Not Not Fun   Page 3

Magnetizer

Reality

Not Not Fun

Oakland’s self-described “emotional machine funk group” Magnetizer traffic a uniquely wacked fusion of brooding cyberwave, maniacal acid, trash fire block party, and psychedelic noise, operating in relative seclusion since 2012. Captained by Jackson Blümgart aka Wormhole, the project has grown increasingly defined and dynamic, culminating in this year’s Post-Body EP for Goaty Tapes. Gunked machines and rusted artificial intelligence are harnessed and hacked into derelict body music anthems both long-form and concise, strafed with cryptic grit: alien monologues, lunatic skronk, sequencer squelch, decrepit dub. Reality furthers the vision, four blasted tunnels of claustrophobic haze, chemical groove, and mismatched cables snaking through stagnant water. Life is wasted on the living. Recorded and mixed by Wormhole in 2016. Design by Britt Brown.

Unknown Me

Subtropics

Not Not Fun

Tokyo trip-ambient unit UNKNOWN ME make transportive vignettes with minimal means: soft-focus static, translucent loops, muted metronomes, field recordings. Comprised of DJ / producer Yakenohara, radloop label boss P-RUFF, electronic texturalist H. Takahashi (Constellation Tatsu, Where To Now?, birdFriend), and art director Osawa Yudai, the group’s sophomore offering, subtropics, furthers the fantasy Zen garden miniatures of their 2016 debut, sunday void. Whereas that collection themed itself as an innerspace voyage of domestic leisure, their latest journeys outward, a lucidly dreamed globe-trot across continents, cities, and coastlines. Dazed tones spiral gracefully against hushed backdrops of floating chimes, distant wildlife, and prismatic vapor. These are less songs than spaces, blissed synthetic bio-domes awaiting habitation. Eight illusions of worlds unrealized, pleasures UNKNOWN. Recorded from July-September, 2016. Mastered by Yakenohara. Artwork and design by Osawa Yudai (Aroe Inc.).

Wave Temples

Isle Enchanted

Not Not Fun

Floridian fantasy island ethnographer Wave Temples is responsible for a unique flow of opaque tropical hallucinations since 2013, issued via a variety of noted tape boutiques. His latest, Isle Enchanted, maps a mirage coastline of salt haze, cerulean water, and smeared, siren keys. Both sides were tracked across three summer days, inspired by notions of Polynesian paradise and the Māori underworld. Blank blue waves swell and crash, tones dance and zone, textures phase and fade – Isolation Exotica, for castaways abandoned on utopian shores. As personal and poetic an encapsulation of palm tree minimalism as any we’ve heard since …On Sea-Faring Isolation (2009). The more hidden the temple the more sacred the space: “This place to me is what it must have been like to discover the island of Capri or Malta uninhabited since beyond ancient days.” Recorded live at Hawaiki, June 20-22, 2016. Images sourced by WT. Design by Britt Brown. Mastered by Alter Echo.

Mai Mai Mai

Phi

Not Not Fun

Roman noise omnivore Toni Cutrone aka Mai Mai Mai names his poisonous, punishing electronic miasmas after characters of the Greek alphabet, beginning with Theta in 2013 and followed by Δέλτα (Delta) in 2014. Φ (Phi) is the third and final installment in his Mediterranean trilogy, pushing the project deeper into a vivid interzone of digital synthesis and scorched ritual. The album opens with a searing collaboration with avant-folk instrumentalist Luca Venitucca, locked into a lofty duel of distorted drones, before pivoting to a throbbing oblivion of jackhammer bass, seething feedback, and combat samples. Later passages ooze through industrial spoken word, technoid voodoo hallucination, seasick prayer loops, and nightmare exotica, assisted in places by Italian experimental percussion legend Lino Capra Vaccina (of 1970’s “golden age” groups Aktuala and Telaio Magnetico). Cutrone ascribes a degree of his maximalist tendencies to a rootless youth packed with parents through Europe and the Near East, absorbing fragments of sensation and sound, but his own decade-plus experience in the Italian underground has doubtless played a role as well. Intensity accrues, patience decays. Closure is its own reward. Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Hombrelobo Studio by V. Fisik. Artwork and design by LEGNO; photography by Ilaria Doimo.

Delicate Features

Sky Of Earth

Not Not Fun

Suburban St. Petersburg unit Delicate Features make sorrowful, mysterious music stitched from a strange symbiosis of trip-hop, new age, medieval lament, and Russian poetics. Sky of Earth expands on the endless steppe meditations of 2014’s The Passenger, sweeping wider and sinking deeper. The album’s 11 excursions into ambient reverie, Eastern bloc Enigma, funereal folk, and devotional electronics share a mood of solitude and contemplation, landscapes disappearing in dusk, plagued by memory. Founding members Radmila Nikogosian and Pavel Astvatsturian variously cite Latvian folk songs, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, funereal black metal, Muslimgauze, metaphysics, and spectral Sade amongst their source material, threading together a vision both bleak and beatific: “We were looking for the state of harmony, and something eternal; we hope the listener will be able to find those feelings.” Cover artwork by Igor Astvatsaturian. Layout by Britt Brown. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Ekolali

Igor

Not Not Fun

Malmö multi-instrumentalist Mattias Lagerkvist spent time in short-lived neo-Harmonia trio Cosmic Letters (alongside Martin Herterich of Sand Circles) but since 2012 his primary focus has been swirling, long-form tape delay odysseys issued under the name Ekolali. Previous releases have explored minimalist solarium drone (Vår Värld I Fossil, via Skeppet’s Kosmisk Vag imprint) and tropical kraut psychedelia (Tropisk Hägring) but Igor is his first inspired by, and centered on, guitar. A single 40-minute piece, the track flowers from ghostly electric haze into a glowing wormhole of looped hand-drums, phasing textures, and Space Echo-soaked riff abstractions, before receding to blank, haunted gauze for a full five minutes, only to gradually return for a final swooping arc of percussive kosmische freefall. In scope, depth, and functional hypnosis, the recording stands apart and above his prior creations, hinting at unknown pleasures in future days. The title “comes from the name me and my girlfriend gave a limping hooded crow; he lived in the parks of central Malmö, and we spent last summer feeding him.” Artwork designed by Britt Brown. Mastered by Alex Nagle.

