Tentacle Loot #27 | Kapha Selections: Sun Castle / Ke’So [KS04]

At first glance, nothing seems to fit on this 2 track split-tape. A solo piano piece on the A-Side and a 15 minute lofi house jam on the B-Side. And yet it apparently reflects the experimental musical melting pot of this New York collective. I say “apparently” because I couldn’t really find out that much about Kapha Selections, except that they have been releasing split tapes for about a year, which largely reflect the underground culture of their hometown.

A little more obvious is the International Winners Collective, to which this tape is dedicated. They’ve been organizing events and parties in Brooklyn, New York and releasing stuff on Bandcamp for a number of years now. Constantly strolling between art gallery and club without seeming to give a damn about whether they should please one or the other target audience. With a cross-eyed look across the Atlantic, such a concept, of course, brings up prejudices about would-be high culture immediately, which are also shaped by experiences from my own hometown Berlin. However, these can be completely dispelled with the two tracks on this EP alone. Because two things come to the fore here: curiosity and honesty. As different as these two pieces may appear, they are both a sincere invitation to a physical, spiritual experience. Both pieces do not want to be viewed and evaluated from the outside, but rather be experienced. (Sorry that I’m doing exactly the opposite of that at this point 😉 )

For these reasons, however, I will simply save myself from describing or even explaining the two tracks in detail. Instead I close with the realization that this short tape is a wonderful reminder that music is a living part of our confused cities and communities and that we will not be able to transport these experiences into virtual spaces.
And that’s a good thing!

Hold on!

Octobird – Faeces | available on Bandcamp (and everywhere else)

  • Beitrags-Kategorie:Releases

There we have him, the newborn. That happy little companion who will cheer you up about the first hardships of the approaching winter. A handful of tracks that are rather creamy, soft and warm, but won’t refuse a little dance or two.

“Faeces” Release Site

The links to the streaming services could still take a few days before they actually lead to the release, but Bandcamp is up and running. Everything else is fake anyway! 😉

Octobird Salad #12 | Digital Natures

A silent evolution is taking place between pixel-flooded landscapes and rhythmic clacking wood emulations. An Euclidean alternation between melody and texture, structure and color. And while hype addicts are still looking for the perfect hookline, the free spirits have long been researching new parameters of expression. And so this episode of Octobird Salad is intended to pay tribute to those free spirits who are looking for new parameters of composition in a mixture of club functionality and emotional expression. And by the way, a sneak peek into my own attempts in this field, which will see the light of day in the very near future. But you have to stay until the end of the party.

It is probably the hidden merit of Jan Jelinek (who is represented here with his Farben project) to have pushed the deconstruction of melody and rhythm. For almost twenty years now, he has been busy blurring the familiar patterns and levels in music and thus lovingly freeing us from our cherished bonds. Always deeply experimental in his musical approaches, somehow he never wanted to scare us. He was rewarded with all kinds of attempts to put him in some kind of genre. Yet he was minimalist before Minimal became a short-lived club trend. Was too conceptual for Ambient and Lounge.

While Jelinek seems to have long since arrived in the academic quarter of his existence, there are plenty of descendants who are striving for structural changes on the dance floor. On Firecracker Recordings all varieties of house music are doused with liters of paint. Dauwd just nailed the Theory of Colours with their eponymous album and 1080p Records owe their independent character in the LoFi corner primarily to their color spectrum. Instead of releasing anyone who can run an R’n’B sample through a tape plug-in, they mainly stood out for their selection of independent sound spectra (which was then run trough a tape plug-in).

So this isn’t all big news and some might even legitimately doubt my brave claim to set Jan Jelinek on the throne here. Let me be honest and reveal that this is all a frame for my own musical intentions in this science and the final track might give a glimpse in this. For me personally this is all very much connected to the art and science of sampling, of finding the hidden textural magic between the peaks of recorded sounds to give them a second birth of something the sound itself wouldn’t have imagined. So keep your ears open, either here at octobird.org or on my Bandcamp for something up-to-date…finally.

TRACKLIST:

Journeyman Trax: Inside
Farben: Love Oh Love
Beta Librae: Swope Park
Lnrdcroy: Terragem
The Room Below: Freedom
Kowton: Bits & Pieces
Gerry Read: Legs (Kevin McPhee Remix)
Dauwd: Silverse
Octobird: Flute Loot
 

Tentacle Loot #24 | Titch Thomas

“[…] music for humans and others with formidable frontal cortexes.”

