Lucy Railton completely upends parameters and expectations with a genius, multifaceted and uncompromisingly forward-facing new album, her second for Modern Love. Blurring distinctions between structured composition and more visceral modes of performance, ’Corner Dancer’ is full of bristling, charged energies, dissolving into sections of almost incomprehensible beauty. It’s one of the most quietly radical albums of the year, required listening if you’re into Maryanne Amacher, HTRK, François Bayle x Graham Lambkin. Following her 2018 solo debut ‘Paradise 94’, and countless collaborations in the time since - in duo with legendary EMS co-founder Peter Zinovieff (RIP), in trio with Kali Malone and Stephen O’Malley, on stage with Patti Smith, plus appearances on recordings by Beatrice Dillon, Ellen Arkbro, Laurel Halo and Petter Eldh, Railton’s diverse musical circles here bleed into each other, revealing vulnerable and compelling emotional facets through a fluid mix of composition, and pure expression. Through a range of approaches, Railton gradually loosens her grip and allows her identities to expose themselves; cut to the bone, sinew and spirit of music making. Reaching outside tried and tested zones, she lands at a charged space characterised by unmetered pacing and an embrace of imperfection, using cello, viella (a medieval cello), Buchla, 808, a fan, synths, horse hair whips, a hand held harp and her own voice, across 8 tracks that revel in the momentum of creation. The LP arcs from an opening sequence of ruptured asymmetries to something bordering a sort of dreampop sublime on ‘Blush Study’, the album’s...
MP3 $9.90
11/10/2023
FLAC $11.99
11/10/2023
Flora Yin Wong returns with a stunning, highly evocative second album for Modern Love, manifesting her instrumental storytelling in a syncretic bind of supernatural themes. Where her debut album ‘Holy Palm’ catalogued exotic personal and spiritual travels captured over a 6 year period, ‘Cold Reading’ details the aftermath; the erosion of fantasy, a breakdown of belief systems, and an overwhelming sense of rootlessness. A surreal, tripped-out listen, it comes highly recommended if you're into Valerio Tricoli, Enya, Bryn Jones, soundtracks to Last Year at Marienbad and Inland Empire - all hyperrealist, concrète sound design and fritzed dream sequences. Heavy with a sense of nightmarish dissociation and grief following an uncanny, dispiriting trip to East and Southeast Asia, Flora Yin Wong read about Giuseppe Tartini’s ‘Violin Sonata in G Minor’, aka the Devil’s Trill Sonata, a notoriously tricky c.18th composition which attempted to transcribe music heard in a dream. It’s this soporific motif that binds and underpins ’Cold Reading’, in which Flora chases the dragon of fleeting fantasy through sequences of etched melancholy, pinched with hypnagogic jerks that linger in the memory. Through 10 parts, Flora crystallises a feeling of ennui that followed those travels, where she was taken to a Bazi reader (a form of Chinese astrology or metaphysics based on time and date of birth), whose augur left her feeling perplexed and alienated. She made a long overdue, ultimately unfulfilling, return with her father to his adoptive family in his hometown Kuala Lumpur, spent nights alone snowed in at...
MP3 $9.90
10/27/2023
FLAC $11.99
10/27/2023
Mary Jane Leach is a composer focussed on the physicality of sound, its acoustic properties and how they interact with space. She has played an instrumental role in NYC’s pioneering Downtown scene alongside Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation and reappraisal of Julius Eastman’s work since his death in 1990, compiling the ‘Unjust Malaise’ 3CD set in 2005 and editing the 2015 book ‘Gay Guerrilla: Julius Eastman and His Music’. 'Woodwind Multiples' is her second album for Modern Love, following ‘(f)lute songs’ (2018). Woodwind Multiples features four pieces for multiples of the same instrument: four bass flutes, nine oboes, nine clarinets, and seven bassoons. Each piece works closely with the unique sound of each instrument, combining pitches that create other, sometimes unexpected, tones, primarily combination and interference tones, as well as rhythmic patterns. What you hear is what happens naturally - there is no processing or manipulation. 8B4 (1985/2022), played by Manuel Zurria, is for four bass flutes. It is a revision of 8x4, which was written in 1985 for the DownTown Ensemble and was only performed once, due to its unusual instrumentation: alto flute, English horn (originally bass oboe), clarinet, and voice. Xantippe’s Rebuke (1993) was written for Libby Van Cleve, for eight taped oboes and one live, solo oboe. The eight taped parts are equal and dependent, while the solo part is meant to be a solo with the tape as accompaniment. The piece works...
MP3 $9.90
07/14/2023
FLAC $11.99
07/14/2023
'Thanks 4 The Tracks U Lost’ taps into Jamal’s finest vein of tekkerz for a ribboning stream of chromatically colourful, insistently psychosexual club music for hearts, bodies and minds. By this point, readers of these pages should be very aware of Jamal’s prolific oeuvre; he’s been a GOAT to us for nearly decades now, probably listed here more than any other artist, and we’ll never tire of diving into his ceaseless stream of life-giving energies. This set of tracks for Modern Love are patently some of his most gripping, romantic, crazed and timeless; drenched in chaotic cosmic harmony and notably textured to the spirit-biting point, with thanks to Rashad Becker’s mastering which really holds up the facets of his raw cut gems to the light. Slicing off just one cross-section of his ceaseless, holistic practice, the music here speaks to the endless variation within a theme that Jamal has made a virtue of since his nascent ‘90s productions. Where those early works with legendary mentors such as Steve Poindexter and Adonis still had Jamal’s experience of the original Chicago warehouse scene fresh in the memory, he’s come to singularly carry that flame far from the original object while never losing sight of its original reasons for being, seamlessly integrating lessons of Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz and his DJ/diggers-instinct for classic synth and industrial musicks, into a syncretic roil of ideas that simply sounds like nobody else. Plainly put, opener ‘The Lust With-IN’ is an instant classic, blooming with arpestral...
