of aged warble that gets right under the skin. The mottled patina blurs their sound to position it in the imagination somewhere between the kind of outsider, homespun curios dug by Pete Swanson & Jed Bindeman’s Freedom To Spend label, Pye Corner Audio’s wood fired synth textures, and BoC and 1991 interludes left to smoke and unspool in a bothy. Frankly it’s gorgeous stuff, set to ratchet their cult status in the nebulous ambient nexus. Embracing a broader palette of piano, horns and electronics beside their trusted electric guitar strokes, Celestial paint richer soundscapes on the back of the eyelids, employing cannier mixing to make their phrases and figures emerge and recede from the ferric fug like scenery shifting in and out of shallow focus. In effect they skew from the first LP’s Balearic bliss to a more allusive, cinematic feel on the journey between the unfurling loops of ‘Brother Sub, Sister Moon’ ft. Romance, disrupting the serenity with distorted synth brass flares on...

Romance

Fade Into You

Ecstatic Recordings

Love is dissolved into gooey pink syrup on Romance's debut album proper, a melodramatic smudge of dream pop, Hollywood glam and power ballads that gurgle n fizz thru yr emotional veins. Stunning gauzy bliss, highly recommended if yr feeling Malibu/DJ Lostboi x OPN's 'Eccojams’ x Stars of the Lid x Pinkcourtesyphone. In the glistening wake of that cult Celine Dion tribute and a couple of collaborative albums with Lynch sound designer Dean Hurley, Romance diverts their attention to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s acidic ’75 melodrama ‘The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant’, turning it into a symphonic rumination on love and decayed glamour. The film’s unforgiving dissection of a toxic relationship between a haughty fashion designer and a beautiful but icy ingenue makes use of elegant surfaces to hide tooth-and-claw instincts, a thing Romance conveys thru a palette of smeared-mascara strings and aqueous synths expressively painted to canvas with an ineffably poignant storytelling style. Heart-in-mouth with a sense of nostalgic longing, ‘Fade Into You’ dwells in a half light shared with Oneohtrix Point Never’s Eccojams and the fantasy glamour of Pinkcourtesyphone with its richly transportive melancholy. The emotive signposts of cinematic soundtracks are refracted through a hall-of-mirrors that also reminds us of Brian Eno’s 'Discreet Music' with its long, phased strings slowly criss-crossing into a pitched-down voice. Elsewhere, 'Golden Slumbers' turns evocative music hall woodwind into a sensual soundscape that's not a million miles from Jake Muir's bathhouse experiments, breathing its fictile tones quietly into...

Romance & Dean Hurley

River Of Dreams

Ecstatic Recordings

Romance & Dean Hurley smudge the collective timeline on a second collaborative album of youtube-sampling ambient fantasies, landing somewhere on the dial between meditation tape, social commentary and regression therapy. Stunning melodramatic wooze from the Lynchian paradigm - essential listening if yr into anything from The Caretaker to Julee Cruise. Continuing their prismatic dissection of daytime soap operas, David Lynch’s chief sound designer Dean Hurley and Celine Dion-worshipping enigma Romance slide into the darkest recesses of fantasy-based escapism on an immersive followup to last year’s ‘In Every Dream Home A Heartache’. While that album spotlighted the omnipresence of daytime tv re-runs and pervasive, endlessly-looped broadcasts, ‘River of Dreams’ examines the interior, mental imbalance sewn by obsessive fandom. As the pair explain, “…the same waters that harvest and transport buoyant dreams, often funnel into nightmarish, tumultuous oceans…” Just as Twin Peaks eyeballed the grotesque energy bubbling beneath the surface of suburban America, ‘River of Dreams’ looks at the same phenomenon using the passing of time as a magnifying component. Lynch's original series was tangled in 1980s and '90s soap themes that have almost lost their relevance four decades later, and so the album’s sanded-down pads, gooey, hyper-emotional loops and detached vocal snippets satirise the past just as much as they idolise it. 'My Heart Beats In Dreams' is an apt example, steering the mood into a bleak windswept landscape scored by tempestuous whistling. In the background, the faintest outline of a beat - memories...

Not Waving & Romance

Eyes Of Fate

Ecstatic Recordings

“Not Waving & Romance turn heads into candyfloss with this sublime full-length opus, a keenly awaited follow-up to that Romance tape of mottled modern classical loops that sold out in an hour at the end of last year. If you’re looking for a smudge of blissed ambient in the vein of The Caretaker’s ‘Persistent Repetition Of Phrases', classic Stars Of The Lid, or even Arve Henriksen’s sublime ‘Chiaroscuro’, this is it.  Identified as a consummate collaborator in recent years on records with Jim O’Rourke, Mark Lanegan and Jay Glass Dubs; Alessio Natalizia aka Not Waving is now found at his most amorphous alongside Romance - an enigmatic figure who appeared from outta nowhere with that stunning ‘You Must Remember This’ tape in late 2020, and now lends their midas touch to the nine immaculate pieces on ‘Eyes Of Fate.’ It’s ambient music of a genuinely rarified, elevated calibre, or what the duo tongue-in-cheek term “mythological, Old Testament ambient”, a phrase which signifies a pointedly classicist approach comparable with seminal records by The Caretaker/Leyland Kirby, Brian Eno and SOTL, but with results that also coolly resonate with the modernist realm of castles in the sky ambient inhabited by the likes of Malibu, Kareem Lotfy or AYYA.  The duo’s first recordings explore the fertile territory between secular and religious music that has long fascinated them, and perhaps most poignantly in an age when allegories of the divine and existential bliss and terror are felt most acutely. Using a palette of...