Noviellion (Discogs User)

The Titch Thomas Tape Trax had a constant spot on my hard drive for quite some time, a recurring companion for stimulating my frontal cortex, until the latter finally formulated a comparatively simple thought: Where that comes from, there must be more!

Lo and behold, at Titch’s Bandcamp a Pandorian can is just waiting to be opened with a handful of old IDM spells to be brought to life. If you look over the quickly put together album covers, you come across well-known ingredients from Acid, IDM and Braindance hold together by a very special cement called Talent. Unforgettable melodies twist out of the creaky goo. The rhythm section always acts on the verge of physical feasibility and these acid sequences work hard on prophecies of an approaching Apocalypse.

It’s been a bit quiet since his split EP on the beloved Mindcolormusic label, but his Facebook profile gives some hope for continuation. Until then, I would advise you to throw a few voluntary coins into his Bandcan: Perhaps just one or the other battered 303 has to be replaced to make him continue his journey 😉

Tentacle Loot #21 | Metadata – TRANS EP

Open your ears and tip your toes for this handy 2-Track-Banger from Metadata!

The Argentine label Infinit Records dropped their third EP into the realsm of Bandcamp in notime. And slowly but steady the musical cornerstones that pull the two labelheads Franco ‘D and Cruz Coronado together emerge. Trippy acid jams, analogue breaks and a balanced preference for classic MPC Downbeats without committing to the 90s all too much – at least not in terms of BPM.

Quite the contrary – Metadata’s TRANS EP (a side project by Cruz Coronado and Lan) raises the pace bar siginificantly. Stubbornly impulsive and yet somehow playful, more drum machine than sample chop, the drum carpet whizzes over the almost 10 minutes. The melody part, meanwhile, jumps happily irradiated alongside. Grinning broadly without noticing how the warning tempo limit signs roll by. It all sounds kind of like Plone at a 90s jungle party, but it’s a fun portion of braindance that warms up for the next group activity.

J’s rolled with fingers crossed 😉

Tentacle Loot #18 | The 36 Chambers of Danny Wolfers

Danny Wolfers, better known as Legowelt or Bontempi 666, Calimex Mental Implant Corp., Clendon Toblerone, Commanchee’s Revenge, Coverti World, Danny Blanco, Dickie Smabers & The Moerwijk Crew, Florenza Mavelli, Franz Falckenhaus, Gladio, House Of Jezebel, Jackmaster Corky, Klaus Weltman, Lords Of Midnite, Nacho Patrol, Nomad Ninja, Occult Orientated Crime, Phalangius, Polarius, R-Zone, Raheem Hershel, Ray Escortienda, Rising Sun Systems, Saab Knutson, Salamandos, Sammy Osmo, Satomi Taniyama, Seaside Houz Boyz, Smackos, Squadra Blanco, Star Shepherd, The Psychic Stewardess, Twilight Moose, Ufocus, Venom 18, Westside Box Savants is a man who needs no introduction, but a separate Wikipedia page.

 

Usually, if you are a musician with only half as many identities, you can be sure that you have lost any prospect of any kind of musical career. After all, the musical identity of one’s own alter ego is usually the creatorˋs greatest asset. And once a recipe has been found that will keep your place in the queue of abundance free, you have to stay tuned and repeat formula X-Y until you get bored and get back into freelance poverty.

So it seems that the only conceivable way to escape this creative one-way street is to have a musical output that a single imaginary identity simply cannot cope with on its own. Regardless of the question how a real person can handle this

… because Danny can.

Where (contrary to popular preferences) I enjoy to hear musicians like Kid606 or Mark Pritchard keep breaking their blueprints constantly and pushing me into completely new worlds of sound, the wondrous “Aha!” moment with Legowelt always arises when someone from my musical arena comes back to with something like: “Oh … yeah, that’s good shit, right ?! Thatˋs actually a Legowelt Track.”

All the more I blossomed through a random Bandcamp fanmail thing from Danny Wolfers, which (far too late) made me realize that another incredible treasure trove of musical parallel identities lives on his very personal Bandcamp site. And even more, mostly on a pay-as-you-please principle. While I recently bought one of the records listed there for a ridiculously low price on Discogs, I guess I will be busy looking at this level of musical effusion even approximately for quite a while now.

Overall, Danny Wolferˋs Legowelt Bandcamp site is a little bit of a personal cabinet of loving curiosities.