Ssaliva

Mercury Coast

Not Not Fun

Belgian shapeshifter Francois Boulanger has traversed several spheres of liquid electronics and mutated beat music across his half-decade of activity as Ssaliva, but in the winter of 2010 he holed up in an old historic house in the town where he grew up, Chaudfontaine, with a partially broken Tascam 4-track to pursue a different muse, on a different wavelength: “The place was super cold. Everything was recorded straight to tape. I was bored using a laptop so these tracks were a reaction to that, I guess.” The 22 grainy guitar instrumentals comprising Mercury Coast slide through a fractured prism of moods, reveries, daydreams, and deliriums, from paranoid surf (“Borys,” “Health”) to opiate lullaby (“Cloud Gap,” “Hyperreal,” “Weav”) to smeared haze (“School Rave,” “Trave”) and beyond. There’s a naked, intuitive feel to the songs, like sketches born from smoke and sleeplessness, tracked at strange hours. The frayed fidelity further enhances the album’s aura of cloaked emotion, altered states, and raw truth. Shortly after the sessions Boulanger and two Brussels associates, Dynoo and Nosedrip, launched a label (Surf Kill) to release the recordings but for unremembered reasons nothing materialized. NNF is honored to finally share this overlooked outlier to a wider world. Artwork and design by Dieter Durinck. Mastered by Alter Echo.

Scraps

TTNIK

Not Not Fun

Brisbane “dehydrated disco” producer Laura Hill explains her faded headspace of dazed electro-wave as: “bogans in the Queensland sun – so dehydrated cause the water tastes like shit.” The latest Scraps full-length, TTNIK, draws from a persuasive moodboard of 80’s hairdresser magazines bleaching in the desert, cubist synth-pop, and disaster fascination. Since her debut LP in 2011 – on grit institution Bedroom Suck – Hill’s synthesis of raw rhythms, sequencer intuition, and echo-soaked storytelling has honed and decayed, heatwaving between low-lidded new wave, woozy acid ballads, and alienated karaoke. The eight songs of TTNIK were self-tracked at her home studio, Vibrations (so named for the paper-thin walls that rattle when trucks drive past), allowing her to indulge accident and chance and disregard pressure and polish. Inspired fatalist electronic romantica by and for freed spirits. Mixed by Chelvis. Mastered by Lawrence English. Executive Manipulator: L. Hill. Design by BB.

Les Halles

Sentient

Not Not Fun

Exclusive companion EP to the Transient LP, unspooling parallel wavelengths of high altitude reflection via woozy flute samples, open-tuned guitar, mirage keys, and magnetic tape decay. Although composed and tracked before the pieces which would become his vinyl debut, Sentient shares a similarly wide-skied spirit and hushed sense of motion. The sides are distinguished by mood: the A (“From There To Here”) skews hopeful and golden, a dawning tapestry of reverberant textures, while the B (“From Then To Now”) brings the dusk, wind and strings looped into a twilit reverie for something left behind. A stirring snapshot of an artist’s process in the midst of quiet refinement. Artwork and design by Dieter Durinck.

Les Halles

Transient

Not Not Fun

French exoticist Baptiste Martin has been crafting fragile pastures of pan flute, field recordings, and stargazing keys as Les Halles since 2012, inspired by a formatively nostalgic night alone “watching the summer sky, thinking of all the mystery.” Previous collections on Constellation Tatsu and Noumenal Loom showcased the nuance of his signature Incan drift mode but Transient further hones his heightened passage into escapist beauty and Tascam grain. The album’s eight pieces are constructed from Amerindian flute samples diffused through lilting echo and streaked with soft-focus textures. As always with Les Halles, there is a mesmerizing mood of natural space and weightlessness – the breath of sky, clouds smeared by breeze, inner islands of peace. Few current crouched pedal-pushers channel ambient dimensions with such poise and blurry grace. Out of time meditations for a newer new age. Recorded and mixed in Lyon, January-October 2015. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Artwork and design by Dieter Durinck.

Body Awareness

The Awakening

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The Kosmisk Väg axis out of Malmo has many splintered sub-factions but label co-founder Andreas Malm’s solo “all synthetic” endeavor Body Awareness remains one of the more reclusive. The initial intention around the time of his self-titled 2010 cassette skewed towards purist drone and new age immersion but a fascination with old Roland drum machines revised the vision. The Awakening presents 30 minutes of music culled from six years of sporadic home recording, particularly inspired by a trip to “the forests and empty beaches” of Oregon and Washington state in 2014. Mantric synth sequences bob and weave like crude holographic ragas over minimalist metronomes, intercut with dream sequence dirges, bleached tone float, reverbed stasis, and wildlife. These are less songs than closed-circuit inductions of restrained psychedelia, utopian explorations of stationary movement. Awake or re-awake as need be. Recorded in Malmö, Sweden, 2010-2015. Field recordings from the Pacific Northwest, U.S. Mastered by Alter Echo. Artwork and design by Dieter Durinck.