Spivak

Μετά Το Ρέιβ

Ecstatic Recordings

“Spivak first came to our attention with her guest vocals on Jay Glass Dubs acclaimed album '’Soma’ and here arrives fully formed with a quietly penetrative sound, layering her haunted but coolly melodic vocals and synth pads around bare-bones, DIY production that makes a virtue of “mistakes” and grit in-the-mix. Lessons from ’80s post-punk to ambient-pop and trip hop inform Spivak’s music as much as her observations on Cypriot sociopolitics, culture, and nature. But the references are more suggestive than concrete, often imperceptibly woven into her songs with a fine sort of folk art filigree that feels timeless but directly effective within her field, recalling the low-key magick of everyone from Teresa Winter to HTRK, yet gauzily delivered from her own, enchanted perspective. Spivak has worked towards this seemingly effortless style and conception of atmosphere for a decade, flowering from MA studies in Architecture in the UK, to develop her roots in Cyprus, where she draws on the energies of a small but active local scene, as well as the island’s agitated recent history, against a backdrop of myth-inspiring topography, that all help imbue her style of sound sculpture with a distinctive, quietly conflicted soul.  Her first bouquet of songs are intimate but prickly, ancient and futuristic creations, unfurling from primitive dream-pop in ‘Minus The motivational Speech’, to the nerve-tweaking chamber blooz of ‘Hardware Store Ballad’ with a deeply arresting, story-telling style that’s naturally brought to life in the music; from the ephemeral sensuality of ‘Sec’, sounding like Lena...

Maxwell Sterling

Laced With Rumour: Loud-speaker Of Truth

Ecstatic Recordings

“Originating as a multi-channel installation commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary in 2018, the four extended pieces here were recorded at home in Morecambe Bay and then subsequently placed in a room alongside works by Moki Cherry (spouse of Don, mother of Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry), Penny Slinger, and a collection of static musical instruments the piece was intended to complement. As a follow-up to Sterling’s 2017 cult hit ‘Hollywood Medieval’ for The Death of Rave, ‘Laced With Rumour’ works with notably more fluid and gently psychoactive structuring that takes in seemingly disparate influences - from Roman mythology to Nottingham’s Lace industry - that result in a sprawling but intimate world of sound, characterised by aetheric arrangements that effectively elide the disciplines of spiritual jazz, chamber music, and art installation into something altogether new. Much like Kara-Lis Coverdale’s converging interests in traditional vs hyper-modern, acoustic vs artificial and synthetic modes of sound, Sterling’s work here is fluid and unorthodox, but rooted in a deep understanding of convention which he proceeds to bend and shape at will. The album opens with a slowly contemplative and almost solemn drift between ‘Laced’, which features samples of Don Cherry weft into its tingling fray of electro-acoustic timbres, alongside the breezy chamber strokes of ‘With Rumour’, the hallucinogenic qualities of ‘Loud-Speaker’, and the darker revelation ‘Of Truth’, which concludes with a transition from mired murk to tones that channel Maxwell’s refined cinematic nous.  One of those albums that's impossible to fully absorb in one sitting, ‘Laced...

Primitive World

The Revolt Of Aphrodite

Ecstatic Recordings

“Throwing himself into bouts of taut, fractious, and probing electronics on his sophomore LP, ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’, Sam Wills uses the same palette as found on his ‘White On White LP’ - PPG Wave, Kurzweil K250, Emulator 4 and Lexicon 224 - albeit with a finer manipulation of form. Oscillating between the Alva Noto/ Anne-James Chaton-esque minimalism of ‘All This Vulgar Data’, to the cubist UKFunky rhythms in ‘Iolanthe Dances’ and Dego-like broken beats in ‘Skins Plastered With White Lead’, we end up in the curdled electronic sensuality on ’The Foetus Of a Love Song’ which gives the album a deftly imaginative and playful dimension that stands in contrast to the homogeneity of much of modern electronic music’s all-too-often blinkered dreams. Following a similar process that was applied to the visual cues of overlooked British constructivist Marlow Moss in his 2018 debut, and recent lysergic rescoring of Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, Willis employs a strategy of in/direct references to Durrell’s seminal ’60s sci-fi diptych ‘The Revolt of Aphrodite’ - comprising the novels ’Tunc’ and ‘Nunquam’ - in an absorbing re-imagining of its scenes, rendered in a mix of electronic shrapnel, craftily disrupted UK club rhythms, and stuttering vocaloids. The original books’ themes of “Nietzchean psycho-sexual satire”, and their acerbic, bawdy, densely allusive text, serve to push Primitive World toward more complex drum programming/editing and a finer spectrum of timbres in order to best transpose the stories into music. Set against a backdrop of the May 1968 general strike in...

Russom, Gavilán Rayna

The Envoy

Ecstatic Recordings

“Gorgeous album of pulsing, beat-less urges by NYC transdisciplary artist Gavilán Rayna Russom, coming into her own with a distinguished solo debut album statement featuring the voice of Cosey Fanni Tutti and brass arrangements by downtown legend Peter Zummo. It's the second notable (if completely different) album in recent months, alongside Barker’s ‘Utility’, that keeps things fluid and propulsive while completely removing the kickdrum.  After decades exploring her sonic personality in various projects inspired by her deep immersion in NYC’s club and avant-garde scenes, Rayna uses ‘The Envoy’ as a vessel to firm up and convey her personal conclusions on intersections of gender and electronic music. Enriched with complex human experience and key influence from sci-fi writer Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel ’The Left Hand of Darkness’ - a book that strongly resonated with her due to its descriptions of an alien race with multiple sexual characteristics - the album is intended to realign misconceptions of Russom’s prescient early work such as 2005’s ‘The Days of Mars’ LP for DFA, which arguably foreshadowed a rise of beat-less and more ambiguous urges that are now commonplace in contemporary dance music, yet were at the time lumped in with retro-fetishist trends. With ‘The Envoy’ Russom returns to a 2019 music scene that’s better prepared with the politics of an emerging new world, and thus readied for her ideas to take hold in the public consciousness. Entwining Russom’s perspectives on gender, the occult, and spirituality, and how they relate to the body...