MP3 $9.90
05/06/2022
FLAC $11.99
05/06/2022
Delia Beatriz’s musical output straddles two distinct artistic poles; her debut solo album, 2017’s acclaimed “Animus”, oozed from sensual, beatless soundscapes to high-octane club music, while her 2019-released 'System' harnessed tribal guarachero elements while simultaneously scraping ideas from industrial techno. On 'The Long Count', the Mexican-American producer has inked her most rigorous statement to date, sublimating opaque ancestral knowledge into vaporous AI-stirred fog banks, activating an ancient rite that reaches into tomorrow. It’s audacious electro-acoustic archaeology that sounds disorientating, anachronistic and arcane. 'The Long Count' is rooted in research Beatriz made into Mayan wind instruments - whistles, ocarinas, flutes and trumpets - using the archive of the Mayan Studies Institute at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, the oldest and largest collection of its kind. Developing a set of digital instruments that could be played using different types of temperaments and scales, Delia processed these sounds using machine learning techniques to shuttle the distant past into our extant artistic universe, peering into Mexico’s pre-colonial history and weaving those ideas into complex tonalities gleaned from musique concrète and contemporary electro-acoustic music. Beatriz describes the Mayan instrumentation as ancestral technology, part of a world that’s not so much been forgotten, but purposefully erased. And although it’s impossible to know exactly how Mayan music may have sounded, it’s feasible to converse with history using modern technology to conduct a ceremony of remembrance. Featuring soundscapes that are haunted by indistinct, shared memories and centuries of pent-up emotion, the material here is as intentional, direct...
MP3 $9.90
02/18/2022
FLAC $11.99
02/18/2022
When you make a record that doesn’t conform, expect to divide opinion. ‘Like Weather’ was released in 1998, on Rephlex - run by Grant Wilson Claridge and Richard D James - an often great label that had the misfortune of having a following made up of mostly aphex- logo wearing fanboys who couldn’t quite deal with electronic music made by a girl - let alone one that used vocals. Everything those lads couldn’t fathom about ‘Like Weather’ is essentially what makes it untouchable; one of the greatest, most effortlessly esoteric, no-fucks-given pop albums ever made, not in the lineage of IDM (Pitchfork) or Trip Hop (FACT), but something else that cant quite be categorised - even 22 years later. ‘Like Weather’ echoes the world-building energy of Prince’s ‘Sign O The Times’ - every track is a self contained universe all its own, there are no rules or conventions - it’s full of hooks, but also insular as fuck, the production is all over the place and it still sounds like nothing else (although if you’re into the Mica Levi-produced Tirzah album, know that this here is the blueprint). It feels analog, then digital - it’s R&B, but also baroque music box, drone pop, experimental, electronic, junglist - attempting to define it is like trying to cup mercury in the palm of your hands; it’ll just find something else to slide into. In 2020 we reckon it’s time to re-appraise ‘Like Weather’ as one of the great “lost” albums of our...
MP3 $9.90
11/20/2020
FLAC $11.99
11/20/2020
***ANDY STOTT's first release since 2016 and first EP since 2011, It Should Be Us is a double EP of slow and raw productions for the club, recorded in 2019 and following a series of EPs that started with Passed Me By and We Stay Together early this decade. Recorded fast and loose over the summer, these eight tracks harness a pure and bare-boned energy, melodies subsumed by drum machines and synths; slow, rugged hedonism. It's all about rhythmic heat and disorientation, pure dance and DJ specials rendered at an unsteady pace, from percolated house and percussive rituals to moody tripped-out burners. There'll be a new Andy Stott album in 2020, but in the meantime... this one's for dancing. Mastered and cut at Dubplates & Mastering, Berlin.
2X12" $28.95
12/13/2019
MP3 $9.90
11/15/2019
FLAC $11.99
11/15/2019
“After a 5 year pause for breath, Rainer Veil return with their debut full length for Modern Love; an immersive, kinematic tumble through electronic forms from hyper trance to tape dub experiments and loose polyrhythms - a summoning of ‘ardcore spirits in flux. Big RIYL: Photek, Caterina Barbieri, SND, Lee Gamble, Gábor Lázár... A hypnotic soundworld tempered by weighty bass and angular construction, ‘Vanity’ marks a breaking away from the binds of overthinking, an embrace of imperfection. It’s a brighter set of tracks then anything we’ve heard from them before, discarding the fog of filters and guitar pedals in pursuit of a more loose-limbed and swung ideal. Opening on the skeletal Trance vapour-trail ‘Sim Screen’ and the agitated ‘Repatterning’, we head into a ferociously asymmetric warehouse swerve ‘In Gold Mills’ conjuring an uncanny, nighttime vision of suburban bass riddled with tension and bliss. ‘Shallows’ retreats through isolation dub, echoing ‘Change Is Never Easy’, a re-worked House template fractured to its bare percussive core, while ‘FM2’ entwines a double helix of DX7 patches with a heart wrench, and ‘Gauze’ dismantles a mosaic of Kwaito patterns, buried under a haze of smoke. Tracing rapidly mutating electronic forms, from ringtone hooks to latinate rhythms and Razor synth edits, ‘Vanity’ explores an instinctive swell of ideas and influences in perpetual and unstoppable forward motion, a sequence of flash frames captured and distilled for posterity.”—Boomkat
MP3 $9.90
05/10/2019
FLAC $11.99
05/10/2019
***Since the release of their album Wonderland (2016), DEMDIKE STARE have been recording material for this new double album Passion; an asymmetric re-imagining of UK club styles taking in frenzied drum trax, shortwave jungle, pinging dancehall and clipped, post-punk riddims. During this time they've been busy curating their DDS label (releases from Shinichi Atobe, Mica Levi, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, and Equiknoxx, among others) and have been commissioned by both the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) and the surviving members of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to mine and rework their archives. Enlisting visual artist Michael England (Autechre, Gescom, Leila), they've created a cinematic accompaniment for their collaborative live shows, resulting in the image which adorns this cover—a hybrid/composite portrait exploring/questioning the current use of software in creating hyper reality and the manipulation of the self. The accompanying film includes documentary footage filmed at a Voguing event in NYC, a Blackpool promenade and a Newark, New Jersey roller rink, the end result smudging the lines between live performance, documentary and sonic cinema. It's an idea that's echoed on Passion, continuing a process Demdike began on their Testpressing series of dismantling lines between analog and digital realms, between urban realism and fantasy, between experimental, pop and soundsystem cultures. An outlandish configuration of avant-garde and ultimately functional club weapons designed and honed for the weightiest bassbins, it's also their most direct and fucked up record to date—a raucous, joyful 9-track smash that comes off like a night on a glamorous, neon-lit bender.