Umberto

Alienation

Not Not Fun

The origin story behind Matt Hill’s perplexingly stark and melancholic new full-length is suitably cryptic: “I had a vision of a man experiencing a series of alienating situations.” Whatever the impetus, Alienation stands as the most fascinatingly atypical Umberto album to date: downcast, subdued, haunted, ethereal.  In the wake of several extensive international tours and a string of high-profile collaborations with Antoni Maiovvi for the Death Waltz imprint—including a harrowing live score of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—Hill began expanding his palette, exploring divergences from his classic Giallo-paranoia mode. The record’s nine tracks flow between winter garden ambience (“Elimination,” “Lost Night”), lofty insomniac reverie (“White Night,” “Passage”), and shivering dirge (“Black Sea”), only two of which echo the pulsing synthesizer night-stalks for which he’s best known (“Drifters,” “Dawn of Mirrors”). Hill also commissioned vocalists Victoria Gokun and Edward Tonoyan to weight certain songs with heavier emotion, using lyrics inspired by condemned Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. The combined effect feels out of time, intertwining currents of memory, delusion and beauty, an unplaceable soundtrack for untraceable sorrow.  Alienation was recorded and mixed in 2015 by Hill in Los Angeles, and mastered in 2016 by Alex Nagle in Philadelphia. The expressionist cover painting is Geoffrey Sexton, the metallic gold-foil layout was designed by Tim Goodwillie.

Purple Pilgrims

Eternal Delight

Not Not Fun

Psychic sisterhood and wistful wanderlust are the twin energies feeding lush ceremonial dream-pop duo Purple Pilgrims. Raised itinerantly in Hong Kong and on New Zealand’s South Island by Traveller parents with deep backgrounds in folk music (their great-grandfather was recorded by Alan Lomax), Valentine and Clementine Adams adapted by devising their own telepathic inner worlds. After the Christchurch earthquake of 2011 leveled their home they fled to the North Island, crashing with friends and sleeping in cars, eventually returning to China, where they began performing crouched sets of gauzy, angelic noise. Subsequent tours of Europe and America alongside Yek Koo, Gary War, and Ariel Pink helped hone their sprawling, choral haze into leaner, more mantric forms.To record Eternal Delight, their first full-length, they sequestered themselves in a family property in Tapu, on the western side of the Coromandel Peninsula of NZ, in a shed surrounded by native palms and birds. The isolation, stars, and river nightswimming evidently soaked into the music – all 10 tracks radiate spectral feeling and wide-eyed sensuality. From the processional-pop ritual of “Is You Real?” to the swooning ghost-choir of “Into Night (Brush My Hair, While I Cry)”, the album elegantly encapsulates Purple Pilgrims singular journey to date, adrift in moonlit guitar, whispered electricity, heavenly voice, and muted percussion. The songs float and flow and billow, echoing the spirit of the title’s origin, William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven & Hell: “Energy is Eternal Delight.” Mastered by Brian Pyle.

Skeppet

Deluxe

Not Not Fun

Multi-instrumentalists Andreas Malm and Henrik Wallin have been triangulating a particular schematic of minimalist mantric-psychedelic instrumental music since the mid-2000s, emphasizing texture, time, and trance states. But with the exception of 2014’s Phase 3 LP, most of the group’s recordings were released as limited cassettes or vinyl in Sweden, long out of print. Skeppet Deluxe collects an assortment of these formative tracks into an hour-long mystic suite of primitivist circular sprawl. Shaping guitar, synthesizer, and percussion into fractals of FX, the ethos of Doing Less, Longer leads across varied terrain: motorik vignette, sunbleached organ vamp, drum rumble, Sky Records cruise, wah dirge, dawnbringer pop, etc. Pieces span from five to fifteen minutes; depth of repetition determines duration. As a discographical cross-section, Skeppet Deluxe revels in a vision of rustic cosmic roads and vanishing horizon lines. Of distance as illusion, and motion as meaning. Recorded from 2006-2011 in Malmö, SE. Gold metallic tapes in J-cards designed by H. Wallin. Mastered by Alex Nagle in Philadelphia, PA.

Bronze

In Stone

Not Not Fun

Few bands perplex like San Fran riddler trio Bronze but ever fewer have managed to hatch and hone such an obliquely singular sound. The group’s third long-player, In Stone, twists and burns through eight new iterations of their classic oscillator-fusion psychedelia, inflected with shades of post-punk raga, skronk lurch, modal incantantion, deep space narcosis, lizard kingmanship, and home-wired industrial dementia. As an album, these recordings skew tenser, twitchier, a touch paranoiac, bloodshot tweakers stalking steep foggy streets. The alchemy of drummer Brian Hock, vocalist Rob Spector, and electronicist Miles Friction is always riveting in the live sphere but In Stone feels like more of a studio document, exploratory and expressionistic, full of ideas and psychic interplay. Bay Area burnout rendered as psychotropic sculptural waveforms. Confusion isn’t sex, it’s something stranger. Black tapes mastered by Ruud 66 with J-cards designed by the band. Vinyl edition on B.F.E. Records.

Legendary Hearts

Music From The Elevator

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Miasmic Melbourne new age prog duo Legendary Hearts (aka Andrew Cowie + Kieran Hegarty) first entered the public eye/ear in 2012 but their music has only grown more opaque with age. Music From The Elevator is their 2012 debut, originally released via the Dungeon Taxis label, and captures their chemistry in altered states of sprawl, symbiosis, and swoon. Six expressionistic oozes of infinity gauntlet guitar, slow-motion drum machines, and warping synth, filtering in and out of focus like glares against glass, unfeeling neon aglow in smoke and smog. Each piece reflects (and is named for) the next higher level of the structure, from the low-lidded fusion lurch of “Basement” up to breezy cosmosis chillouts “Rooftop” and “Fire Exit.” Long-form, liquid, nebulous, and narcotic – Legendary Hearts walk a wavelength all their own, on their own. Remastered by Lawrence English in Brisbane, Australia. J-cards designed by Britt Brown.