Not Waving & Dark Mark

Downwelling

Ecstatic Recordings

“Inspired, wholly unexpected collaboration between legendary singer songwriter Mark Lanegan and Ecstatic maverick Alessio Natalizia aka Not Waving - a timeless, modernist fusion of barrel-aged narratives and diverse, experimental backdrops, RIYL Scott Walker, Conny Plank & Moebius, David Sylvian...  Following Not Waving’s stellar recent recordings with Jim O’Rourke , Colin Potter & Jay Glass Dubs, ‘Downwelling’ finds him in a striking Pas de deux with alt. rock god Mark Lanegan (Screaming Trees, QOTSA). It’s one of those rare link-ups that truly transcends the sum of its parts, with Not Waving’s rolling range of nuanced electronics acting as backdrops for Lanegan’s smoky barritone storytelling. Delivered in a husky but pliable voice that has come to define the American alternative rock scene since the early ‘90s, Lanegan inhabits the songs with a reserved presence that has served him well for decades, but which has never been heard in quite this context. Pairing music recorded by Natalizia between London, Italy, and Paris over the past five years, with vocals recorded by Lanegan in LA, the duo arrive at dreamy non-place that’s not defined by geography or time. Instead the album offers a timeless insight into human behaviour, as reflected in the sleeve art details from the ‘Lights of Canopus’, a Persian version of the ancient Indian book of animal fables, the ‘Panchatantra.’ Thanks to Lanegan’s classically dusty tone - famously described as being “scratchy as a three day beard yet as supple as moccasin leather” - and the breadth of Not Waving’s...

Serpente

Parada

Ecstatic Recordings

“Brilliantly relentless LinnDrum productions made as a sort of homage to Prince’s ‘Parade’ album; 40 minutes of virulent, Afro-Latin polyrhythms that sound something like Prince producing free jazz jungle with Jamal Moss and the Príncipe gang.  Lisbon-based Bruno Silva enacts pure voodoo with extended, restless LinnDrum workouts that take Prince’s distinctive LM-1 signatures as a starting point for loose-limbed tribal jams that flow with the colour of the Brazilian carnival and the rhythmic psychedelia of hardcore jungle. The title ‘Parada’ cannily nods both to Prince’s ‘Parade’ album and the percussion of carnival parades, speaking to a plurality of polyrhythms in a tradition of fusion music that seeks to meld myriad forms of communal, ritualistic and ecstatic music - not a million miles from the bare carnival funk of ‘Parade’s’ ’New Position’. In six parts ranging from extended runs of drumkit-falling-down-stairs to nimble junglist mutations and rapid, darting concisions, Serpente spells out a heavily intoxicating and intuitive sort of rhythmic psychedelia that lives up to a broad palette of influences ranging from Haitian voodoo ceremonies and central African drum circles, through to the Sun Ra Arkestra and Alan Silva’s Celestial Communion Orchestra, via Keith Hudson’s dub transcendence, and the rude modernism of UK rave and virulent styles currently coming from Lisbon ghettos on the Príncipe label. In attempting to untie and unite these worldly references, an asymmetric percussive friction and hypnotically unresolved tension naturally emerges from Serpente’s flux of machine made patterns. It’s there in the restlessly gnashing, swingeing brilliance...

Not Glass

Forma

Ecstatic Recordings

“Not Glass is the hugely immersive, often surprising debut collaboration between Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) and his longtime correspondent Dimitris Papadatos (Jay Glass Dubs), deploying a sublime and unexpected line of mystic, ambient dub and tribal rhythms to reconfigure what we know about their respective outputs. If you regularly join dots between Eno & Budd, Sylvian & Sakamoto, Peter Gabriel & John Carpenter, and crave that sweet spot where pop and ambient archetypes reach an unsteady equilibrium, this one’s spectacularly satisfying.  Paying tribute to Latin and Greek authors Ovid and Heraclitus in a suite of sublime electronics and cryptic rhythms comparable to a theatrical soundtrack, ‘Forma’ is the result of years of daily chats between the London and Athens-based artists where they cemented the album’s concept around key quotes by the legendary poet/philosophers, who hail from their respective homelands of Italy and Greece.  On this timeless plane, Natalizia and Papadatos spaciously consolidate their contrasting, rhythm-driven approaches in a reverberant, often beatless sphere of exploration. Removed from their usual handrails, the artists operate at their most open-ended and suggestive, amorphously shapeshifting from gloaming shadowplays of synth and keys to investigate arcane percussive impulses and iridescent ambient whorls. The result is a perfect, finely shaded marriage of their mutually esoteric, outsider Southern European energies, which intuitively acknowledges and inhabits the paradoxes of their respective styles. The illusively static yet mercurial ebb and flow of the atmospheric intro ‘Fallite fallentes’ sets the scene, where ‘Dum loquor, hora fugit’ invokes a viscous...