2XLP $28.95
12/14/2018
MP3 $9.90
10/26/2018
FLAC $11.99
10/26/2018
“Four long pieces for flute and voice composed between 1985-2018 by Mary Jane Leach, a pivotal part of NYC’s pioneering avant-garde community since the 1970s and an active member of the legendary DownTown Ensemble, working alongside peers including Arthur Russell, Ellen Fullman, Peter Zummo, Philip Corner and Arnold Dreyblatt, as well as devoting years to the preservation of Julius Eastman’s legacy since his death in 1990. Mary Jane's vinyl debut 'Pipe Dreams' arrived last year via the Blume imprint and completely blew us away, and '(f)lute songs’ is only her second vinyl release in over five decades, feeding and expanding our obsession with her work. In the late 1970’s Mary Jane Leach was triggered by an interview she heard with Steve Reich in which he implored artists to figure out ways of becoming more self sufficient when it came to performance rather than relying on traditional group structures. At the time Leach had already began to experiment with recordings she had made of herself performing long sustained tones made on instruments she could play; mostly voice and bass clarinet, and gradually became fascinated by the sound phenomena resulting from layering tones on her multi-track tape machine. Reich’s thoughts, however, made Leach realise that she didn't have to restrict herself to instruments she could play and, in an indirect way, were the foundation for this album. Trio for Duo (1985), was Mary Jane's first attempt at creating work for instruments she couldn't play; revolving around alto flute and voice. She...
MP3 $9.90
10/19/2018
FLAC $11.99
10/19/2018
"An astonishing solo debut by acclaimed cellist and composer Lucy Railton featuring one side of filigree, multi-layered autobiographical collage-work, the other of raw and phased cello glissandi. RIYL: Mark Leckey, Alvin Lucier, Beatrice Dillon, Nate Young, Valerio Tricoli, Popol Vuh... Lucy Railton is a prolific performer who has appeared on countless recordings and collaborations with many important figures in contemporary music over the last few years. Paradise 94 is, remarkably, her solo debut - featuring archival, location and studio recordings which serve as a time capsule of all the myriad disciplines and influences that have brought her to this point in time. It both plays up to and shatters expectations of her music, which harnesses a duality of energies - acoustic/electronic, real/imagined, iconic/iconoclastic, pissed-off/romantic; out of place and androgynous - resulting in a visceral emotional insight and rare narrative grasp. Variegated, asymmetric, and located somewhere between her usual fields of exploration, Paradise 94 gives free reign to aspects of her creativity that have previously been subsumed into collaborative processes and interpretations of other composers’ work. Here, she’s free to probe, sculpt and layer her sounds through a much broader range of techniques and strategies, placing particular focus on non-linear structural arrangements and exploring the way her cello becomes perceptibly synthetic through collaging, rather than FX. At every turn Paradise 94 is bewilderingly unique. The A-side unfolds an oneiric, inception-like sequence traversing temporalities, timbres and tones from what sounds like a spectral ensemble playing on a traffic island in Pinnevik,...
LP $24.95
04/20/2018
MP3 $9.90
03/23/2018
FLAC $11.99
03/23/2018
Zomby’s near-mythical Eski grime concept album was created over an intense two week period around 2008-2009 and features 16 uniquely formulated interpretations of Wiley’s seminal Eskibeat productions. It's been in hybernation ever since and, almost a decade later (and after many aborted attempts), is finally available for public consumption - still sounding like an ancient future. After nearly a decade in the making, Zomby finally dispatches his astonishing take on Wiley’s series of Eskibeat releases, a.k.a. the cornerstone of grime. Originally recorded over a mad couple of weeks while suffering from circadian dysrhythmia, Mercury’s Rainbow documents Zomby riffing on intricately hand-programmed arpeggios, using theories of colour and its relation to the sonic chromatic spectrum - the circle of fifths - to place an expressively avant spin on the Wiley Kat’s slyding Triton squares and frozen, post-garage drum patterns. Rather than simply imitating Wiley’s foundational unit of grime currency, Zomby innovates with a structure of bewildering, modal styles, refracting 16 diamond-cut permutations according to a colour-sound spectrum of tonalities. In the process he effectively loosens up and liquifies the Eski riddim, rendering its bones and sinew in varying states of reactive, physical deliquescence or GIF-like micro-organisms. For dancers and DJs, the fluid contours and viscous, displaced rhythmic anticipation of Mercury’s Rainbow suggests myriad geometries for movement in-the-mix, and serves to single-handedly put to sleep a whole genre of also-ran, prosaic “future grime” thru its methodical, inventively ground-up construction. While it’s difficult to say with certainty, if...