X.Y.R.

Mental Journey To B.C.

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Russian Federation ambient fantasist Vladimir Karpov aka X.Y.R. (aka Xram Yedinennogo Razmuwlenuja) usually frames his decaying Soviet analog synthesizer pieces within “illusory worlds” – lost cities of gold (El Dorado), polar oblivion (Arktika), deserted equatorial islands (Robinson Crusoe: Lost Soundtrack) – but his latest collection less conjures a place than a time. The mood of Mental Journey To B.C. is pre-human: obscure landscapes hissing in the heat, shimmering in the dark, uninhabited, unreal. Humid loops of Formanta Mini and smoke-ring keys float over hushed jungle metronomes and moonlit field recordings. 10 shades of prehistoric haze, slipstreamed with temple chanting, distant insects, heavy echo, silhouettes of the subconscious. New Age as Ancient Age; the Portal as Process. X.Y.R.’s escape artistry continues to expand. Tinted red cassettes with red imprinting in J-cards designed by Dieter Durinck. Mastered by Alex Nagel in Philadelphia, PA.

Conda, Sasha

Bronco

Not Not Fun

*** The muse of BRONCO is Bronco Stephenson, a morally naïve cyber hedonist strutting ever deeper into the bowels of a dystopian capitalist arena called the Palace Interior, where he must eventually face a day of reckoning with “the true computer heart of the world.” The album acts as journey and destination, each piece reflecting his geography / mental state, from iridescent vape shops and electrode funkadelica into “the deeper, darker, questionably legal” inner sanctum of flickering fluorescent hallways and hacker pulse-programming.  Conceived by Minneapolis musician and MJ MJ Records CEO Sasha Conda in collaboration with writer Patrick Scott-Walsh III, whose 24-page narrative accompanies the release, BRONCO maps its hero’s quest across a linear 7-song cycle of decadent casino fusion boogie, neon waterfall 2-step, sci-fi new wave, and spherical synthesizer dirge  – fantasy-as-escape meets escape-as-fantasy. The text spills the story in ways both graphic and cryptic:   “At street level, the lights of the overwhelming hyperterranean Palace Interior are temporarily denied. Bronco sprints, gun in hand, passed the line for the public multipurpose privacy stalls, fitting himself through the density of bodies, to the line of mirrors and sinks.  He pulls his pants down … and puts cold water on the burn. The sound of pain/relief escapes through his gritted teeth, on top of the muffled sizzle of his flesh. The still bubbly lettering spelling EFFORTLESS is now adorned above his sheared pubic hair.”   Pro-dubbed cassettes mastered by Neil Weir in oversized cases with artwork by Keith Rankin, plus...

White Poppy

Natural Phenomena

Not Not Fun

Crystal Dorval from Vancouver, Canada, has been making healing, distorted rug-gaze music from a coastal mindset all her own since 2011. Natural Phenomena is her second album, and it echoes 2013’s self-titled effort in its isolationist origins, as the record emerged slowly across a nine-month retreat alone on a farm on Vancouver Island: “Some days I would only add one tiny guitar line or keyboard texture and that would be it for the day… it was a long process.”  However grueling and gradual the method, what accrued is gold—ten of Dorval’s deepest dreamdives, starry ambient pools and dissolved guitar designs, ghosted through a lens of grey-skied pop. Songs wax and wane across faded rainbows of guitar, sunrise keyboards, looped percussion and vocal ocean-spray.  Behind Dorval’s gauze of warm noise glows something pure and newer than new age: “My hope is that these positive feelings will be communicated sonically, or in essence, and will be enriching for listeners.” A high height for a climbing talent; White Poppy blooms on cliffs of light.

Night Court

Law & Order

Not Not Fun

The origins of these enigmatic VHS-scrambled prog-techno explorations are so true and tripped they’re worth quoting in full from co-chairman Christopher Hontos: “Night Court was recorded in July two summers ago ('13) in a remote cabin on Lake Namekagan (located on national forest grounds in northern Wisconsin). We usually do these ball-busting weeklong recording sessions up there with a good group of folks and a grip of mushrooms. For this one we had this idea of setting up our synths on the deck and doing a trippy somnabulistic overnight open-air recording sesh that would be called "Night Court.” However when the time came and the crew got together we interpreted the name literally and ended up jamming out an album of legal system-themed tracks. We recorded the entire album in one day – every song in one take – and with very little post-production. Track after track flowed and we never drifted from the theme nor spent time diverting our focus (with the exception of Farstad being vetoed after trying to start up a footwork-style track). After the session we were all so burnt-out and fried we thought little of the recordings. But as time passed we went back to them and realized we had struck gold.” Italics ours – this is rare ore. A freaked fusion vision, flowing cold city collectivist synths interlaid with executioner guitar, ambulance/TV samples, alley haze, and flashing sirens sax. Insane music for insane times. Its meanings are manifold: political (“a sweeping overview of the...

