DJ Stingray 313
F.T.N.W.O.

Deux Filles was not, in fact, two girls despite what the group name and its elaborate hoax of a backstory suggest. No, they were not Gemini Forque and Claudine Coule, French women who met as teenagers under tragic circumstances and became fast friends, recording two albums together before disappearing into the ether. In reality, Deux Filles was Simon Fisher Turner and Colin Lloyd Tucker, a UK duo who first worked together in an early incarnation of The The.Straddling the line between experimental and pop, Turner was an actor and teen singing star who later composed soundtracks for the iconic queer filmmaker Derek Jarman while Tucker’s career began as an engineer for the famed UK library music studio, De Wolfe, before forming experimental wave group The Gadgets. In Deux Filles, the duo found an outlet for their least commercial tendencies, combining lo-fi proto-dream-pop instrumentals with samples, tape experiments, ambient textures, and drum machines. Even in the vibrant, seemingly endless well of UK DIY, Deux Filles stand out.Silence & Wisdom – the duo’s 1982 debut – is a series of musical vignettes, like the score of an unrealized arthouse film. Blending processed guitars, sheets of synthesizers, echoey pianos, and washed-out vocal snippets to surprisingly varied effect, the album is recommended for fans of Durutti Column and Virginia Astley’s From Gardens Where We Feel Secure.

Luz Azul by Luz Azul

Two years have passed since their previous Inflict LP and we don’t really know how what recently happened impacted on the band’s mastermind Michael but what’s sure is that Veil Of Light are now a fully grown-up band.Landslide is their fifth full-length (and their third on Avant!) and it’s definitely their most elaborated album.Ten new songs, rather than the usual eight, with a perfect balance of Coldwave-inspired intimate atmosphere and synthpop catchy melodies. Musically speaking it’s still clear where the Swiss duo draws their influences from, right in between New Order’s moodiness and The Klinik trying one softer, less brutal approach to their Electro. But a new sense of privacy is reflected all through these new tracks, enhanced by lyrics now more personal than ever.The Prayer Wheel is a page torn out of a private diary, Love And Money is a mechanical mantra for a no-way-out situation; Suburban War is a confession of defeat whispered at night, No Return is the last dance before reaching the point of.This is the kind of record that takes its time, and takes its toll, we just need to sit down and listen because there’s much to discover.

ABT076 - CA - 2019Open Reduction Internal Fixation by Blue Hawaii

Welcome to BM-18 the biokinetic realm created by Dana Kuehr, a lush audio environment where organic and synthesized matter coalesce. As we float disembodied above this verdant pixel plain, Dana offers us shifting repetitions and sequences in disguise, each track a landscape within a world created in the utmost detail, from the minute bleeps and chirps to the enveloping and bumping bouncy basslines. Flickering drums explode like dandelion seeds in a breeze, searching for a place to lay, grow, and flourish. Sounds are captured (fingers tapping, rain patter, Belgian parakeets released from a '70s zoo, vocal oohs and ahhs) and hybridized with patterns, samples, and musical manoeuvres (jungle breaks, west coast hip hop, layered drums, IDM crunch and twinkle, reverb, delay, '90s R&B, underwater video game soundscapes).

Creak​-​whoosh (Estonian, Ingrian and Votian song re​-​imagined in Australia by Olev Muska and Mihkel Tartu)‘Creak Whoosh’ is a collection of choral ballads originating in the Finno-Ugric regions of Estonia and Ingria, electronically adapted predominantly by Olev Muska and Mihkel Tartu, based around the contemporary arrangements of Veljo Tormis.Originally established as ‘Kiri-uu’, the project was undertaken by the children of Estonian refugees, most of whom grew up over 8,000 miles away in the metropolis of Sydney, Australia. With the majority having never visited the land of their ancestors prior to the tour of 1989, the first generations reshaping of these ancient folk tales conveys Seeger’s process amidst displacement and its subsequent fringe-culture. Estonian bards are carried forth this time into the 21st century, a revised selection of the original 1988 recordings accompanied by ‘Tšimmairuudiralla’ allowing for new perspectives and, perhaps crucially, a truly global audience.