MP3 $9.90
12/01/2017
FLAC $11.99
12/01/2017
Philippe Hallais aka Low Jack returns to Modern Love with a debut album under his own name, this time round unfurling a deeply seductive and opaque mixture of squashed dream pop and ambient shimmers, sounding something like Badalamenti/Lynch doing Shoegaze except a lot more weird and beautiful...It’s an album in the tradition of great records by Hype Williams, Leyland Kirby and, more recently, Yves Tumor; inhabiting a sonic world where not everything is quite what it seems. It offers familiarity and warmth one moment, dread and transformation the next, with an aesthetic that can basically be defined by that iconic image of the trophy cabinet in Twin Peaks, slowly zooming in on Laura Palmer’s framed face.Divided into four sides (and eleven tracks) acting as parts in a greek tragedy, the album delves into the dislocations of the mythology of sports and its achievement in mass entertainment; whereby the hero becomes a dispensable and mimetic body. It delves into this unusual portrayal of triviality and disaster, naivety and cynicism that make the real life and ordeals of the hero indistinguishable from their scripted form on TV. And so the narrative flows from the introspective ambient fizz of the opening Theme (Trophies) - sounding like the Cure’s All Cats are Grey as heard through the cracks, shrouded in several layers of auditory fog, through to the goosebump inducing Angela (Square), complete with punctuated snare/bassdrum crashes, to the Thriller-esque/Actress vibes on Fantasy (4U). Feel (Storm) is like Jóhann Jóhannsson’s brass masterpiece Virðulegu Forsetar...
MP3 $9.90
06/09/2017
FLAC $11.99
06/09/2017
Debut release from a new addition to the Modern Love family featuring 10 dancefloor variants shot from the hip. RIYL Kassem Mosse, Willow, Lorenzo Senni, DJ Stingray, Move D, El-B... Outta the shadows and into the strobe-light, Alex Lewis aka Turinn debuts on Modern Love with a highly rinsable debut double-pack of sawn-off brukbeats and anxious, nerve-riding grooves brewed in the ravines of North Manchester. Turinn emerges from a new generation of producers in the city that include longtime spar Willow, and upcoming producer Croww, soon to offer up his own debut recordings. Crooked and rugged AF, but tempered by an acute emotive sensitivity, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps renders a bleedin’ cross-section of mongrel, hybrid style ’n pattern in a breathless, deceptively freehand fashion that comes riddled with an electric blue energy all of its own. Committing ten trax of fractious, mutant funk and sore feels, 18 1/2 minute Gaps serves to cap Turinn’s formative phase of production like a lead lid on a nuclear rave implosion; trapping original ‘ardcore ‘nuum, Detroit booty and dank post-punk elements in a perpetual flux of in-the-pocket grooves which ravenously attempt to split at the seams, alternately pushing into Muslimgauze-like buffer zones of distortion or resoundingly wide ambient dimensions, and often both at once. On the first plate, this ambiguous dichotomy is epitomised between the rare surge of quick/slow torque in Ovum, which almost sounds like Chris Carter sparring with Burial Hex, and then in his nod to the Italian new...
MP3 $9.90
02/17/2017
FLAC $11.99
02/17/2017
A project that came to life fuelled by collectors’ obsession and a lifelong willingness to dive head- first into unknown musical wormholes, Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have never been defined by a singular musical trajectory. Their opening salvo of releases dabbled with the aesthetic of the occult and provided an alternate, parallax view of the Italian Library records with which they were both obsessed at the time, but as their long running mixtape series and brilliantly curated DDS label attest, their interests extend far outside the crevices of early electronic music and into dance music, dancehall, roots, jungle, techno, industrial, noise and beyond. While 2013’s Testpressing series provided an outlet for mostly club-based productions shot from the hip, Wonderland has been constructed with a narrative in mind. From the clipped Hardstyle of the opening Curzon, through the jaunty Dancehall mutations of Animal Style and FullEdge, Exotica/House refractions on Hardnoise, the frankly ridiculous, bassbin destroying Jungle ructions on Sourcer, or the extended tease of Overstaying, it’s probably the most enjoyable and loose-limbed hour of music in their catalogue, or that you’ll likely hear in these weird, angst-ridden times.
2XLP $28.75
02/24/2017
3XCD $22.50
12/09/2016
MP3 $9.90
12/02/2016
FLAC $11.99
12/02/2016
Long in the making debut album from Modern Love’s most elusive operator G. Howell. Recorded with a DR550, a battered Charvel guitar + assorted pedals, recommended if you're into Stephen O’Malley, Autechre, David Lynch, Shackleton, NWW, Demdike Stare... From the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G..H. claims a no mans land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal and concrète techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that’s exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare. The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.’s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project & HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003 - 2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti. The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched subbass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener Screaming Demon Pickups and the hollow-eyed stare down of Angels & Doormen, or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in Mickey Cosmos or the subsidence of Packhorse. He often underlines that physicality with a drily ambiguous wit; check...
MP3 $9.90
09/16/2016
FLAC $11.99
09/16/2016
***Too Many Voices is the fourth album from ANDY STOTT, a follow-up to 2014's Faith in Strangers. It was recorded from 2014-2016 and sees a diverse spectrum of influences bleed into nine tracks that are as searching as they are memorable. The album draws inspiration from the fourth-world pop of Japan's Yellow Magic Orchestra as much as it does Triton-fueled grime made 25 years later. Somewhere between these two points there's an oddly aligned vision of the future that seeps through the pores of each of the tracks. It's a vision of the future as it was once imagined; artificial, strange, and immaculate. Full of possibilities. The album opens with the harmonized, deteriorating pads of "Waiting For You" and arcs through to the synthetic chamber pop of the closing title-track, referencing Sylvian and Sakamoto's "Bamboo Houses" (1982) as much as it does the ethereal landscapes of This Mortal Coil and Dead Can Dance. In between, the climate and palette constantly shift, taking in the midnight pop of "Butterflies"; the humid, breathless house of "First Night"; and the endlessly cascading "Forgotten." Longtime vocal contributor ALISON SKIDMORE features on half the tracks, sometimes augmented by the same simulated materials as on the dystopian breakdown of "Selfish," and at others surrounded by beautiful synth washes, such as on the mercurial "Over" or the dreamy, neon-lit "New Romantic." It's all far removed from the digital synthesis and the abstracted intricacies that define much of the current electronic landscape. The same cybernetic palette is here...