Beat Detectives

Climate Change

Not Not Fun

Climate Change marks Minneapolis/Brooklyn block party brain-scrambler trio Beat Detectives’ debut on the vinyl format after a splatterpaint trail of tapes for the 1080p, 100% Silk, Where To Now, Moon Glyph, and Night People labels. Their time is now. The album’s 14 cuts coast and crunk within a Quaalude Quadrangle of blasted dub (“Roaring Lion”), cro-magnon acid (“Reward Card,” “Three Pointer”), hijacked funk (“Dead Girl At A Party,” “Sands Of Slime”), and smeared low rider bass grease (“Magic Island Ripper,” “When You Wake Up”), spliced with speaker-blown samples and singer Oakley Tapola’s dazed, glazed vocals. Rhythm constructionists Aaron Anderson and Chris Hontos channel a fried, psychedelic Friday vibe, in service to a higher cause: “Push it towards something else.” Something temporary, something ripping, something more than the sum of its parts – Climate Change congeals Beat Detectives’ mixtape-you’d-find-in-the-trunk mission statement into a positive journey of swap meet magic and melted body music. Change or be changed. Black vinyl LPs in whacked fontmanship jackets designed by Anderson; mastered by Collin Gorman Weiland.

Cankun

Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold

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Vincent Caylet’s state of mind as Cankun has always been sunburnt and woozy but, despite its title, Only The Sun Is Full Of Gold is his first to stray intriguingly into the shade. “I wanted to explore the melancholic aspect of my music, the wild side.” This motive comes through in longer, looser sections, more lurking melodies, and moments of heavier mood, communed through his ongoing language of snake-charmer guitar, heatstroked keyboards, and tribal dub electronics. As always his songs divide and diverge in unexpected moments, collaged from scattered burnzones of improvisation, where endings and beginnings become reversible. Among current French psychedelicists, Cankun’s home-rigged solar panels cast weird reflections, a warped, patient radiance. Long may it gleam. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Artwork by Valerian Marguery. Vinyl version on Hands In The Dark. NNF cassette/digital edition includes a different track sequence, as well a bonus song, “Trezz.”

Severed+Said

Occlusions

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Jacksonville, Floridian John Touchton’s second release of ritualistic synthesizer music, Occlusions, is less soundtrack-ish than his last and hugely more sunken. The decision to blast his hardware through a trio of vintage amps before capturing it on the Tascam gives this set of songs a more physical aspect, thick throbs over signal buzz and low corridors of drum machinery. The pieces swerve from mechanical raga (“Black Shine Bright”) to tranced nightrides (“Death By Empire”) to Heathen Earth bass trenches (“Occluded”), but they share a processional heaviness and humid pulse. Six electronic stalker themes from under the shadow of dawn, the glow of gear the only light. Recorded in a warehouse in “the dark corners of Florida” in October, 2014 by Jeremiah Johnson; all instruments by John Touchton. Purple-imprinted silver metallic tapes in doublesided cathode-warp J-cards with images by Phantomphoton; layout and photography by Rebecca Rose.

V/a

She Knows More Than She Thinks

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A cultural experiment as much as compilation, She Knows More Than She Thinks is the result of St. Petersburg musician Galya Chikiss deciding “to show something beautiful, unusual, unknown, and talented from different sides,” by uniting six different solo female DIY electronic artists from Russia and Ukraine within a shared document. She saw it bluntly: “Everybody exists in her own world, lonely and closed. Suddenly I’ve thought – it’s a cool idea – to connect them.” The purity of her motive belies a curatorial instinct heavy on contrast and enigma, as gauzy Soviet ghost-pop gives way to cultish percussion/chant loops, and electro Siouxsie fever sequences dissolve into fragile moon safari space chansons. Other modes repped evoke operatic new wave, insectoid industrial, tape-hazed folk, bedroom organ sleepsong, and 1980’s Moscow MTV, unspooling like a magnetic tape mural of unseen pockets of distant domestic radicalism. The cast includes: Blablarism (Kiev), Peekaboo (Moscow), Tosya Chai (St. Petersburg), Anya Kutz (Petrozavodsk), Ladan (Kiev-Odessa), and Chikiss’ own project. Despite the two nations’ complex international relations, the camaraderie of this collection belongs to people not places: “There is no political and feminist subtext in this story – just music and inmost things.” Pro-dubbed tapes with synthetic snow-maiden in ultraviolet artwork by Galya Chikiss. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Edition of 150.

Maiovvi, Antoni

Avrokosm

Not Not Fun

The strain of synthesizer cosmosis harvested by Bristol-born Europe-roving psycho-maestro Antoni Maiovvi tends towards the longform and texturally opulent. Past dalliances in horror giallo and intergalactic disco have demonstrated his capacity for mood sculpture as well as dancefloor pleasure nodes, but his latest LP, Avrokosm, assumes an almost ethno-musicological perspective of a distant desert planet. Swirling sand dunes of sound, cold tonal winds, and veiled loops sweep in across pulsing, runic techno patterns. Begun in Berlin but finished in Madrid, the record shares some of the sprawl and mysticism of certain unclassifiable Warriors Ov Gaia sides, a neo-tribal fantasy of rhythmic cave-painting, fires flickering in ancient caves under twin blood moons – the Avrokosm as microcosm for man the animal. Six processions bound for the same horizon. Mastered by Alek Stark at Fundamental Audio. Sci-fi landscape sleeve artwork by Annita Rivera; layout by Eric Lee. Edition of 250.