Not Waving

Futuro (Music For The Waldorf Project)

Ecstatic Recordings

“Futuro is Not Waving’s engrossing, highly original soundtrack to Sean Rogg’s world-renowned art/theatre project. It features Ambient, environmental and tonal works & abstractions that come highly recommended if yr into Laurie Spiegel, Steve Roach, Brian Eno, Shuttle 358...  ’Futuro’ is Not Waving’s sublime synth/ambient soundtrack to one of the world’s most intense art/theatre experiences: Sean Rogg’s radically immersive ‘The Waldorf Project’ - fusing choreography, spatial design, music and performance. Drawn from more than 20 hours of material recorded between 2013-2018, it finds Alessio Natalizia exploring a style of tonal and spatial minimalism that works as a fine palette cleanser for much of what you’ve heard from him in the past. While not a new solo album, per se, the longform, Eno-like results of ‘Futuro’ demonstrate the full wingspan of Not Waving’s obsessive knowledge and emotive feel for electronic composition, making it in some senses one of the most substantial and unusual releases in his catalogue thus far. It ranges from highly emotive, site-specific synth meditations thru to bittersweet Kosmische intuitions, and milky, Eno-esque beauties. But if any part sums up Futuro's widescreen scope, it’s the final side’s 17 minutes of awning, gently curdled synth pads - originally used in a performance to 4000 people in Thailand laid in pitch black, with bodies formed in triangles while dancers caressed their faces. It ends the album with such memorable effect as to make it something of a modern day environmental/ambient classic - and perhaps our favourite Not Waving release in an...

The Cop Killers

The Cop Killers

Ecstatic Recordings

“A genuine holy grail of Italian post-industrial music, The Cop Killers’ sole, eponymous tape is remastered and issued on vinyl for the first time via Alessio Natalizia’s Ecstatic label. Fetching triple figures on the 2nd hand market (there’s a copy on scogs atm for £300) this is an indispensable slice of ‘80s Europe’s underground experimental rhizome.  An important release for Ecstatic and one very close to their heart, ‘The Cop Killers’ was originally released in 1982 on the legendary Trax label and features the industrial power trio of Trax co-founder Vittore Baroni and label regular Daniele Ciullini assisted by UK’s Mark A. Phillips (Five Times of Dust) in supposing a sci-fi narrative set in a not-so-distant future society. While clearly drawing influence and literary license from classic sci-fi by Orwell, Ray Bradbury and William Burroughs, the trio also take cues from the not-so-distant history of Italian fascism to offer a subtly coded and subversive warning against right-wing ideologies. In the process The Cop Killers distinguished themselves by preferring to plants seeds of hope amid the rubble of their peers nihilistic/apocalyptic visions, implicitly turning the album into a sort of “pacifist parable”. The political aspect wouldn’t be half as crucial without the music, though. A coarse blend of Italian-accented english vox with backing tracks ranging from jaunty synth figures to cloven drum machine malfunctions and noisier wig-outs, it was mixed on a dual cassette deck and mixer from numerous tapes in just over 90 minutes, and successfully carries the narrative...

Jay Glass Dubs

Plegnic

Ecstatic Recordings

“Jay Glass Dubs returns with this plate of new, original material channelling Greek pop and echoes of classic 4AD soused in distress and flipped in dub...properly good, perhaps the best yet from Dimitris Papadatos.  Jay Glass Dubs sublimates Athenian distress and ennui into plasmic dub ether on ‘Plegnic’, his lushly evolved first collection of new material for Ecstatic, following from their acclaimed, 2LP ‘Dubs’ set of his earliest, hard-to-find tape releases, Deconstructing and rebuilding Jamaican dub with musique concrete production methods and a lingering air of inspiration from classic 4AD, new age and Laïko, or Greek popular music, Jay Glass Dubs fascinatingly evolves his sound with richer melodic and harmonic arrangements in a concerted effort to bridge and expand the nostalgic, esoteric and dancefloor dimensions of his unique sound world. The key to the record lies in its title, ‘Plegnic’; an extinct word meaning “to strike like a hammer”, as well as its palpable sense of nostalgia. In this archaic context, JGD uses vintage machines and obsolete samples into junction with vocals from Yorgia Karidi - sound artist and coincidentally former beau of his childhood neighbour, and Andreas Kassapis one of his oldest friends, who provides the cover art - to conjure a strikingly new, mutated take on classic and well-trodden styles; metaphorically and anachronistically renewing their purpose while connoting his newfound dancefloor drive in the process. Recording took place at his mother’s house in the Athens suburbs, with Fugazi’s ‘Steady Diet of Nothing’ on repeat. It was here...

Head Technician

Profane Architecture

Ecstatic Recordings

Martin Jenkins aka Pye Corner Audio aka Head Technician returns with this new album of immersive slow acid enigmas inspired by Brutalist architecture, Detroit house and UK bleep ’n bass.  Taking inspiration from his fascination with Brutalist construction, Jenkins exclusively uses Roland TR-606, MC-202 and TB-303 boxes plus the Roland System 100 modular synth to sketch out a slow, murky sound with results that are even darker and more obscure than his previous work.  Echoes of early Detroit and UK bleep & bass infiltrate the stark corridors of Profane Architecture as much as the hauntological spirits of BoC, combining to make a sound that revels in nostalgia yet yearns for the future. It’s not a new idea, but it is one that Jenkins executes with such classic style and unique character that can only lead to comparisons with acid maestros such as early Plastikman or the Analord, Richard J. James.  For moody dancers, Profane Architecture is perfect; from the oozing elan of opener First Pour thru the spheric momentum of Béton Brut and the mind-weaving acid of Formwork he establishes a slickly hypnotic sound that works its magick with more funk on the flipped, generating the tactile form of Second Pour and the ruggedly hewn groove of The New Brutalism, then closing out with the exquisite darkness of Demolition - a real highlight in his extensive and highly collectible catalogue.