CD $18.65
04/22/2016
2XLP $28.75
04/22/2016
MP3 $9.90
04/22/2016
FLAC $11.99
04/22/2016
A very rare turn up: Modern Love reach outside their close-knit crew to present a definitive, rooted, yet outward-looking album statement by Low Jack; spinning the centripetal torque of footwork counter-clockwise with a whipsmart, bruised palette of screwed hip hop, Detroit-style atmospheric pressure, and something far more unquantifiable... With the 10-track Lighthouse Stories, Paris-based Low Jack both wrecks and builds on the foundations of his previous outings for dope labels such as L.I.E.S., The Trilogy Tapes and In Paradisum - sifting their ideas for precious stones, but also retaining their gritty mineral deposits, resulting in an alluring yet abrasively rough-edged sound that clearly caught in Modern Love’s filters. Sparking up with the hot-boxed hip hop skit, Saab Prelude (Radio) the session unfolds with a mixtape-like sensibility, switching up from Six In The Morning’s narcotised slow-house to the crystalline juke geometries of Thin Platforms before vaulting headlong into a breathtaking, fractal footwork collage with Coquelin Cloarec (Steps) and its noisier inversion, Coquelin Cloarec (Emotions). With the humid, hyper-tropical ecosystem of Judo Coaster we’re presented with the LP’s most exhilarating and incomparably colourful high, and again Solidor draws on Low Jack's Honduran heritage to infectiously hypnotic appeal, whereas the exhumed boogie monsters and ferric miasma of Feigned Confidence seems to take a more ambiguous look at his personal sonic ontology, and Blinking Lights Sheep almost provides a point of resolution, albeit hazy as f**k and just out of reach. File this record somewhere between Actress, Rezzett, Spectre, Anthony Shake Shakir and Rabit...
MP3 $9.90
04/01/2016
FLAC $11.99
04/01/2016
*The seventh and final instalment in the Testpressing Series for the time being* Hands-down, #7 is the best Testpressing yet from Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty's Demdike Stare. Landing almost two years since the series began back in 2013, and six months on from their last raid, it's a dichotomy of dancefloor devilment, going hard for it on one side, and running ragged emotions on the other. A-side 'Rathe' opens the doors of perception to a show-stopping bloom of heavenly voices and halfstep jungle, ratcheting the levels to heart-in-mouth effect with panoramic harmonies and ricochet drums that sound like a fwwwd update of Windowlicker, all owing as much to Source Direct as Alice Coltrane. B-side, 'Patchwork' is a whole other madness. Shocking in a different style, it consolidates swirling, norish samples nodding to Italian concrète with the kind of 2-step swerve last heard on Artwork's 'Red’ EP - proper feral, swinging business. We seen and heard it go off in the dance and can safely confirm that it's one of the baddest joints in their now extensive catalogue...
MP3 $1.98
06/29/2015
FLAC $2.99
06/29/2015
BACK IN PRINT WITH NEW LOWER PRICE AND JEWEL CASE PACKAGE Death Is Unity With God finds DOMINCK FERNOW returning to the kind of feral, burned-out productions that dominated 2012's Ornamented Walls. This double LP includes 12 of the 20 tracks included on the original 2014 limited six-cassette release of Death Is Unity With God, in advance of Modern Love's triple-CD edition compiling all the material. It clocks in at an hour and a half and features some of the most compelling productions from Fernow yet. Nodding to classic Muslimgauze, but also inspired by the parallels between religious fundamentalism at home in the USA and abroad, the oppressive atmospheres and destroyed rhythms isolate the gutted toil and drone in "It's to Come," while "F.B.I. God" reduces the drums to scorched blasts against some harrowing, darkside chords. The quasi-speed torment of "Manufactured Silencers Under Direct Orders" ends the A-side with dread, flowing into the haunting chorales and chiming percussions of "Living On and Off At the Shadows Motel" and the scything techno roil of "Small Explosives and Blasting Caps Inside the Pages of a Phonebook," before a particularly effective chamber-like meditation, "McVeigh Figure," draws aesthetic lines between ambient black metal, Coil, and early Autechre. "Waco Postmortem (Murrah)" ends the set operating nearly out of earshot with those incredible, sashaying synth motifs persisting in their struggle against the patina of hiss and exasperated rhythms blurred around the edges.
3XCD $22.65
06/23/2015
MP3 $9.90
06/29/2015
FLAC $11.99
06/29/2015
***Faith in Strangers was written and recorded between January 2013 and June 2014, and was edited and sequenced in late July of 2014. Making use of on an array of instruments, field recordings, found sounds and vocal treatments, it's a largely analog variant of hi-tech production styles arcing from the dissonant to the sublime. The first two tracks recorded during these early sessions bookend the release, the opener "Time Away" featuring euphonium played by KIM HOLLY THORPE and last track "Missing," a contribution by ANDY STOTT’s occasional vocal collaborator ALISON SKIDMORE, who also appeared on 2012's Luxury Problems. Between these two points Faith in Strangers heads off from the sparse and infected "Violence" to the broken, downcast pop of "On Oath" and the motorik, driving melancholy of "Science & Industry"—three vocal tracks built around that angular production style that imbues proceedings with both a pioneering spirit and a resonating sense of familiarity. Things take a sharp turn with "No Surrender"—a sparkling analog jam making way for a tough, smudged rhythmic assault, while "How It Was" refracts sweaty warehouse signatures and "Damage" finds the sweet spot between RZA's classic "Ghost Dog" and Terror Danjah at his most brutal. "Faith in Strangers" is next and offers perhaps the most beautiful and open track here, its vocal hook and chiming melody bound to the rest of the album via the almost inaudible hum of Stott's mixing desk. It provides a haze of warmth and nostalgia that ties the nine loose joints that make...