Profligate

Finding The Floor

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Philly trawler Noah Anthony’s pulverized industrial designs under the black Profligate flag have grown increasingly caustic and cracked, culminating in the eight misery beat clawhammers comprising his sophomore full-length, Finding The Floor. What’s particularly impressive given Anthony’s history in form-frying outfits like Form A Log and Social Junk is how deft and purposefully these pieces are arranged – asylum weaponry fashioned from scavenged hardware. Of the record’s eight cuts, only “Can’t Stop Shaking” has seen release before (though the LP version is a fresh edit); the rest rip through variously frenzied frequencies of slaughterhouse techno, basement desperation, maniac minimal wave, heavy breathing, and shattered glass dub. Only the closer, “We Can Have It All,” hints at an escape hatch, glassy synth-pop bliss pinned against a Belgian new beat rhythm. All in all a slaying, sleek selection by one of our favorite heads in the game. Electronic body music as existential prison break: “Can’t stop shaking / can’t stand myself.” Mastered by Alex Nagle. Sleeve design by Noah Anthony.

Rangers

Reconsider Lounge

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Trans-american Joe Knight recently caravanned his custom duffel bags of woozy jukebox esoterica from the Bay to the plains of central Texas but, before and during so, crafted and released the double-volume Scrap collection for multifaceted Midwestern organization, Bezoar Formations. Reconsider Lounge distills a portion of this material into different arrangements, intercut with an assortment of unreleased curiosities and classics, comprising an essentially new album in the instrumental fantasy radio canon Rangers reigns so uniquely at. Song modalities station-switch from piece to piece, spanning lonesome new wave garage (“Lauderdale Saints”), dreadlocked psych (“Clown Prince”), monorail zoo tour DVD themes (“ETV”), tight-wired Television-lensed guitar heroics (“Safety Goggles”), out across the endless airwaves. The logic of Knight’s pack-rat electric collages culture-jam as much as flow, chasing sparks, exposing irrelevancies and connective tissues. Fissured fragments of rock mythology, obscurely realized, again and again. Reconsider. Lounge. Black vinyl in buffalo relic jackets designed by Suzanne Pfutzenreuter. Mastered by Brian Pyle. Edition of 265.

Swanox

Duskrunner

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A sequel of sorts to his 2010 cassette, Dawnrunner, Anthony Orion’s debut vinyl long-player is a vagrant classic of stringy-haired new age loner Americana, above and beyond anything in the Swanox public domain. Mixing personal Casio squatter meditations with crystal jukebox guitar and hitchhiker whistling over echo-smeared SK1 metronomes, Duskrunner feels hungover, spaced out, worn down, and at peace – sometimes all at once. The ex-projectionist and current touring drummer for Tony Molina slowly refined the record’s nine songs across several itinerant years in San Fran’s Sunset District, between sublets, day jobs, evictions, work trips, couch life, and muggings. You can hear it: his is a voice muffled and downcast, nights lost smoking cigarettes on the fire escape, the lights of the Golden Gate swooping up dimly into the fog. “There’s a sign at my bar / and it reads NO LOCALS.” Strangeness and truths from an artist apart. Mixed, assembled, and “saved” by Sam Rezendes at Unified Stations Audio. Artwork and design by Sean Hewitt and Alex Coxen (of Milk Music). Comes with a Tres Hombres-inspired foldout poster of a wastoid’s feast. Mastered by Carl Saff. Edition of 299. 

Cuticle

Mind Holding Pattern

Not Not Fun

When Cuticle’s asteroid techno shrapnel formations finally streak the sky, they’re immediately recognizable – the stark cubic mixing eccentricities, a clashing crosshatch of alien bass patterns and arcade synth fingerpaint, acid atmospherics dripped like candlewax, poems whispered through futuristic air ducts. Brendan O’Keefe’s phantom touch has been distinct since the project’s origin but Mind Holding Pattern feels even more defined and isolated than his earlier work, nine morphing textures charged with different voltages. “Antigogglin” and “Faberge Tear” spywalk a stealthier electronic heartbeat, but “God Still Cannot” and “Beg To Exist” come down thick like heavy Depeche Mode lessons learned at cosmic desert raves, restless and deranged. As always his layouts are spiked with dabs of freeform mutation and wobbling grids, programs buffering to align. The naked hand glows weirder in the foreground. Mastered by Ghost Sounds. Black vinyl LPs housed in custom silkscreened sleeves designed and printed by Daniel Luedtke. Edition of 397.

Filthy Huns

Leopard On My Right

Not Not Fun

Echo Park (by way of Minneapolis) motorcycle mechanic Nick Koenigs aka Filthy Huns follows his 2012 self-titled debut with a freshly iced 8-pack of stark tar-streaked roadburn meditations, Leopard On My Right. Echo-blurred metronomes rev from dive bar dub to aging engine chugs, laced with keyboard exhaust, stick-and-poke guitar designs, hungover highway vocals, and dust-choked American desolation. As before, Koenigs keeps the dead-eyed leather menace quotient high while bleaching the songs' rock bone structures into pale, emaciated shapes ("Ancient Hell," "Nomad Status"), occasionally dissolving into drained badlands atmospherics ("Into Oblivion," "Stein Stugga"). Sleeveless, stained with axle grease, after midnight, a Viking in the basement with a 4-track, wind whipping through his mind. Have been loving these skeletal rider themes rendered live in various unkempt Los Angeles interiors across the last year, stoked to present them publicly for physical consumption. Mastered by Cole Gorman Weiland. Artwork and layout by Eric Carlson and Chris Hontos.

Regional Curse

S/t

Not Not Fun

Regional Curse is the scarred, spectral incarnation of Melbourne-by-way-of-Adelaide musician Stacey Wilson aka Rites Wild. Her instrumentation remains similar – cyclical keyboard figures, downward tracing synths, skeletal drum machinery – but the execution follows a more disembodied, ceremonial logic. Her latest collection of uneasy electronics murmurs and seethes like threatening shadows silhouetted through the blinds. Low-lit drones stalk their waveforms, unraveling into pulsing, blank dubs for unknown presences. Like all of Wilson’s work, the album’s five pieces move with an alluring narcolepsy, focused but foggy, drained but sentient, a spirit stranded in some serpentine purgatory of space and time. Recorded at Miracle Cure, Fairfield, Australia. Mastered by Lawrence English at 158. Red-tint tapes in collaged J-cards by the artist.

