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Cimientos Fecundos is a South American Minimal synth – electronics act born in the city of Medellin (Colombia), formed by Camila Valencia and Juan Camilo Betancourt, his style travels through the seas of art electronic music, combining art and minimal electronics in both graphics as in sounds, I would call to think that their music has more to do with the IDM 90s, (Autechre, Seefeel) and the recent dark electronics, than with the analog synth of the 80′s.
L’Avenir is the cold synth side project of veteran electronic musician and sound artist Jason Sloan. Known throughout the space and ambient music scenes for his contemplative electronic soundscape work for over a decade; Sloan founded L’Avenir as a side project in 2012 to explore his long time love of synthpop and minimal wave music created purely from analog and vintage equipment. While releasing over a dozen solo albums and E.P.’s under his own name, Sloan has played solo all over the US, Canada and Europe including the influential Live Constructions radio program at Columbia University, STEIM in Amsterdam and Philadelphia’s The Gatherings concert series, one of the country’s oldest continuing ambient and electronic music series. Sloan is a Professor teaching full-time in the Interactive Arts department along with being the founder and program coordinator for the Sound Art concentration at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland.
Icelandic post-punk trio Kælan Mikla returns for the group’s third album, Nótt eftir nótt. Topping a year that catapulted the band onto stages shared with the likes of The Cure and Placebo, Nótt eftir nótt is Kælan Mikla at their most confident, and their most deadly. It’s been five years since Margrét Rósa, Laufey Soffia, and Sólveig Matthildur formed the band in Reykjavik, and after several tours and high-profiles stages, as well as two critically-acclaimed albums, Kælan Mikla has truly brought their A-game. Starting off quietly with a creepy, gothed-out and ethereal intro, Nótt eftir nótt erupts with post-punk brilliance and synthlines that harken back to the bad old days of the Batcave, big hair, and Egyptian-inspired eye-liner. Tracks like the melancholy “Hvernig kemst ég upp?” are wonderfully delightful, while the band goes for the big goth dance number on “Skuggadans,” succeeding with glorious ease. Near the end of Nótt eftir nótt, when you’ve already ingested a healthy dose of Diamanda Galas meets The Birthday Party, the title track, produced by popular Icelandic electronic wizard Bang Gang, is basically perfect. Hot on the heels of shows at Roadburn, Meltdown, and The Cure’s 40th Anniversary, as well as a Fall tour supporting King Dude, Kælan Mikla are set to take their place as one of darkest aural poets on the world stage.
Twenty-Twenty is Molly Nilsson’s 8th album; the latest opus of an artist in a constant state of development and strength. Twenty-Twenty is about emerging from the husk of your old self, about binning the chrysalis and daring to stand up both to power, and also to your own limits. In 2018, we see the climate changing, democracy crumbling, inequality and injustice erupting. 2020 examines the near future, seeking out clarity, reflection, renewal and opportunity. It contains anthems so tall as to induce vertigo, leaving the taste of Euro Dance in your mouth, albeit without a four on the floor beat. Here, the pop auteur is haunted by the late Prince, channelling Courtney Love and Lou Reed, anger and love. Recorded as ever in her own Lighthouse Studios and co-released with her imprint Dark Skies Association, the record is consistent in strategy and approach to past releases, yet on 2020 Nilsson pushes the limits of what can be said in the scope of a pop song even further. Despite working with used keyboard sounds that evoke memories of a distorted past, the sound is distinctly contemporary. The record drifts between playful punk methods and hi-fi ideas, strikingly clear through the fuzz of a surrounding world painted with reverb. Rather than gracefully dissecting, 2020 rips apart personal neuroses and insecurities, looking for the roots of issues and the equation that, when solved, will produce the future. “I don’t care if the world is through, every night is new,” 2020 erupts with fist-in-the-air empowerment, a realization that if we’re all alone down here, we can still make it. Every Night Is New is a personal and societal manifesto, a slogan comprising the different layers that make this record Molly Nilsson’s most personal, evocative and emotionally packed in years. First single Serious Flowers is a naked confessional trance hit stripped of its beat. Centred around broken trust and friendship, Nilsson sings over suspenseful synth strings with a vocal delivery so inexact and honest, its vulnerability seems almost unaware of itself. Although very much in the vein of Nilsson’s production style on her recent albums, Days of Dust, accomplishes escape and breaks free from the past. There’s a carpe diem immediacy to this fast-paced Rock Song that belies Nilsson’s near-iconic self-contained delivery: “Like I had just been saved from a burning building of desire, I got back up and I ran right into the fire.” It’s so immediate, and speaks so perfectly about the nature of desire, that you wonder how you’d never thought about it like that before.
DKA is proud to announce the debut cassette from Passing (AKA Christopher Myrick.) Passing hails from Los Angeles and has been active on the scene for the last couple of years. Myrick was initially a founding member of Bestial Mouths but left the group and started Passing as means of exploring a more minimal sound. After a brief stint as a duo, Myrick decided to make Passing a solo project. For his debut self-titled full length on DKA Myrick has submitted eleven tracks of pulsing EBM that manages to sound like the future-past of EBM and Industrial music. One could imagine this as the lost early demo recording of Skinny Puppy or Psyche but from a dystopian future twenty years from now. That’s what makes this recording so interesting: it conjures up DIY post-punk cassette culture harkening to lost tape classics of cold-wave like Trop Tard. At the same time, there is a definite hint of the chic, futuristic EBM sound of Phase Fatale or Silent Servant. However, it is Myrick’s vocals that really make this release standout from other contemporary EBM offerings. Passing has all the snarl and grit of Skinny Puppy on some songs yet can also drift into a more classic goth register. In some ways the vocals are reminiscent of Roz Williams of Christian Death on “Only Theatre of Pain,” showing a deeper, more emotionally vulnerable quality while other times sounding more like the staccato vocals of Cabaret Voltaire. DKA is proud to work with Passing and include him in our family. Passing first appeared on the DKA roster with “Sacrifice” on the Strategies Against the Body Vol. II and then a more recent appearance on DKA |