CD $20.50
11/25/2014
2XLP $26.50
12/09/2014
MP3 $9.90
11/17/2014
FLAC $11.99
11/17/2014
Exactly one month on from TP#5, Demdike Stare unleash the 6th instalment in their ongoing tespressing series, a split session focusing on damaged dancefloor articulations on the a-side, and demented metal edits on the flip. ’40 Years Under The Cosh’ spans the A-side and finds Demdike in feisty form, re-framing the bare- boned floor-bound funk of classic Artwork and Anthony Shakir within more brutal parameters, complete with some seriously disorientating shenanigans halfway through proceedings. ‘Frontin’ on the flipside heads somewhere else entirely once again, unloading an agitated, freeze-framed metal loop and turning it into a barely contained bass-and-drums session that, unsurprisingly, sounds like nothing you’ll have heard from this lot before.
MP3 $1.98
08/11/2014
FLAC $2.99
08/11/2014
7 months on from TP#4, Demdike return with the 5th instalment in their ongoing research and development series - a double-headed monster split between gnarly reductions on the A-side, and industrial strength edits on the flip. ‘Procrastination’ edges through Grimey detritus and gunshot snares within a vast open space perfectly primed for that Demdike slow build. ‘Past Majesty’ on the flip offers up a feral take on some kind of cyber-industrial insanity, somewhere between Ministry and Powell - with a denouement which should probably come with a public health warning attached to it. All we’re saying is - watch yr eardrums.
MP3 $1.98
07/14/2014
FLAC $2.99
07/14/2014
Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow labelmates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12” releases between 2008 and 2010. It’s been four years since we last heard from them but they now return with “Drop The Vowels”, their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013 / early 2014, it’s an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila’s incredible debut ‘Like Weather’, eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favour of something much more visceral. It’s an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalised, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener GIF RIFF brings to life a Gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed ‘Stay Ugly’ breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D James and Jai Paul. “Temper Tantrum” and “Spectral Source” follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EP’s respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake’s mighty ‘Madmen’. ‘Corrosive’ flits between a fillibrating, arpeggiated steppers rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while ‘Drop The Vowels’ further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer “Back Down” provides pure percussive abandon. Quay ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings.
MP3 $9.90
03/31/2014
FLAC $11.99
03/31/2014
Searing, tormented darkside f**kery from Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty’s Demdike Stare on their rinse and run Testpressing series. A-side ‘Fail’ is a slowly descending panic attack of pealing hi-end frequencies and impending bass doom reaching a pit of noisy no return. B-side ‘Null Results’ bruks loose with a scything jungle attack; frantic 16th note hi-hats and cone-crumpling subs laced with a rudeboy mentasm to incite warehouse capoeira. Come test.
MP3 $1.98
02/10/2014
FLAC $2.99
02/10/2014
Released almost exactly a year on from their debut ‘Struck’ EP, Liam Morley and Dan Valentine return with ‘New Brutalism’, an exploration of angular, brittle club music. Referencing the stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic of Brutalist architecture (a detail of Preston bus station features on the cover), the 5 tracks here mine looped, blocky source material gradually embellished with more complex percussive and atmospheric layers that are at once robust and introspective. From the opening woodblock/rave dismantling “UK Will Not Survive” to the heady Hardcore of “Three Day Jag”, the EP evokes a distinctly Northern British Weltanschauung, a joyous revelling in melancholy that goes as far back as the earliest dances documented in Mark Leckey’s ‘Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore’ - somehow unique to British nightlife. The EP closes with the industrial clang of “Run Out”, the cacophony slowly converging into an alignment of percussion and space, trigerring that feeling of re-emerging into daylight at the end of a long night. Blinded by all the light... by all the possibilities.
MP3 $4.95
02/10/2014
FLAC $5.99
02/10/2014
***Polymath JAMES LEYLAND KIRBY must surely have one of the most confounding CV’s in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons you’ll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of ‘tributes’ and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7”s back in the early noughties. But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the world’s attention and, in 1999, made his first album as THE CARETAKER, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. Since then he’s also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EP’s under the ‘Intrigue & Stuff’ banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade. All of which brings us to Watching Dead Empires in Decay, a new album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms THE STRANGER and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful...
LP $22.25
11/12/2013
CD $20.15
11/05/2013
MP3 $9.90
10/28/2013
Demdike Stare return to the lab with two extended new productions, inaugurating a series of untamed releases brought together under the Testpressing banner. 'Collision' was recorded in late 2012 and is pretty much unlike anything you'll have heard from Demdike before, an intense high-frequency re-arrangement of Jungle and Noise, like a more brutal variant of the Demdike-affiliated HATE project, fed through a bank of analogue boxes and pedals, left to spin uncontrollably for 10 minutes before fading to black. 'Misappropriation' on the flip feeds off a different noise altogether, perched precariously between the mangled percussion you'd most commonly associate with Muslimgauze and the metallic clank of industry, a proper sunstroke riddim: angry and unforgiving.
MP3 $1.98
08/26/2013
FLAC $2.99
08/26/2013
So here we are at part two in the series: "Grows Without Bound" on the A-side is a monster; a noisy analogue session resurrected from the burning embers of Industrial and Noise, harnessed into an unstable growl that slowly makes room for a barely-there percussive stumble - think somewhere between Vainio and Nate Young. Over on the flipside "Primitive Equations" takes for inspiration the bare-boned, hyper-tense production of Photek's still devastating "Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu", slugging out feral, steely noise and 'ardcore torque forged by calloused hands and burning minds to cruel, propulsive effect.