Delicate Features

The Passenger

Not Not Fun

“…our music goes to ambient, and sometimes atmosphere, of disturbance and worry, sometimes meditation. But it doesn’t lie.” So sayeth singer/soothsayer of Saint-Petersburg haunted romance duo Delicate Features, Radmila Nikogosian. We’re fully of the mind to concur. Nikogosian and bandmate/beau Pavel Diakov-Astvatsaturian have been lurking in the off-grid steppes for roughly two years, scotch-taping microphones to fragile percussive objects and folk flutes amidst glowing grey electric swells of depressive sensuality. The Passenger blurs morose misty synth-jazz with windswept new age memory pop into a love-blind stalk along an ice-scarred river – an experience befitting “two misanthropic dreamers who just like to listen to beautiful music.” The original intention apparently skewed more in a dancewardly direction but their grey northern home gravitated the mood into displaced, pensive nocturnal rhythms, often ditching drum forms entirely, like in the keening, cracked classical drift of “Orphan Song” or “Whispering Wind.” The sequencing spills out a story of devotion and dissolve, tracking the whole heavy soul waveform – poetic faith (“Birds Near River”), Sunday morning (“Opal”), body rapture (“Kiss By The Sea”), escape/evolution (“Transparent Shadows”), etc. 10 twilit and tactile songs for staring through stained glass to. Mastered by Alex Nagle. Artwork by Britt Brown.

Legendary Hearts

Aerial View

Not Not Fun

Legendary Hearts ooze an elusive chemistry. The collusion of Andrew Cowie’s disembodied synth sensibility and Kieran Hegarty’s fluorescent liquid guitar lines result in strange medicated states not easily grasped on first pass. Their previous (and only other) recording, 2012’s Songs From The Elevator, plays a little like the softest soft-rock sieved through a porridge of melted pills: chemical, blank, alluring, indistinct. The duo’s latest psychoactive sculpture garden, Aerial View, takes inspiration from a similarly liminal, haunted zone of transience – vacant, nocturnal hubs of travel – but pushes the project into richer, more irradiated moods. “Vanishing Point” and “Acceleration” spill and slide through blurred, lofty passages of legendary soloing and glassy synth exploration, coming in and out of view like hazy Tantric waves of tonal emotion. The more condensed pieces – “Terminal A,” “Terminal B,” “Stopover (Snapshot)” – connect the dots between, half-choreographed mood swings of starved beats, wealthy fog, and sunset guitar heroics. Haunted dreams of carpeted horizons, illuminated nothingness, on the way from some place to nowhere. Lift off, look down, let go. Mastered by Lawrence English at 158; artwork and design by Suzanne Pfutzenreuter.

Daughters Of The Sun

Ride To Die

Not Not Fun

Minneapolis torn-leather psychedelicists Daughters Of The Sun cop a tripped deathless vibe on their fourth, and most far-gone, full-length, Ride To Die. Severed by distance (singer/guitarist Nick Koenigs transplanted to LA), and pulled omni-directionally by other projects (Koenigs as Filthy Huns; percussionist Bennett Johnson and multi-instrumentalist Collin Gorman Weiland in Dreamweapon), the trio transmute these tolls into seven of their best badlands kosmosis interstate benders yet taped. The disintegrated chemistry of dirt-road hunts like “Desert Grave” or “Sater’s Ghost” sounds ingrained but reborn, bruised engines re-revving to life. Highway synth rhythms flutter between motorcycle riffs and pummeling war drums, evoking landscapes harboring psychic venom, a spirit bleaching the grease-stained sand. Moments of survivor wisdom burn too – the burned lope of “Lonely At The Top,” the rainstorm techno pulsing under “Fly By,” the 4:20 fatal vision intro to “Reigns Of Iron.” As songs and textures the LP pushes past their previous recordings into some unknown wrecked horsepower zone. Debut European tour this October currently being booked; drop a line if interested in helping or participating in any fashion. Recorded in Minneapolis, MN; mastered by Sonic Boom at New Atlantis. Artwork by Collin Gorman Weiland. Edition of 400.

Flat Fix

An Unkempt House

Not Not Fun

The transformation from trashed noise to tranced programming irks some technocrats but the truth is such shifts only highlight the kinship between these parallel modes of longform electrical activity; hypnosis and confusion can be achieved with or without drum machines. Newcastle transplants Nick Senger and Cooper Bowman both share storied pasts in improvisational amplifier damage as performers (Castings/Cistern Corrupt and Dry Mouth/Junk Sick, respectively) and label heads (Spanish Magic and Altered States Tapes), but recent efforts have focused on Flat Fix, their heavily dazed hardware duo. The pair oscillate between roles and equipment intuitively, allowing the pieces to accrue and unfurl across fried expanses of psychedelic repetition. Recorded straight to two-track tape at their home studio in Melbourne, An Unkempt House collects three recent worm-hole constructs for a half-hour factory tour through weirdly wired mazes of flatliner pulsing and melting signal dreams. Leave the club; enter the Unkempt House. Mastered by Australia's Prime Minister of Musicological Exports, Mikey Young. Double-sided silkscreened vellum artwork by Tokyo's Crooked Taper Ryo Kuramoto.     Flat Fix "Cerulean Blue" by NOT NOT FUN

