Joe Bataan
Call My Name (Andres Remix)

Apron Records has been instrumental in shaping the current landscape of contemporary electronic music coming out of the U.K. since 2014. After almost a decade of pushing their unique vision has made the Apron Records imprint one of the most in-demand labels in most independent record stores. Now more than 45 releases deep in their journey, Apron Records have teamed up with Patta Soundsystem to work on their first various artists release and to celebrate this monumental milestone, both camps have collaborated to create a clothing capsule to accompany this release. After working with the artist formerly known as Funkineven on ‘The Wave’ late last year, it was only right to showcase the diverse talents behind this movement.

Maara’s latest effort comes straight from the inner zone. Whether meant for use as vision quest guidance or club hedonism, Fancy Feast continues the Canadian’s tradition of crafting seductive, trance-inducing dance music in mesmeric fashion.‘Can’t Slo Down’ is a vehicle for transcendence. Locked-in, hypnotic fare with subtle gear shifts consistent with Maara’s propensity towards trippy atmospherics and urgent dancefloor dynamics. Then, in a heady alloy of ritual throb and fractal warehouse ruffness, ‘Highrollerz’ finds Maara at her most propulsive.Prog reigns supreme across the record, but 'Princess Express' has the third-eye dilating magick in full effect. It’s both fractal and functional, a ritual incantation with rugged appeal. ‘Rude, Crude & Out Of Control’, on the other hand, harks back to those halcyon days of the free party movement. Proper breakbeat torque with yet another healthy dose of prog.

Greetings from the darkness. Tunnel Vision Records is delighted to introduce you this forgotten masterpiece. Lola V.Stain was a not so typical band formed in 1987 in Skopje, Republic of Macedonia. They took inspiration for the name from a Marguerite Duras novel.Their music can be described as avant-garde, electro-acoustic ambient with Macedonian ethno influence. They released two albums, Ikona (1990) and Mansarda (1992), both for the Croatian label “Blind Dog Records”. The group ceased work after its second album.This is an historical masterpiece from Europe. The music on this record is a great document of pre-war Yugoslavia as it was released on a Croatian label Blind Dog Records.The ethnic identities of four of the quintet's members might have been best described by the term Serbo-Croatian, an eventually discarded name for the mix of languages shared by much of what was once Yugoslavia.The founding member of the group was Zlatko Origjanski, who was born in Skopje in 1963. He formed the band Gospodinot Otiden in the mid-'80s and this is the ensemble that formed the roots of what would shortly become Lola V. Stain. The fifth member is what really gives this group a distinct identity. He is Pece Atanasovski, a traditional Macedonian bagpiper . Lola V. Stain creates a blend of traditional and modern instruments, throwing in everything that comes to mind. It is a totally unique concept. The combination of bagpipe and oboe is beautiful, and many of the percussion and electronic textures seem to foreshadow the post-rock movement that would come along a few years later.Although an obviously negative impression was created by the series of wars that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia, the involvement of a Croatian label in releasing Macedonian music was just typical of the kind of artistic cooperation between sections of the country that made the independent record scene successful. Of course, enjoyment of music is so much a matter of time and place ( and space ) , and perhaps no sensation could match the impact of hearing music like this in Sarajevo in 1990, only a matter of a year or more before a terrible war would split the country apart, making collaborative efforts between Serbians, Croatians, Bosnians, and Macedonians not impossible, but much more difficult. Yet there is plenty of majestical mystery residing in the grooves, and fans of world music fusions can keep this in mind anytime they want to embark on a quest for something next to impossible to find.

Habitat by Leon Louder / Scattered EnsembleMontreal-based composer Leon Louder spent the 2020-21 lockdown period in remote collaboration with four fellow musicians, exploring tones from homemade and traditional instruments and percussion, using a mixture of live sampling and improvisation to create aleatoric tonal landscapes. Inspired by a stay on a remote island in the St-Lawrence River estuary, where the weather can shift dramatically from serene to turbulent at any moment and the dialogue of birds, insects, and seals is omnipresent, Habitat is a sequence of restless sound worlds, an impressionistic depiction of a constantly changing ecosystem that had its parallel in the emotional turmoil of pandemic time.Like the phenomena they approximate, the pieces exist in a continual state of composition and recomposition. Populated with melodic fragments that call and respond, break apart and ricochet, they ask the listener to live in the music as much as to listen to it, accepting discord as equal to harmony, chaos as part of the order.The individual tracks are strikingly varied, not only in their vocabularies of sound but in the moods they create and the hints of environment they evoke. They range from "Full of Light", in which mesmerizing bell and woodwind tones interweave in melodic counterpoint, building to a gently driving train-like rhythm that conjures some sort of Celestial Express -- to "Underpass", whose low dark sounds and simple repeated rhythms carry us down through subterranean strata bored out by primeval life forms, into what feels like a maze of subway tunnels on another planet.The recordings bring into play double bass, vibraphone, homemade zithers, piano, modular synthesizer, and found percussion, and feature collaborators from the Montreal experimental music community: radio artist Martin Rodriguez, multi disciplinary artist Gabrielle Godbout, drummer and electroacoustic composer Samuel Bobony, and multi instrumentalist Rodney Sothmann.