MP3 $1.98
08/26/2013
FLAC $2.99
08/26/2013
Proceeding missions into the no-mans-land of noise and jungle, Demdike Stare adopt a typically schizoid stance at House and Techno tempos on the 3rd Testpressing. Their A-side 'Eulogy' is a square bass devotional to the soul of deep Chicago and Detroit house, most notably the magic of Mr Fingers and Terrence Dixon. A constantly morphing, Escher-like bassline folds in and out of itself, accented with offset kicks and washed out with effervescent, barely-there synth strokes. It's lip-smacking sunset/sunrise gear and a perfect set-up for the flipside shocker. Destined to become a classic in Demdike's canon, 'Dyslogy' comes off like an early 'Waveform Transmission' or H&M bomb spanked by Anthony Shakir; an evil, droning intro ratchets the tension for martial kicks and darkcore chords before a feral breakbeat romps loose like the spirit of '93 unchained. They really don't make 'em like this any more…
MP3 $1.98
08/26/2013
FLAC $2.99
08/26/2013
*30 minute EP follow-up to Miles' recent 'Faint Hearted' album for Modern Love, mastered by Matt Colton* An addendum of sorts to his recent 'Faint Hearted' album, Miles' returns with a half-hour EP more squarely aimed at the floor with four darkened, robust variants. 'Blatant Statement' is up first, slowly emerging from a rough alignment of metallic percussion and abrasive stabs not a million miles removed from the kind of racket you'd most likely associate with Vatican Shadow, before the almost-clipped rub of those super-warm bass stabs shifts the perspective to a different kind of environment altogether. 'Technocracy' delivers an oozing House deconstruction, slowed down and inebriated, while 'Infinite Jest' revolves around an industrial cacophony harnessed into a rhythmic anomaly situated somewhere between a technofied Pete Swanson and a sweaty Kassem Mosse. 'Plutocracy' ends the set with a bleached-out warehouse chug, slowed down and menacing, surrounded by a submerged choral arrangement and more of that toughened hammered-metal sound that runs through the EP.
MP3 $3.96
06/03/2013
Miles has been releasing material on Modern Love for a decade, first as one half of Pendle Coven, then on his own as MLZ, and eventually pairing up with Sean Canty to record as Demdike Stare. In between he’s also pursued more experimental terrain under the Suum Cuique moniker, produced Jungle for the HATE project and (together with Andy Stott) taken on the occasional release as Millie & Andrea for Modern Love sublabel Daphne. He is also an admired, exhilarating DJ, his sets have been known to span a broad spectrum of electronic music, from the obscure UK techno of labels like Radioactive Lamb and Irdial, to classic Chicago House, Detroit Techno and – most importantly – early 90’s jungle and breakbeat, feeding into his love of the most uncompromising end of the Italian experimental movement, Musique Concrète, Synthwave and contemporary Noise. After more than 10 years of producing, “Faint Hearted” is his debut solo album. ‘Faint Hearted’ is an exposition of Miles’ love of electronic music in all its shapes, harnessing his fidgety production style into one expansive, restless set of tracks. The album opens with the filtered and looped Jungle mutation of ‘Lebensform’, through to the minimal, barely-noticeable bass-shifts of ‘Irreligious’, the classic Plastikman-infused looped ruffage of ‘Status Narcissism’ and the padded bliss of “Sense Data”, coming across like a lost Move D production from the classic Studio Pankow era. The second half opens with ‘Rejoice’, a slowly-unfurling 4/4 variant that sounds like a more technofied and electric...
MP3 $7.92
04/08/2013
Rainer Veil are Liam Morley and Dan Valentine, two friends who met while studying contemporary music in the north of England. The pair began improvising and making drones in a dark basement before incorporating a broader palette and forming Rainer Veil as an ongoing concern last year. ‘Struck’ is their first EP and debut for Modern Love, following an appearance at the label Boiler Room takeover in August 2012. The ‘Struck’ EP incorporates recordings made over the last year and extends from the rewired Jungle ruckus of the title track to the more emotive formation of ‘Wade In’ and ‘Bala’, through to the hazy closer ‘Yield’. There’s a melancholy pop pulsing at the heart of these tracks, coloured by a love of electronic mutations from UKG and Hardcore rave to House and Techno, most evident in the unusual recording process undertaken while constructing the EP. Each track was re-worked from radically different first drafts, often starting life as more recognisable and structured songs before being dismantled into more abstract shapes: percussion degraded and layered, vocals fed through analog delays, samples reworked at the wrong speed and re-sampled to tape for added warmth: the narrative all mixed up.
MP3 $4.95
02/18/2013
Jack Dice is a new project from John Twells and Walkmaster Flex, now releasing their debut EP for Modern Love. John Twells, amongst very many other things, runs the Type label and has been producing music of various different disciplines and varieties over the last 15 years. Although he’s never released anything on Modern Love before, he’s a long time friend and associate of the label. Walker is the manager of Main Attrakionz and has been DJing with them for the last couple of years as the official ‘Green Ova DJ’. ‘Jack DIce’ is fuelled by an interest in bass, Twells being a car audio nerd and Walker having an obsession with 90s southern rap music. These are their first tracks produced together, who know what might follow...
