Various
Repsies 002

During the late 2010s, music lovers around the world began obsessively listening to increasingly esoteric albums on Youtube. More often than not, they’d leave the browser on autoplay. This was how Facundo Arena, the composer and producer behind The Kyoto Connection, discovered the technonaturalistic pleasures of Kankyō Ongaku (environmental music), a distinctly Japanese interpretation of European, British and American minimalist composition and ambient music. “It was a kind of algorithmic magic,” he says. Upload by upload, the utopian music of Hiroshi Yoshimura and his 80s Japanese contemporaries transported Facundo back to his childhood. When he was five, his father placed him in karate lessons and began watching martial arts movies with him. From those early experiences, Facundo became fascinated Japanese history, tradition, and culture, particularly that of Kyoto - the cultural capital of Japan. Kankyō Ongaku reminded him of hearing the sounds of Japanese folkloric instruments as a young boy, and suddenly, the way the influence of Japan had manifested in his music made sense. “I had the sensation that for many years, I’d been doing something similar to the style,” he explains. Inspired, Facundo used an iPad and an old Akai cassette deck to record Postcards, his homage to Japanese minimalism and Kankyō Ongaku. By this stage, he was twelve years deep with The Kyoto Connection, the musical project he launched in 2005 in his hometown of Buenos Aires, Argentina. Over that late 2000s and 2010s, Facundo, later on joined by collaborators Rodrigo Trado (drums), Jesica Rubino (violin) and Marian Benitez (vocals, now his wife), released numerous D.I.Y albums. Project by project, they followed the threads between 80s synth-pop, ambient, new age, house, techno and acoustic composition. Postcards introduced The Kyoto Connection to listeners around the world and brought Facundo into our orbit. During Argentina’s covid lockdown, Facundo received a set of soundscapes recorded in Kyoto by the Japanese musician and sound designer Masafumi Komatsu. Over several insular months, he decorated them with synthesisers, samples and subtle rhythms, creating The Kyoto Connection’s next album, The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain to be released via Isle Of Jura offshoot Temples Of Jura.Ostensibly made up of twelve distinct tracks, listening to The Flower, The Bird and the Mountain feels more akin to spending calm, meditative time in twelve specific environments. Although the foundations they rest on are recordings made in geographic locations around Kyoto, Facundo has yet to visit Japan. As a result, the landscapes he paints sit somewhere between fiction and fact, richly pictorial sonic imagination juxtaposed with echoes of reality. Regardless, as his bubbling melodies and glistening synthesisers glide against Masafumi Komatsu's recordings, Facundo guides us into a blissful zone of tranquillity well worth spending time within.

gianni aka cesare b. · [ORB-08] Pre-Sale: TV Totem "TV Totem 4 - 1983"

Verlies by Vladimir Gnatenko, the first release by Lutsk label Lss557.

 These four compositions, written by Vladimir in his homeland, are ready to delight connoisseurs of quality electronic sound.



Kologo by AlostmenFormed by Stevo Atambire and produced by Wanlov (Fok’n Bois) and Percy Yip Tong, Alostmen’s music is based around the Frafra traditions of the kologo, a stringed lute, using traditional instrumentation in entirely new ways. “I like to force my instrument to work,” explains Stevo. “I’m a yout’man and into rap, reggae, Malian music. I add these to the band’s sound.”“I had toured with Stevo in my band Afro Gypsy in 2017,” Wanlov continues, “and we recorded the tracks for this album on the road in Uganda and North West Ghana in hotel rooms” The band comprises Stevo (kologo, vocals), Jo Ajusiwine (goje fiddle, vocals), Aminu Amadu (talking drum) and Sowah (gome box, djembe and conga) while featured guests include highlife legend Gyedu-Blay Ambolley and Ghanaian stars Yaa Pono and Medikal.“We are Alostmen because we were lost in the street, the forgotten people,” explains Stevo. “People at home see music as a teaching so I always try give my community hope to achieve.”

Ronan’s journey has seen him move between Boston and New York, Washington State, Bogota, and most recently Mexico City. Rarely in one place for too long, his energy and enthusiasm for his craft carry that same roving sense of adventure, whether in his own expressive productions welding hyper-speed techno and classic hardcore into a dynamic whole, or through his Eternal Ocean imprint, which has notched a string of impressive releases from close friends and like-minded producers. Throughout, a sense of wide-eyed wonder and joy is the constant, an awe for its ability to transport and transcend, to become a calling in its own right, through sound and soul, a grounding force that becomes the guiding path through the world. It’s that sense of possibility that dominates the sensibility of Vision Quest, Ronan’s second outing on Eternal Ocean, a four track offering recorded in Ridgewood, Queens just before he headed west in 2018. The tracks echo this awareness of a road stretching out before him. These are tunes about the journey, best exemplified by the snaking routes and pathways they pull the listener through: half-time breakdowns, sudden vocal stabs, hard-left turns and sudden shifts of tempo. Where previous Ronan EPs found their strength in meticulous mixing and track-craft, these embrace technique and arrangement as means to an end, resulting in lyrical, ever-evolving tunes that show an artist embracing the time given to create worlds unto themselves.