Doll Food

Marrow Deep

Not Not Fun

Doll Food first emerged as a solo vehicle for Bri LaPelusa's bleached experiments in extended vocal improvisation layered with samples sourced from hypnosis videos and weight loss tapes, but the addition of multi-instrumentalist (and romantic foil) Brandon Volz roughly one year ago enriched the project's opaque, vaporous psychedelia with an extra dimension of enigmatic dread. Marrow Deep collects the Iowa City duo's six strangest slices of stained glass tone decay to date, basement choir loops unspooling under amber waves of gain and delay. In places LaPelusa's witchy, wordless voice tapestries evoke the cryptic basement weirdness of Inca Ore or early U.S. Girls, cracked American diviners singing through the psychic sludge of disappearing dreams. An inspired suite of haunted heartlandia, uniquely creeped and fully improvised (and, incidentally, recorded on Cuticle's 1/4 inch reel-to-reel machine following his recent relocation to Germany). That the group often performs in drag, dressed all in black, further feeds their murky mythos: "I Was Hungry And It Was Your World." Cut to the Marrow. Full-color double-sided J-cards designed by LaPelusa.

Eleventeen Eston

Delta Horizon

Not Not Fun

Perth multi-instrumentalist John William Tanner's suntanned soft rock miniatures as Eleventeen Eston exude a mood of sleek shades and faded footage: the bleached beauty of cerulean coves at golden hour, windsurfers gliding like skybirds on the horizon. It's the sound of smooth jazz at a seafood sky-lounge, sunset glittering on waves while a new wave instructional hang gliding video plays above the bar. Leisure and pleasure, loose and lost, grainy coastal cruises traced in piano, guitar, cocaine bass, and keys, laced with licks and hooks. A revisitation of futures past, enshrined on shredded tape for dusty dashboards.Despite the haze of airbrushed fantasy Tanner cites a muse truer and more beatific than breezy vacation rock: “The optimism and sincerity that exists (or did exist) in popular music, beyond any notion of nostalgia.” At this, Delta Horizon delivers, in ways warped, wondrous, unknown, and unforgettable.

I IM EYE MY

7 Transmissions

Not Not Fun

Formed by Philadelphian shred savants Al Creedon and Sean Hamilton as an outlet for their less headbangist musings, the bafflingly monikered (but fun to say) I IM EYE MY pour a lot of hot potions into their scavenger's cauldron: horizon-line Casio pop, boiled vine psychedelia, kalimba krautrock, stone temple psychosis, dirt road dream sequences, etc. Partially assembled during a session at Kensington's premier recordist lair Fancy Time Studios, the duo further architected the songs with layers of Farfisa, hand percussion, cheap keyboards, Youtube samples, piano, prepared guitar, feedback, midi miscellany, and more. The rich blitzkrieg of toys, tools, and tricks works; 7 Transmissions is a stirring and striking listen, meshing modes and moods and fidelities into frenzied fusions as unclassifiable as their name. Eccentric electronic exotica for a planet drunk on dreams of devolution. More persuasive proof of the potency of instinctive collaborations. Striated-shadow collage cover artwork by Lisa Armstrong; layout by Chris Kalis. Mastered by Tom Asselin. Edition of 100.

Minerva, Maria

Histrionic

Not Not Fun

Estonian expat Maria Minerva may have found her footing in the cultural battlefield of Brooklyn but her recent music continues to confound easy assimilation, crawling further into the crevices between karaoke fantasy, hall-of-mirrors pop, and meta-dancefloor mind games. Histrionic begins bluntly ("Sometimes beauty and brains are not enough"), ushering in a bewitching 11-song cycle about ivory towers, underground spirit, galactically challenged romances, predators vs prey, seeing the soul, and the ennui of identity amidst the metropolitan maze: "Tables are turned / bridges are burned / you fooled me once / but then you fooled me twice." Shades of woozy trap, London bass music, Eastern European cassette kiosks, 90's diva house, phaser ballads, and ambient rave commingle and align, tracing a nuanced self-portrait of her inner ecosystem of loves and labors lost. A stimulating surf across the brainwaves of one of our favorite artists (and people) at the threshold of an intriguing new pipeline of inspiration. Black vinyl LPs mastered by Dietrich Schoenemann, in constructivist sleeves designed by Antonio Trecel Diaz.

Skeppet

Phase 3

Not Not Fun

Though active for roughly half a decade, instrumental hypno-kosmische duo Skeppet (Swedish for “Vessel” or “Ship”) have only released two cassette EPs, one 7-inch and one split LP—each more spacious and weightless than the last—all on local labels in Sweden. Even so, their mantric ceremonial psychedelia hooked the minds behind Not Not Fun immediately, delivering on the title of a 2010 compilation curated by core members Andreas Malm and Henrik Wallin for their own Kosmisk Väg imprint: The New Wave of Swedish Cosmic Music.  For Phase 3, the group’s first full-length, they drafted Upper Layer Cruiser Martin Nilsson to play additional percussion, infusing a texture of mind-washed congas within their futurist Popul Vuh ascension voyages and gracefully opiated raga-rock. The album mimics the journey of a deep-orbiting craft, first spiraling deep into the ether, eclipsed and endless (the 20-minute wormhole “Den Nya Kusten,” or “The New Coast”), before arcing back toward the solar wind, increasingly sunbathed and radiant (fittingly kicking off the B-side is “Solskeppet,” or “Sun-Ship”).  A refined exploration of transportive aerodynamics and escape pod jamming by a sub-radar squadron who’ve paid their dues in the engine room, Phase 3 was recorded in waves across three years, partially at Skeppet’s home studio in Malmö and the rest at TonGeneration Studio with Björn Stegmann.