Sterile Hand

Sterile Hand

Ecstatic Recordings

Hypnotic new EBM techno project from Juan Mendez aka Silent Servant featuring vocals from Ori Ofir, highly recommended if yr into Nitzer Ebb, DAF, Boy Harsher, Phase Fatale!  Juan Mendez a.k.a Silent Servant finds his ideal EBM vocal foil in Ori Ofir under their Sterile Hand moniker. The duo’s first vinyl round for Not Waving’s Ecstatic label is a dark and sleazy run of deviant industrial techno and pugilistic EBM cuts made over the last year.  Following Silent Servant’s killer split 12” with Not Waving and Pye Corner Audio in 2017, and two fierce 12”s with Marcel Dettmann and Phase Fatale in 2018, the L.A.-based artist behind Sandwell District and Jealous God is at the apex of his game right now, combining EBM and techno in faithful but inventive new ways. If there was anything previously missing from Silent Servant’s music, it’s only become apparent thru the seamless and natural incorporation of Ori Ofir’s classic-styled but unique vocals.   The two L.A.-based artists push each other down tightening alleys of EBM and industrial techno, with Ofir’s stark, blunted declamations haunting and highlighting the most fetid corners of Mendez’s rolled-steel productions. It’s a style that works to cryptic, head-turning effect in the Voigt Kampff-like probe of Personality Test, then with increasing dancefloor force in the Nitzer Ebb-esquer flow of The Hunter and the punishing, gnashing bite of Security, whereas Listen For Water and the creeping figures of Untitled explore the esoteric powers and parameters of Sterile Hand in...

Potter Natalizia Zen

Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out

Ecstatic Recordings

Nurse With Wound’s Colin Potter hooks up with Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and Guido Zen for this new album for Ecstatic; a sublime trip by three highly skilled synthesists that comes highly recommended if yr into Klaus Schulze, Vangelis, John Carpenter or Eduard Artemiev.  After stranding listeners in deep space with Schleißen 4 in 2015, Potter, Natalizia and Zen regroup along the percussive vectors of Shut Your Eyes On The Way Out - three years in the making and taking cues from Kosmische, abstract EBM and obscure library sounds for seductive new horizons of pulsing rhythms and floating ambient dub tones.  The trio control the mission with masterful skill and sleight of hand, prompting routes for the user rather than signposting the way with cliché. Of course, it’s hard to escape some sense of homage or reverence for the original forms, but they do so with such sensitivity to the material and “the journey” that the results simply transcends that heritage, to arrive somewhere, timelessly, out there.  They chart a steady course, slowly melting from cryogenic stasis to map out free floating space in Articulated, then holding their course despite the gravitational pull from massive objects in Rhythm Did Not Change, and under pressure of slow disco G-forces in the pulsing beauty of Linda, leading to the interception of panicked bleeps in Chaosmosis.  Over on the B-Side When Time Stops Moving the mission becomes very Tarkovsky-esque and surreal, with those lysergic drones really coming into...

Primitive World

White On White

Ecstatic Recordings

“Following a major retrospective at The Tate St Ives, forgotten art maverick Marlow Moss (1889-1958) - a radical, gender-bending British Jewish lesbian and innovator of non-figurative art - is the inspiration and the focus of this new LP from Primitive World for the Ecstatic label. Crafted from various synth improvisations, including the rare and tricky PPG Wave synth/sampler, it comes highly recommended if you’re into Peder Mannerfelt’s brut ambient, Raster Noton’s grid-based rhythmic fascinations, or Pan Sonic at their most glacial.  White On White forms a follow-up of sorts to Willis’ Ascention tape, and perhaps more aptly, leads on from his and Not Waving's reworks of Daphne Oram - arguably another overlooked, British female pioneer of her field - which are collected on their Walls album, Sound Houses. There’s little doubt that this new album contains some of Willis’ strongest solo work, which can be attributed to the fecund inspiration of Moss’s work, life and theories, as well as his access to a prized arsenal of rare vintage synths.  Titled after the Moss piece which adorns the LP’s front cover, White On White forms a welcome first introduction for many to Moss’s “work, life and theories” thru a combination of visual representations - photographs of the artist and her work - with text by Lucy Howarth, curator of Moss’s recent exhibitions at Museum Haus Konstruktiv exhibition (2017), the touring Tate display (2013-15), and of course the music itself, which seeks to describe Moss’s mathematically sound geometries and evocative...

Jay Glass Dubs

Dubs

Ecstatic Recordings

Written during what Dimitris Papadatos, aka Jay Glass Dubs, describes as “an adventurous and bold period”, and holding material issued on tape by various labels between 2015-2016, the Dubs compilation frames a singular, stripped down take on classic dub forms, wherein Jay Glass Dubs perceptibly retains the sound’s heavy function and mystic qualities, but subtly updates its palette with a range of nods to a myriad of unexpected, angular styles.  The results form a sort of ghostly, filleted subtraction of classic dub architecture, all plasmic tones and diaphanous, boneless structures buoyed by an often overwhelming, yet somehow intangible bass presence. Beyond the obvious, thematic ligature that connects the material, which was all recorded within a very short period of time, the artist also suggests there is an underlying, encrypted similarity to the material which is “merely apparent to me”, and awaits much closer investigation from keen ears.  From Jay’s eponymous 2015 debut for Hylé tapes, listeners will encounter the heaving smudge of Definition Dub, the serpentine, Coil-like digital delays of Grumpy Dub, and a grime drone drill Depression Dub. Off the II tape for THRHNDRDSVNTNN comes the darkwave synths and militant step of Magazine Dub recalling a gauzier Equiknoxx production, next to the bass-less scudder, Detrimental Dub and the shoegazing bloom of Daria Dub, while his III tape tees up some abyssal highlights in the vertiginous Hilton Dub, the melancholy, Basic Channel-scoped scale of Sieben Dub, and the HTRK-esque starkness of Everlasting Dub.  Exclusive to the set...

