Filippo Bologna
Loto Azul EP

PRD019 - IT - 2021Terrestrial Funk's sixth release explores over a decade of Armenian disco, funk, and soul. Compiled by Darone Sassounian who spent three years tracking down the records and artists; fulfilling a calling to lift his people's voice, a people that have always faced the threat of erasure. The music was made a generation after the Armenian Genocide, a testament to perseverance. The seven tracks featured are incredibly inventive and unique in their interpretations of Western seventies sounds. This compilation comes at an urgent time as 2020 set the stage for Azerbaijan and Turkey to perpetuate genocidal rhetoric as they invaded Armenian borders and bombed civilian cities eventually resulting in the loss of lives and land stewarded for millennia. All while the western world paid little notice. It is with great gratitude and purpose that Terrestrial Funk rebirths this music and uplifts the voice of the Armenian Diaspora.

Picture the scene if you can. It’s Sunday evening at the Meakusma Festival, 2019. A small audience (in varying states of inebriation and recovery) sit patiently on the floor, drenched in soft sunlight. Fizzy Veins is set up to play - his guitar resting on his knees while he stares into his laptop with an expression displaying amusement and fear in equal measure. He tentatively speaks into the microphone. There’s a lot of reverb. I don’t think anybody has the slightest idea what he’s saying. I assume he’s delivering a joke, but it’s very hard to tell. People laugh. After yet more tweaks to his gear he starts to play some loose, bendy phrases on the guitar, and we are all gently vaporised up Mount Effervescent. Our benevolent guru sits at the peak, speaking in tongues to the freshly formed congregation. The beats start to roll out and the sun begins to set in the evening sky. Fizzy transitions and he continues his long distance narration from deep inside his own reverb. It sounds like he’s in another room. On another planet, more like.Witnessing the show, as I did, left me wondering how he even manages to boot-up his computer.. let alone produce an album as brilliantly formed and coherent as this!Yours sincerely,A. Fizzyfan

Micron Audio opens its doors to an external artist for the first time, welcoming in Ctrls with a crucial new EP entitled Your Data. Across four tracks, the Danish producer unravels a dark and funky electro core, taking inspiration from the rapidly intertwining codependence between technology and society. As digital twins, metaverses or humanoid robots lodge themselves deeper into our surroundings, Ctrls unpicks the deepening complexity brought on by our pervasive digital lives. Encouraged by Micron Audio boss Stingray to delve into the darker productions as a means of exploring a contemporary electro sound, Ctrls fixes a hypnotic heft with fresh industrial sound design, never resting as he navigates contorting track structures and twisting tones. The digital hum rages, as brain neurons fire from information overload, with a tsunami feeling and emotions in tow. Remarkable is the combination of pounding rhythm, hauled in by a magnetic motion, with tones of digital disintegration, all flux and shift. This electro sound is a far cry from a clone of the genre's forebearers - no retro-specificity. Instead, Ctrls delivers a timely dose of accelerated culture - The Future is Now.

Cult South Asian New Wave! Naya Beat is proud to announce its second release, Tere Liye, the highly sought after and impossible to find New Wave album by the unsung pioneers of the British Asian music scene, Pinky Ann Rihal. Remastered for vinyl by multi Grammy-nominated Frank Merritt at The Carvery and available for the first time since its limited 1985 release, the album is as fresh and relevant today as it was 37 years ago.

Figurant sur le second various de Kump, Maahrt signe ici son retour parmi nous. Ce septième disque est une pièce aux deux faces traversées d'un même trouble. Quand « Gault » martèle des réminiscences big beat contre l'austérité d'une trame industrielle, « Clag » vibre de breaks habités d'échos et de voix. L'un frappe, l'autre fuit, tous deux se déploient en artefacts mitoyens et pourtant si singuliers. Il faut bien attendre le dernier titre « Noma » pour tenter un pont dans le lieu mince laissé par ces deux masses noires. Ce pont, A Strange Wedding l'imagine en plan-séquence cyberpunk aérien tandis qu'Odopt le sculpte en angles bruts. Osez pénétrer dans ce labyrinthe plus grand qu'il n'y paraît, il se pourrait que vous souhaitiez y rester davantage que ce que vous croyez.Featured on the second various out on Kump, Maahrt is back among us. This seventh record is a two-faced coin pierced by a single disturbance. When « Gault » pummels big beat remains against an industrial frame, « Clag » vibrates from breaks resonating of voices and echoes. One hits, the other flees, both extend in twin yet singular artifacts. The track « Noma » comes at last as an attempt to bind both sides in this narrow place in between two dark spaces. A Strange Wedding re-imagines this bridge as an aerial cyberpunk movie sequence whereas Odopt sharpens its angles. Dare to penetrate this labyrinth bigger than it seems, you might wish to stay there longer than you think.