MP3 $3.96
12/10/2012
***Ornamented Walls is the most intense, brutal and, in many senses, most substantial work from DOMINICK FERNOW’s VATICAN SHADOW project yet. Released to coincide with his first tour of Europe, the album incorporates the live mix rehearsals of "Operation Neptune Spear" with tracks made in their aftermath, recorded straight to tape and mastered by MATT COLTON at Air Studios. Anyone familiar with Fernow's live set-up will recognize the distinct nature of this material—making use of stems and partial tracks separated into a cassette system which is then re-layered and mixed, effected with electronic processing. In short, Fernow uses his tape machines like turntables in a mix, weaving a hazy and intuitive narrative of sounds that never quite head in the direction you expect, all imbued with an almost feral attitude that's exhilarating to witness, their limitations (ever noticed how VS tracks end so abruptly? the tape ran out), and their mechanical machine qualities used to devastating effect. Side A features all three parts of "Operation Neptune Spear," originally made available in a measly edition of 17 cassettes and sold at the first-ever Vatican Shadow live show in L.A. back in May 2012. Side B features an additional 25 minutes of previously-unreleased work made in the aftermath of the show and using the same set-up, including an astonishing revision of "Cairo Is a Haunted City," dis-assembled and re-wired, lending it a shortwave quality that's nothing short of revelatory. Ornamented Walls is the fourth Vatican Shadow release to be made available on...
LP $24.35
11/27/2012
MP3 $8.91
11/06/2012
***Received an 8.7 Best New Music rating from Pitchfork. Following on from a pair of extended players released in 2011 (Passed Me By / We Stay Together) ANDY STOTT returns to Modern Love with Luxury Problems, an eight-track album of new material recorded over the last 12 months. Five of the tracks on the album feature the voice of ALISON SKIDMORE, Andy's one-time piano teacher whom he hadn't seen since he was a teenager back in 1996. There was no grand gesture in mind, it just sort of happened—but after almost a year of studio work, the result is really quite unlike anything you'll have heard from him before.
CD $20.15
11/13/2012
2XLP $28.35
11/06/2012
MP3 $9.90
10/29/2012
For their first release of 2012 Modern Love deliver the second album from Suum Cuique, the analogue noise/experimental project from Miles Whittaker, one half of Demdike Stare. The first Suum Cuique album 'Midden' was released on Modern Love sublabel 'Young Americans' back in 2010, with these new recordings made in the intervening years and in betweeen sessions for the most recent Demdike Stare album 'Elemental'. What differentiates this project from all the others Whittaker is involved with is that the material recorded under Suum Cuique was made using analogue hardware only, often recorded straight from mixing desk with no overdubs or edits. The sound veers from the intense shards of noise that make up album opener 'Strohtopf' to the padded techno malfunctions of 'Kuiper Anomaly', the found sound/shortwave radio signals of 'Atlas Levels' to the mystical rotations of 'Intonation' and the electrified drones of album closer 'Dionysus Decay'. Although there are obvious sonic threads running between Suum Cuique and Demdike Stare, the material on 'Ascetic Ideals' is much more stark, at turns recalling the work of Mika Vainio, Eleh, Maurizio Bianchi and even John Carpenter, whose nightmare visions lurk somewhere deep in the mix.
MP3 $7.92
06/11/2012
It's been almost a year since Demdike Stare finished their "Tryptych" of releases, and in the intervening months Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty have been busy touring and gradually piecing together sounds for this new series: Elemental. After four limited edition vinyl installments, Elemental is now released as a digital album, including different versions of tracks that have appeared on the vinyl editions, plus extensive additional material - making for a two-hour trip through dark, post-industrial terrain.
MP3 $13.99
03/12/2012
G.H. is Gary Howell, longtime associate of Modern Love as one half of Pendle Coven and sometime contributor to the HATE project. The Ground EP features Howell's first material produced outside of Pendle Coven and takes on a much darker, more stripped down aesthetic - making use of location recordings amassed over the last decade. The title track extends over 7 minutes from a solitary bass pulse into a slow, three dimensional industrial reduction heaving with uncomfortable bass weight and a sense of nervous expectation. It's like the bare, skeletal noise framework for darkest junglist hardcore stripped of its percussion - all bar a bass drum and intense shards of noise. Albedo has more of a swing to it, dominated by a growling bassline and the metallic clunk of disjointed percussion at odds with the squashed funk lurking somewhere at its core. The template is extended on Earth, a brilliantly discordant club variant that sounds like an R&B mastertrack exploded into 100 constituent parts and put together not entirely in the right order. It builds and collapses into itself, a stylistic oddity that at one and the same time brings to mind Boards of Canada's re-working of Colonel Abrams' 'Trapped' and the extreme frequency vortex of the Raster Noton label.
MP3 $2.97
11/28/2011
Recorded in the immediate aftermath of his last EP "Passed Me By", this new doublepack from Andy Stott features six new productions that are more desolate and exposed than anything on its predecessor. The opening "Submission" tumbles into being with layers of washed-out digital revolutions, creating an artificial landscape that's quite at odds with the analogue machinations that follow - yet somehow rendering the alienated feel of this material perfectly. "Posers" nudges its way into being abruptly and embeds another squashed funk variant that's all low-lit neon and growling textures, awkwardly shuffling into a more robust 4/4 template suffused with sparkling percussion and disembodied vocals. "Bad Wires" is the centrepiece of the EP, a relentless percussive cluster*ck that belies it's slow tempo with a fearless rhythmic attitude. It's as immersive and narcotic as anything ever produced by Stott - peeling away one layer after another with each repeated listen. "We Stay Together" (Part One) was the first track written for the EP and offers a more spacious narrative and a more sparkling, hazy palette - culminating in a beautifully frayed central hook that's somehow in keeping with the VHS aesthetic of both Jamal Moss and Ferris Bueller. "Cherry Eye" tumbles deep into a darkened hole before EP closer "Cracked" turns up, fuelled by an odd mixture of adrenalin and sorrow to send you on your way.... buzzing and forlorn.
2X12" $22.15
10/24/2011
MP3 $5.94
10/24/2011