Novo Line

Dyad

Ecstatic Recordings

Novo Line returns with a new disc of Algorithmic Body Music® for Ecstatic engineered to be played at both 33 and 45. It’s a stubbornly innovative twist on late ‘80s and early ‘90s dance music; If yr into anything from Aphex Twin to DAF, Front 242 to Powell - or generally like your club music analogue, fffuckkked yet still forward thinking, this one’s for you.  Novo Line reprises the meter-messing genius of his Movements album with Dyad - exclusively using the tools of ’88/’89 professional recording set-ups - namely the Atari ST, but with a slight algorithmic alteration. While it’s increasingly hard to find new tricks in old gear, especially with the resurgence of hardware fetishism and the ubiquity of DAWs, that’s exactly what Nat Fowler has been doing for the best part of a decade as Novo Line. By, in his own words, “misusing one algorithmic composition program (not, by a longshot, a professional music production tool of any epoch) contained in 208kb of data on a 3.5” floppy disk”, He generates and explores new permutations of old music which, ironically enough, sound fresher or at least more innovative than a lot of new music in circulation right now.  The release poses a playful question: can a record be ambivalent as to which speed it should be played? Celebrating vinyl and futhermore physical media, the listener is encouraged to find their exact speed of preference with the RPM toggle and pitch slider, that nearly forgotten joy in...

V/a

Trax Test (excerpts From The Modular Network 1981-1987)

Ecstatic Recordings

Trax Test’ is the first ever survey of Italy’s pioneering, visionary and influential label and mail art collective Trax, which ran from 1981 - 1987 as a network for the creation of collaborative projects. The collective included a pre-NWW Colin Potter and some of the earliest work from Masami Akita aka Merzbow, but also had deep connections with the art world; a few trax members went on to become famous designers and artists - Ettore Sottsass of hugely influential Memphis Group even guests on vocals on the last track of the compilation. The whole selection here is rare as heck and sorely in-demand by collectors, much of it now making its vinyl premiere some 30 odd years after the fact.  With credit due to compilers Vittore Baroni of Trax and Ecstatic’s avowed wave fiend, Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) - who was also behind the ‘Mutazione (Italian Electronic & New Wave Underground 1980-1988)’ compilation - ‘Trax Test’ is a portal to the international scene which laid the grassroots for a proliferation of electronic music over the proceeding decades - a pioneering part of the infrastructure for independent music distribution which could be said to pre-echo the myriad social networks and platforms which exist for sharing music today.  As Frans De Waard astutely points out in the 16-page booklet, there were no ‘templates’ for this thing back then - as opposed to the forms of Soundcloud, Spotify or YouTube nowadays - meaning artists did everything DIY: from cutting, pasting and...

L/F/D/M

Music Without Discipline

Ecstatic Recordings

Second LP of cranky hardware oddballs by Richard Smith a.k.a. L/F/D/M for Ecstatic featuring 11 tracks for the ‘floor and stranger spaces. Recommended if you're into Jamal Moss, Larry Heard’s Gherkin Jerks, Not Waving, Beau Wanzer!  L/F/D/M squeezes off a volley of misshapen bangers and atonal wormholes in Music Without Discipline, making a mutant follow-up to his M Is A Shape (2015) LP and Crocodiles In The Ceiling (2016) EP for Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving) & Sam Willis’ Ecstatic label.  For his third solo LP proper as L/F/D/M, the London-based producer/artist/designer jams, layers and hacks a clutch of new hardware toys, the Akai VX90 and Yamaha TX81Z in particular, into 11 variants of what is essentially a style of no wave or new beta techno.   Pursuing his taste for unique, visceral and affective electronic tones into odder integers of the club, L/F/D/M establishes a jagged line that runs from original ‘80s industrialists thru Larry Heard’s legendary Gherkin Jerks and the scenius of Downwards’ brummie radge packets to a place right between the eyes of 2017.   DJs and dancers will find full fat, wonky weapons ranging from the cranky-assed jacker Dance, You Awful Cxnt, thru to a sludgy turn called Birds, a super-tangy Chicago percolator Texan Flower Girl, and the throaty acid gargle of Living Without Gain.  But it’s the way in which Richard Smith is just as happy to follow his nose into sparkling vignettes such as After R Version and Ballet, and...

