Marco Van Basten met the revolving cast of musicians known as The Castles in Berlin in 2022, and together they set his music afloat across an entirely new ocean. On their own, The Castles have been pursuing a diverse range of music and dramas in the city for years, and Marco—nearly named for the Dutch footballer who scored a famous goal in the week of his birth—has been making music in Dublin and Berlin for a decade.
Now, what started as a playful handful of demos has transformed into the debut 3-track release The Castles on the Italian label She Lost Kontrol. Marco Van Basten and The Castles pair ethereal, evocative vocals with haunting, heavy synth music that reverberates in the mind long after the final notes dissipate to dust.
Performed live, the music conveys an additional intensity with the musicianship of the performers given room to breathe. However, this intensity means the group must be selective with their performances, with the release party for The Castles taking place on October 20th at the ever-intimate Kantine am Berghain.
Digital Album
After his appearance on the last Surviving in Europe compilation in 2020 ( SLK012 ) with the track “Minozzi Voli”, Be Dellow finally releases his debut EP on She Lost Kontrol.
Featuring five tracks (3 originals and 2 edits), “Phantoms from The Past” was born during those surreal days of the 2020 lockdown after days and days of listening to 80′s Japenese Synth Pop. Distorted and desperate vocals, layered over melancholic basslines and repetitive drums are the soundtrack created from those empty weeks when only the imagination was free to shift to other places.
The release includes two edits, one for Luke’s Soundhouse, a Brazilian cosmic/Balearic producer, and one for Words Two Four, a Puerto Rico band from the 80s.
Be Dellow is the Proto-Italo pseudonym of Francesco Baudazzi (Violet Poison, Diana Berti, Bakunin Commando, Red Lodge).
Digital Album
Savage Grounds lands on She Lost Kontrol with a 7 track EP, Hidden by the Night.
For the first time, the voice of Kleio Thomaïdes joins Savage Grounds members Florin Büchel (Synthesizers) and Daniele Cosmo (Drum Machines). The result is an attractive, intense record with some nuances that will surely make the old nostalgics of Krilian Camera and Simona Buja’s voice squeak their eyes.
The record reminds us the heartbeat of Italian darkwave, the angularity of German basements, the youthful despair of French coldwave. But it’s more than that because it’s a very personal kind of darkness.The exasperated atmospheres seem to resonate on both sides of the record, with the due differences between the darker-wave elements of the record and the more proto-ebm ones.
All these songs are almost ‘goth love protest songs’: they all have the gloominess of the pre-disappointed, of the already-disgusted, of the unrelentlessly bleak against a freezing, sparse, ethereal electronic landscape.
The voice by Kleio Thomaïdes is so fascinating because it’s a wise, opaque, adult female voice which pave the way for a sting of sexy verbs spoken and screamed by a mysterious female voice, discordant EBM-influenced melodies and the occasional screech.
Dark as hell, coldly passionate, Hidden by the Night really is a poignant journey of pain and love. If you like the sound of that kind of thing, you’re going to love it madly.
12″ EP / Digital Album
The NE-21 return to She Lost Kontrol after their first pitch-perfect 80s dark wave release in 2016. After releasing a collaboration with Donato Dozzy with the project ‘Men with Secrets’ at the beginning of the year, the duo lands on the label with their new work “In The Realm of Electricity”. The album is a collection of 8 tracks composed and recorded between 2012 and 2020 at the Sy6 studio in Boscoreale. The outcome is a perfect blend of synth pop and minimal wave, filled with icy synths, shuddering bass, and anthemic vocals, ranging from mumbled vocoder to arch talk-singing.
While diverse in atmospheric scope, swells of ghostly synths circle the driving beat throughout, producing a haunting totality drenched in an ethereal midnight trance; the submerge of cold, spectral vocals sing within the darkest depths of a starry soundscape – the gloomy romanticism of low, distant vocals bursting with post-punk melancholia.
The track’s unease between purpose and utility create a discrete synthesis, and, like a piece of speculative fiction, the memory of the body and its coalescence with the future become prime motives for this liquid age. Akin to Ballard or Philipp K. Dick, the work is not only dreamlike and surreal, but vocally sinister, as if this spectrum of LUSH new wave ‘80s pop and Almond-style weirdness hides a truth waiting to be grasped. , the work is not only dreamlike and surreal, but vocally sinister, as if this spectrum of lush new wave ‘80s pop and Almond-style weirdness hides a truth waiting to be grasped.
The album in essence sounds unashamedly distinctive, unique and charming. Whether you fall in love with the whole act or you’re just stunned by the bizarreness of it all, one thing’s for sure – you’ll be compelled and gripped right to the infectiously smutty end.
12″ / Digital Album
Under exhausted lights of civil discontent the count has just began. What you parodied, what you scrutinised rears its pure gaze when punctured beyond performance. We cried for justice but instead found order, and now we face the chain.
PC World comes through with a haunting EP on She Lost Kontrol to distort the view and warp the vision of industrial addicts and mutant punks with their second release “Order”, a discursive counterattack on four distinct forms of command. The South London duo disfigures the unconscious reduction of pleasure and fetish, the connective tissue between privatisation and violence, the seduction of societal norms, and the neurotic tendencies of self-defeat. Like the surrender to a future shock, these four interwoven tracks are produced for the recognition of restraint and the demand for wanting more.
B-side remixes of the title track “Order” come from Physical Wash (former member of High-Functioning Flesh) and Aktion Mutante (featuring members of Violent Poison and Unhuman), two additional perversions of protocol from synth-punk veterans on both sides of the Atlantic. So initiate these six cries of havoc in solidarity with this wasted world, a world of precarious necessity and incessant definition. A world whose shape and conscience will forever be satisfied by order.
EP / Digital Album
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