Among countless hand-painted, fluffy album covers that reflect a uniquely sympathetic, deliberately naive DIY ethos, circulating Tape Acid Jams and warm, analogue ambient treasures abound, which alternately plant stories of elephants in city parks, extraterrestrials in fast-food restaurants or retro-futuristic vampire societies in the listener’s imagination. And probably the greatest achievement of Danny Wolfers is that you can believe all of these stories. Because he believes in them himself. Because he chose to believe all of these stories. And so with each release you understand a little more that Danny is a great role model for the eternal child in us. Someone who takes well-groomed naivety and an exorbitant knowledge of kitschy micotrends of underground culture to create his dream worlds uninhibited. Someone who does not criticize or condemn exaggerated musical clichés like coolness, but simply soaks up everything and let his robots translate his own version of it.

Danny Wolfers, the man who makes music faster than others can hear it.

“Word.”

Tentacle Loot #14 | World Crime League vol 1

“1997, EARTH

CORPORATIONS HAVE BLED THE EARTH DRY, LARGE PORTIONS OF THE WORLD ARE NOW UNINHABITABLE. ICE CAPS MELTED, RADIOACTIVE WASTE PREVALENT. CRIMINAL ORGANISATIONS ARE RAMPANT, CAUSING MISERY FOR THOSE WHO CLING ON TO LIFE IN A TOXIC WORLD. AS OF 1995 THESE CRIMINAL ENTERPRISES BEGAN TO CONSOLIDATE, QUASHING LOW-LEVEL CRIME AGAINST SURVIVORS OF WW3 AND INSTEAD TARGETING THE CONGLOMERATES WHICH LEAD US TO INTO THE DARK TIMES WE NOW INHABIT.”

 

“Wow…that’s rough!” You might say, reading the promotion text from Temporize Records. “I don’t really wanna hang out there! I’d rather stay here and chill.” But I tell you what. As dystopian as it may occur…It’s a quite funky environment. Between all these wrecked cars and robots on deserted sidewalks, there are palm trees blooming. I mean… it’s a bit warm and you have to wear protective suits but it’s better than freezing your ass of in Winter 2020, aint?!

Anyway… World Crime League vol. 1 is all kinds of things but not a dystopically gloomy premonition of an uncertain future. Although … this aesthetic may have sounded different in 1990. As you listen to the tracks, you are joyfully caught up in old memories of Miami Vice episodes and Turrican Amiga Games. World Crime League gambles through all styles of house music, but most of all they make themselves sympathetic as they never go straight four to the floor. Neither are they really tricky or experimental. But somehow … cheeky. And tracks with the tag “cheeky” on it always have a very welcome existence in my collection. Because being cheeky requires courage. You have to get past over-ambitious seriousness, leave genre boundaries behind and prove that you are able to have some serious fun. I obviously did!

Oh, and besides… If you are in Germany and read this text before 1998, with a little luck you might be able to grab a tape copy at your local record dealer … even if they are already sold out at Bandcamp.

Octobird Salad #7 | Pacific Planets

I tend to go off topic. No 2020 dystopian megafuture, no winterly cold digital abysses. Instead: Which instrument would you bring on a desert island? … on a strange planet … to communicate with people there … or at least to just hang out and watch the two moons …

…fairly stoned.

In the variety of experimental house music, a handful of artists have emerged in recent years, who have given a very own coloring to the washed-out concept of world music. Far from squeezing cultural assets of non-Western cultures into banging club tracks, but also from subordinating themselfes musically to the researched cultural heritage in false humility by simply creating a prettied blueprint. Instead they trace back their own club culture as a contemporary kind of rite and ecstasy to the origins of this music, which functions far from egocentricity and self-expression. Be it as a musical concept or just as an ingredient in experimental club music.

Probably the most consistent in this ranks are Don’t DJ (which I unfortunately stupidly DJed twice in this set … sorry; /). With their percussive polyrhythms and impulsive monotonous structures, they build bridges between non-western tribal music and the raw idea of techno. The 12th Isle label preferably uses color palettes and publishes wonderfully quirky tracks, impregnated with pale pastel memories from a imaginary Caribbean vacation in 1974(ish). And then there are formations such as Groupshow (with Jan Jelinek), Tru West or even Transllusion that are deeply influenced solely by their clearly audible improvisational character.