Not Waving

Populist

Ecstatic Recordings

Not Waving takes 2017 by the scruff with his Populist EP, consolidating the myriad stripes of last year's acclaimed Animals album for Diagonal in four extended peaktime hammers forged for darkrooms, basements and warehouses alike; flirting with sleazy New Beat, nEuro EBM, Acid n0!se and deep-raved Italo.  If last year’s LP saw you thru from day-into-night, or vice-versa, this one is aimed squarely at the gurny hours of abandon in between, with ferocious acid lines and jabbing drums stripped down and strapped up to prompt reckless behaviour on the ‘floor. The Populist EP is Alessio Natalizia's strongest dancefloor statement since the one-sided Get Serious (2015) bullet. It finds him taking the opportunity to make straight-up bangers, rather than ‘songs’, which were thoroughly tried and tested over successive tours of the USA and countless shows in Europe too in the last 9 months.  Too Many Freaks is an anthem in waiting, harnessing a barely-hinged sense of chaos between its careening synth lead, acid squabble and velvet-clad kicks, before the dry-rutting jag and plaintive vox of Vibe Killer takes a dog-grip like This Heat meeting Tuning Circuits.  Top marks go to the check-your-stylus intro for Control Myself on the B-side, which holds its fizzy line into a fetid crevice of what sounds like Russell Haswell ramping with Powell, whereas the crooked clampjaw groove of Ur Lucky Ur Still Alive pivots around a sample a lone raver at Atonal, Berlin “who had no idea how she got there and what...

Novo Line

Movements

Ecstatic Recordings

2016’s most meticulous album of Algorithmic Body Music, Chicago house and Belgian new beat, made by the guy who delivered that insane “For Promotional Use Only” white label for Diagonal, produced on malfunctioning software with two Atari ST PCs, using Yamaha FM synthesis via MIDI... Following that amazing 12” for Diagonal and a limited tape release for Ecstatic, Berlin’s Nat Fowler renders his meticulous Novoline for its second full-length release, a killer marriage of automated EBM and unexpected midi disruptions, continuing a lifelong quest for esoteric knowledge and a love of archaic computer hardware.Modelled on re-appropriated software, run on two separate Atari ST's, Movements is the compelling result of obtuse production technique and painstaking trial and error; basically experimentation at the service of discovering a sound that really sounds unlike anything else out there. As he explains: “I like the idea of using restrictions in order to find and push boundaries, from limiting which octaves I use to how many notes at a time. I use the only PC capable of MIDI that had no multitasking, so communication is immediate, a direct mechanical communication from my fingers to the sounds is created. I feel lucky because technology has accelerated so fast since the first digital synthesisers and PCs that nothing since the early 1980s has been really pushed to its limits.” In that sense, he can be placed in a small category of operators - including The Automatics Group, Dave Noyze, Lorenzo Senni and V/Vm among them - who persistently...

Not Waving

Redacted

Ecstatic Recordings

Redacted was originally issued in an edition of 100 gold tapes in 2013 and goes for £££ 2nd hand. This new version has been completely remastered by Matt Colton and comes highly recommended if you're into Pye Corner Audio, John Carpenter, Edward Artemiev...  While there’s a mutual sense of technoid momentum to both albums, Redacted is a far gauzier, freeform and sensual beast; one richly steeped in proto/post-club atmospheres and allowing his imagination to run away with itself.  Conceptually, Redacted pursues the “classified” themes of his Remote Viewing-inspired Umwelt (2013) LP into even murkier departments, drawing subtly ‘marish parallels between the cold war atmospheres that birthed original post punk, industrial and proto-techno, and the current pallor of socio-political unrest that pervades our present situation.  Omitting the original tape’s expansive closer for the sake of a single LP cut, this vinyl version plays out like an alternative soundtrack to scenes in the overgrown, radioactive zones of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, using an anachronistic palette of analogue machinery to emphasise a sense of fluid, shimmering motion and out-of-place-and-timelessness that genuinely goes straight to the head with trippy effect.   Swampy slow techno horror themes vacillate with decayed pastoral panoramas and windows of synthetic optimistic, both lush and disquietingly needling, using dissonance and sweeps of hazy noise to ultimately spell out a foreboding but dreamlike sort of electronic subterfuge and suspense that resonates with the nostalgic Stranger Things score as much as Leyland Kirby’s Intrigue & Stuff series.

Head Technician

Zones

Ecstatic Recordings

Martin Jenkins aka Pye Corner Audio returns in Head Technician garb for a slippery set of slow, plasmic acid workouts that were originally issued on a super-limited tape, and now sit heavy on wax, remastered and including bonus tracks not on the tape.  Over the years since he first mooted the PCA sound in 2010, Jenkins has used the Head Technician alter ego as a sort of evil engineer Hyde analogous to his day-to-day Jekyll, a sort of hyperstitious studio partner in a time-honoured tradition of sleeve credits ghost chasing.  Where PCA’s pieces may tend to be lustrous, optimistic, the Head Technician’s Zones LP hems to the shadows of the ‘floor with a furtive, noirish quality that works a treat in the right situations, whether soundtracking gaslamp-lit raves or midnight street patrols seeking out ne’erdowells and laudanum dealers.  Fired on a classic trinity of Roland TR-606 drum machine with an MC-202 (a beast to program, he admits) and TB-303 to sequence his baselines, it clearly makes explicit reference to the early days of Detroit techno or UK bleep ’n bass, but the vibe is more anachronistic, out-of-time, possibly thanks to his patented, lagging basslines and slowly unfolding arrangements, bridging that imaginary, dilated gap between fuzzy dancefloor head melt and curtains-drawn next day gouch out.

