The palette and precision of prolific synthesizer composer Hector Carlos Ramirez aka Auragraph have heightened incrementally since the project’s conception in 2018, but Reflection Plane – his 8th full-length, and first for Dais – finds him streamlining his sound even further, to its gleaming chrome essence. Moody pads and sequential circuits cycle through cybernetic galleries of marble, ferns, and flickering screens, at the threshold of film score, slow techno, and hard vapor. The album’s nine tracks deploy an array of 80’s tonalities, from night drive arpeggios to Art Of Noise sample stabs to Seinfeld slap bass, but fused into a hybrid landscape of lucid dreaming and hypnotic horizon lines.
Born in the Texas border town of Laredo, Ramirez relocated to Austin for film school, where he became fascinated by the local electronic underground scene spearheaded by SURVIVE and the Holodeck Records network. But it was only after moving to Los Angeles to work in the music department of a film trailer house that he crossed paths with Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of SURVIVE, who were in need of an assistant for multiple ongoing projects. After helping out on National Geographic’s Valley Of The Boom miniseries, Ramirez officially joined the Stranger Things soundtrack team as a Score Mix Engineer.
This intuitive expertise for audio design infuses Auragraph with a unique sense of fluidity and finesse, able to shift gears and integrate contrasts: sleek yet strange, icy but emotive, minimal though rich. Shades of classic EBM, 90’s electronica, and Dreamcast-era video game music glimmer here and there on certain tracks, but the cumulative effect of Reflection Plane is of entering a place outside of time and space, post-human and pristine. These are songs of parallel realities and second lives, freed from friction and gravity, playing on loop in a skybox sculpture garden at the ends of the earth.
Digital Album [free download]
Vacant Heads is the duo of Christian Donaghey (Autumns) and Oliver Ho (Broken English Club). Anyone familiar with their work, or underground electronic music in the last two decades, probably needs no further introduction. Having worked together (Autumns’ album ‘Shortly After Nothing’ was released on Oliver’s ‘Death and Leisure’ label) and shared stages over the years – Vacant Heads was borne from a desire to both collaborate on tracks and form a live unit.
Their debut self-titled EP is a bold taster of where Vacant Heads are at and where Vacant Heads are headed. These four tracks reek of a brutal and busted city – after hours prowls with fuck all to do and nowhere to go.
12″ EP / Digital Album
Alan Harman is the solo minimal synth project of Ethan Harman from the small town of Port Hope, Ontario, about 1.5 hours outside of Toronto. Suction Records’ minimal synth/post-punk sublabel, Ice Machine, is proud to present Alan Harman’s debut physical release, “Human Research Program,” a full-length cassette compiling selections from a series of self-released digital EPs and singles. The project came to our attention via an interview in Legowelt’s Shadow Wolf zine. The interview was conducted by Legowelt himself, who wrote: “Buried deep in the snow of the Canadian internet one will occasionally find a great authentic undiscovered artist who lives in obscurity devoted to their art. An artist like ALAN HARMAN.”
Alan Harman cites the influence of early-Martial Canterel (aka the solo project of Xeno & Oaklander’s Sean McBride), Belgian minimal synth project Snowy Red, and Canadian cult synth duo (and Ice Machine label alumnus) Ceramic Hello, who Harman described in his Shadow Wolf interview as, “a perfect embodiment of Canadian sound because it gives you this cold, distant feeling which is exactly how it feels living here; isolated and far away from the rest of the world.”
The project came to be when Harman found himself disillusioned with the lack of band-mate prospects in Port Hope, realizing that synthesizers and drum machines could afford him the opportunity to become his own one-man-band. With a small set-up including a Korg MS-20 synth, a TR-808 drum machine clone, and a homemade spring reverb unit, Harman writes and records his songs alone, always beginning from scratch, and usually the tracks are written, recorded, and mixed within half-an-hour. The spontaneous nature of the recordings, and the raw tone of the electronics and vocal delivery, gives the music an authentic, early-‘80s synth DIY feel, at times reminiscent of minimal synth genre classics by Thomas Leer and Robert Rental, Absolute Body Control, and John Bender.
Cassette / Digital Album
Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder’s second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and “wonky disco” into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our age of escalation: tick tick tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity, loose systems of percolating circuitry and airless funk. Recorded across a handful of sessions at MemeTune Studios in Cornwall with frequent collaborator Benge (aka Ben Edwards), Mallinder cites no guiding aesthetic premise for the collection beyond “cowbell on every track, and entirely no reverb.”
From the first coiled cybernetic groove of opener “Contact,” the album’s spatial dynamics are disorienting and asymmetrical, alternately cold and sensual, opiated and claustrophobic. But, throughout, “rhythm is the default, the bedrock, the building block – even the melodies are rhythmic.” Across 40-plus years of electronic musicianship, Mallinder’s sense of timing and tempo has honed into a rare tier of mastery, limber and fluid but knotted with strange frictions. Shades of Detroit technoid industrial (“ringdropp,” “Shock to the Body”) crossfade into no wavy punk-funk (“Guernica Gallery,” “Galaxy,” “The Trial”), bad trip IDM (“Wasteland”), and jittery vapor house (“Hush”), at the threshold of modes both familiar and foreign.
Lyrically the record is equally evasive, rich with allusions and associative linguistics, surveying liquid notions of societal noise, ecological ruin, art world pretension, and the trials of daily life. But the lack of fixed meaning remains Mallinder’s main muse: “Music should draw you in; lyrics should make you think. Most interpretation is misinterpretation.” This is music of countdowns and comedowns, fleeting pleasures and opaque futures, observing the great decline while dancing on its ashes. Flux is deathless and forever; the rest, illusion: “I will be a constant figure / Flickering a moving picture / Turning in your head forever / Split apart but held together.”
LP / Digital Album
Dina Summer, the collaborative band project between Kalipo and DJ couple Local Suicide, announces their exciting debut album “Rimini”. The LP is a unique blend of their influences, drawing from 80’s disco, 90’s electro, new wave and downbeat for a fun, nostalgic and dark retro sound.
The Berlin-based project is fronted by Dina P, who lends her vocals and thought-provoking lyricism to the act. The Greek native first started performing as a teenager on local radio stations, where she made waves as one of the first women DJs in Thessaloniki. She later moved to Berlin, meeting her husband and DJ/Producer partner, Brax Moody, to form Local Suicide. The third member of Dina Summer is Bavarian-born Kalipo, who started his music career as the producer and a band member of the German electro-punk band Frittenbude. While the trio initially met at a rave at the Rock am Ring festival in 2013, they only began working on music together in 2019 and have since been refining their combined sound.
Dina Summer’s “Rimini” offers a nostalgic and beautifully crafted journey through retro disco sonics, incorporating synth pop, new wave, and disco elements for funky, upbeat, and versatile tracks that can be enjoyed beachside or on the dance floor.
LP / Cassette / Digital Album
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