Tommy Vicari jnr
MSR001

'Music For Theatre And Dance – Volume Two' is the second in a small series of EPs that will focus on music which was initially created for or inspired by dance and performance. Created as a dialogue with the avant-garde and highly experimental work in dance, theatre and art evolving at the time, the music was in turn at times greatly innovative.That it was created for a dance or performance though means that such music was also often highly rhythmic and a number of pieces from this time stand out and seem greatly deserving of a new context.Whether it's more ambient or atmospheric works or whether it's in the more rhythmic or percussive pieces, Music From Memory brings together another selection of tracks that aims to highlight this highly innovative direction in music.

The Italian producer and founder of the Berlin-based label "Sonic Interface Records" has long been influenced by many subgenres of dance music; from electro to techno-acid music before combining them in his pioneering first ep . "Sonic001'' which sees Michael Space gravitating towards a different kind of electronic music, driven as much (or more) by analog sequencers, marked vocals, melodies and experimental sounds between space bass lines and acid sounds of the most common bassline 303 synthesizer, as by drums and percussion.

After the 2020 release of Old Dreams And Memories, Icelandic dub techno linchpin Yagya returns for a second release on his emergent label, Small Plastic Animals. This latest venture marks a new chapter in the artist's accomplished career, having released on Delsin, Subwax BCN and A Strangely Isolated Place as well as forming a core part of the Thule collective alongside his partner in Sanasol, Thor. As those associations ably point out, the music Yagya crafts is spacious and atmospheric, using the techno tradition as a vessel for meditative as well as emotional exploration and experimenting with sound design according to a specific, patiently cultivated style. Always Maybe Tomorrow finds Yagya ruminating on the behavioural energy of environments as viewed from afar - the man-made electricity of urban expanses and the interconnected flora and fauna of ecosystems. Looking to his chosen tools as a means to express these ideas, he employed a non-linear approach to each of the four tracks on this EP, choosing to create musical systems in constant flux rather than composing each piece in a conventional left-to-right narrative. Yagya's trademark voluminous chords and vast pads ebb and flow through filters controlled by LFOs and randomness, creating their own micro-incidents and macro evolution as though holding a mirror up to the environments the initial inspiration was drawn from.

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.