Paper Eyes

Source Cognitive Drive - Transmissions 1996-1998

Ecstatic Recordings

Not Waving compiles the prescient, early work of Gavin Russom from the late ‘90s, reflecting the visceral and overwhelming experience of an artist getting familiar with the data overload of a megatropolis and all its 24 hour thrills and poly-cultural topography. Original tapes re-mastered by Matt Colton...In effect, these tracks are a series of snapshots or graffiti-like doodles and sketches of the feelings and and textures absorbed during late night dérives from his loft on 31st St. and around the Williamsburg locale, all channelled thru a rugged set-up including: Sony TC-155 and TC-102 reel-to-reel tape machines a Silvertone guitar, ATUS AM100 mixer, Boss Harmonizer, a tiny Radio Shack mic, a Radio Shack Realistic Electronic Reverb, Casio MT-40, Univox Compac 2 and Casio SA-41.Imagery of policemen and truck drivers picking up prostitutes, along with the whistling signals of crack buyers and sellers on the corner become transcribed into screeching scrabble and blow-out paroxysms of noise, interspersed with passages of bittersweet, rudimentary melody and swaggering, drugged-up rhythms, recalling a prickly and often uncomfortable experience as sticky, fucked-up and phantasmagoric as finding yourself in a new city can be.As Russom explains: “Arriving in New York City I found myself surrounded by an incredibly intense field of stuff to take in; late night radio mixes which featured distinctly New York sounds like freestyle and hip hop, clubs where house, techno and jungle played to drugged-out and/or completely sober sweaty crowds and beard scratchers alike, no wave, new wave, disco, afro-carribean, art rock and experimental...

Novo Line

Live Aus Der Spielothek

Ecstatic Recordings

Killer “Algorithmic Body Music” from the canny cat behind that "For Promotional Use Only" 12" on Diagonal! Not Waving’s Ecstatic label grip a bendy-as-f**k live recording of (deep breath) “alternatively-tuned polyphonic multi-rhythmic live-mixed live-generated parameter based unrendered unsequenced spontaneous improvised electronic music” performed (?) by Novo Line at Berlin’s Sameheads club night in December, 2015. Using a software program on a 720kb floppy written in 1988, run on two x Atari ST PCs using only era-consistent hardware FM synthesis via MIDI, it’s nothing if not authentically retro, but also proves there’s latent, vital life in outmoded gear, provided you’re willing to look hard enough.  Like his aforementioned For Promotional Use Only 12”, everything’s yoked to a mesmerisingly sluggish pace, which is perhaps necessary as the spiky, curdling, and discordant sequence of events carries so much repetitive - yet subtly morphing - information that it may be genuinely psychotomimetic at higher tempos. To be honest, we’re a bit baffled at mention of his current actions “reflecting research in the fringe fields of electrical theory with relation to pythagorean tuning systems”, but it should prompt some interesting wikipedia mooches later on. Ultimately, it sounds like something hypothesised by boffins at IPEM’s secret darkrooms circa ’88, and that cannot be a bad thing in any freak's estimations.

L/F/D/M

Crocodiles In The Ceiling EP

Ecstatic Recordings

Richard Smith a.k.a L/F/D/M reports four barrelling hardware shots from London’s EBM and techno underworld with the tense, nervous energy of his Crocodiles in the Ceiling EP for Not Waving’s Ecstatic label following a slew of ‘floor-wreckers with Optimo Trax and Diagonal (Bronze Teeth, Green Gums with former Factory Floor member Dom Butler). More pointed, succinct than last year’s M Is A Shape debut LP for the label, this 2nd volley finds him flexing and bozing a buzzing set of dancefloor prongs amid the sweat-mist and strobelights, feeling equally at home during all-day, no sleep Berghain rituals and clammy, redlit darkroom beat offs. It’s burning deep heat for the DJs, rubbing up the gym-trained pony canter and popper fog of Lego Train Crashes beside the rude industrial rider Elek F up top, and clearly taking a grimacing pleasure from the New Beta jut of Take A Chance, whilst Rum + Black foams and spits with the rawest, most uncouth agenda. In his dual roles as musician and graphic artist L/F/D/M draws on both sides of his practice in order to dance, as he explains “Music and art kinda switch places within the balance of my creative process, ideas come in different ways, cutting out collages, layering sound, hacking into outtakes, snipping out ideas.” The result is a visceral, animated style, pushing at the most frayed, wild-eyed aspects of post- industrial/acid/techno with inarguably potent impact and effect.

The Tapes

Selected Works 1982 - 1992

Ecstatic Recordings

Ecstatic offer a fascinating, often dizzying insight to the primitive industrial minimalism of Italian siblings, Giancarlo and Roberto Drago, a.k.a. The Tapes, via Selected Works 1982 - 1992 sourced from original tapes and pressed to vinyl for the first time ever. Following on from Ecstatic’s issue of “mail artist” Danielle Ciullini’s Domestic Exile Collected Works 82-86, this set surveys a blind-spot in most people’s knowledge of early ‘80s Italian underground music, framed against a backdrop of the Anni di Piombo, or Years of Lead - a period of domestic political turmoil between the late ‘60s and early ’80s - and the mushroom shadow of nuclear war. Like their international tape-scene allies, The Tapes reacted to this world thru a matrix of mono-synths, drum machines, microphones and 4-track recorders, mostly recording/experimenting ideas direct-to-tape in one take and making a virtue of their lo-fi set-up’s infidelities and imperfections - randomness and mistakes were embraced rather than discarded - whilst absorbing the counter-cultural influence of William Burroughs or Throbbing Gristle, and the sci-fi dystopia of J.G. Ballard and John Foxx. These 21 tracks, drawn from 10 different, limited tape releases, perfectly distill a wandering, weirdo spirit, ranging from the funereal swagger of Tanz Fabrik and the darkwave hip-thrust of The Day of Silence to freeform, motorik trajectories such as Time Out of Joint and singular enigmas like the Actress-esque bobble of The Wait and Falso Movimento B2’s weightless, hyaline spindles. Collected and compiled by Alessio Natalizia (aka Not Waving) and remastered by Matt...