TRACKLIST:

Dices, AEM Rhythm Cascade
L/F/D/M
RAMZi
Don’t DJ
Pavel Milyakov
Beta Librae
Kassem Mosse
Don’t DJ
Groupshow
Healing Force Project
Galaxian
Transllusion
Tru West

Pacific
Untitled (Blue)
Fly Timoun
Repercussion
Silent Elektro
Speedway
Chilazon 2
Syrian Rue
Pet Hair Magnet
Alternative Currents
Forget About It
Moment 4
Chasing The Loophole In A Relentless Spiral Of Self-indulgence

12th Isle
Clan Destine Records
12th Isle
Berceuse Heroique
ГОСТ ЗВУК
1080p
Honest Jon’s Records
Berceuse Heroique
Staubgold
On Board Music
Foul-Up
Clone Aqualung Series
Marmo Music

Octobird Salad #6 | I still don’t know what I did last Summer

Damn, the last winter of the decade! Outside, in front of the clubs, queues doze in puddles and slowly soak themselves up with mud. Inside, as a precaution, the soundtrack of the indivual is bashing down the faces in a minor key in order to push the impending depression back into subconscious. And I’m crouching here in my over-heated flat and still don’t remember what I did last summer.

Time to put my smartphone into the video recorder to recapture.

It was definitely a happy one. Always nice and LoFi, but most companions out there already realized that there’s need for more than a 64bit tape plugin on an 808 beat to make everything 12bit.

World Crime League cruises with us through a wonderfully wonky, housy album thing, cheerfully wagging their feet between throttle and brakes. Sweely and Ex-Terrestrial inject their light-footed acid house with springy breakbeats and rewind our listening habits back into the next subgenre of the 90s. And Marco Bernardi shows that he can do totally, completely different than dystopian and dissonant. Same Ingredients but with loads of sugar. A nice dessert before the next rough meal.

Last but not least, it is still a tongue-in-cheek pleasure to look back on a decade of tape rewinds, in which we’ve been daydreaming all nights in long forgotten associations of a brighter future.
Not to be imagined if, from 2020, completely new genres may pop up again. Then it’s over with cozy!

TRACKLIST

1 Palmbomen II – Pure Tibet [Beats In Space Records]
2 World Crime League – Palm Haze [Temporize Records]
3 Dreems and Jamie Blanco – Percussive Racing Cars [Futureboogie Recordings]
4 Leo Anibaldi – Universal [Safe Trip]
5 Sweely – You Don’t Really Want Me [Lobster Theremin]
6 Marco Bernardi – Space Coral [Futureboogie Recordings]
7 Nackt – Let’s Go Shopping [Left Hand Path]
8 RIP Swirl – Possessed
9 Ex-Terrestrial – Urth Man [Pacific Rhythm]
10 SFV Acid – Trader Joe [SFV Records]
11 Junk Runner – Nanofax [Pr0gramma]
12 Leonardo Martelli – Alice [Antinote Recordings]

Tentacle Loot #11 | The Hatcliffe House Tapes Vol. 7 – Incidental Moments And Accelerated Fusion

… or just one of countless research papers from the John Lee Richardson lab.

When you first land on the Bandcamp site of Indifferent Space Recordings, you feel a bit lost but yet tied up by unknown forces at the same time. What kind of planet is this? A tape label … an acid planet? But then track after track you become aware that you’ve stranded in a peaceful dictatorship, because this planet counts only one inhabitant:
Captain John Lee Richardson.

Richardson recently released the collected works of his two senior alter egos from his self-managed discography: Acrelid – Illegal Rave Tapes and The Hatcliffe House Tapes. While he indulges in a good old sample-loaded Braindance style on his Illegal Rave Tapes, his “House Tapes” are more dedicated to the laid back psychedelic spheres of retrofuturistic electronic music.

On the warm, limited frequency spectrum of a cassette recording, one get carried away into the infinite vastness of space and yet always has the feeling of being in a very personal, comfortably furnished parallel universe. Sometimes stoically impulsive as on old recordings of the Silver Apples, sometimes leaning back and playful as on many Ghost Box releases.

As I said, Vol. 7 – Incidental Moments and Accelerated Fusion is actually just an entry-level terminal if you decide to travel with Richardson. Because once you’ve started, you’re out there for a while. Far out!

Highly recommended are also his early Oscillopeisia releases as well as his YouTube channel, which gives a wonderfully blurry look from his spaceship.

Inhalts-Ende

That's the bottom of the sky.

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