N'Gomatéké Emy Laskin
N'Gomatéké Emy Laskin

Caracol by João de Bruço / R.H. Jackson

The Tenets of Forgetting is the long-awaited follow-up to MSYLMA’s lauded 2019 debut, Dhil-un Taht Shajarat Al-Zaqum. This time he’s joined by fellow musician and producer ISMAEL for seven tracks, built around a lush palette of synths and MSYLMA’s singular voice.Written and produced in Cairo between 2015 and 2020, The Tenets of Forgetting is the first collaboration between MSYLMA and ISMAEL. Like his first record, The Tenets of Forgetting finds MSYLMA singing in classical Arabic, and the musicians have enlisted Nariman Youssef to provide translations of the lyrics. This gesture of openness runs parallel to the themes of the record; romance and vulnerability; growth and change; pathos and passion. Listeners who aren’t familiar with pre-Islamic poetry or classical Arabic will find the lyrics just as rich and beautiful as the vocal melodies imply, telling a story of love, loss, self-doubt, and grave introspection.Musically, the album moves in broad, painterly sweeps of 808 kicks, rich synthesizer chords, and MYSLMA’s soaring, plaintive voice. The English translations reveal a second world of mathematically sound rhythmic structures and poetry in the lyrics. The music pushes and pulls in both tempo and timbre, swirling both around and underneath MSYLMA’s voice but never losing a sense of self-contained narrative.The album is rounded out by Jesse Osborne-Lanthier and Omar El-Sadek’s immersive, esoteric art, and features additional production on track 7 by Osborne-Lanthier, Pierre Guerineau, and Asaël Robitaille.Limited run of 300. Includes insert + DL code.

Bruno De Angelis and Giovanna Gulinello unwittingly met in London in the late 70’s, after being introduced by a mutual friend. Both Bruno and Giovanna arrived with varying ambitions. Giovanna wanted to learn English or be a painter, while Bruno found work at the Royal Post Office, which he found testing. It wasn’t until Bruno rescued Giovanna from an awkward date that the pair became a couple. At the time, music was just something they did for fun. Bruno already had an acoustic guitar and G bought a bass. Those were the days when you could start a new band, whether you could play or not, and new independent labels were springing up. Rough Trade Records was literally around the corner. In 1981 the pair moved back to Italy and found an apartment in Rome. It’s here that they began to focus on their music and where they started ‘recording’ their tracks. First, they would record the rhythm, maybe add the Gigster (the name of their “cheap drum machine”), the bass, and then, as they made a copy of the first cassette onto a second cassette they would add guitar, more synth, or both at the same time. After that, it was not unusual to copy from the second cassette back into the first cassette adding even more “stuff”. As with many artists during the early 80’s, the Influenza Prods’ sound was the direct result of the accessibility of emerging electronic instruments and the recording equipment available to them. The duo was resourceful and inventive, acquiring new equipment as resources allowed. They recorded dialogue from British Soap Operas on their TV set, which were later added to their tracks, while further making use of their family’s cutlery sets, which were used to fill in certain percussion sections The duo’s homespun recordings found a web of admirers in the unofficial distribution of tape trading and mail-art scenes. Despite the DIY ethos and the fact that most tapes were handmade, the Influenza Prods managed to ‘release’ three tapes which comprised of the Greatest Tits (1983), Cheek-A-Bomba (1984) and Quasi Solo (1985). Bruno and Giovanna were sadly subjected to serious family problems, including the loss of loved ones in their lives and eventually parted ways, concluding the Influenza Prods. However, to this day they remain close friends who keep in touch regularly.

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.

Le temps lent by Enfant MagiqueSlowing down time with Eric GingrasThe simple acoustic guitar plucks out a lulling back-and-forth, accompanying a voice that seems to arrive from another, far-off era. Elsewhere, the guitar moves around in the background, repetitive and drawn-out. But here, alone, it takes the time to find its rightful place, much like the deceptive simplicity of a hand-made quilt. This humbly whimsical patchwork seeks out form, succeeds, and is reunited with the voice. Articulate and elastic, it sometimes crisscrosses, sometimes circumnavigates this landscape of song both subtle and rich. Its clear lines of flight point to a remote village and its recent arrivals, a motley crew of hybrid things and beings: woolly sheep, beat-up robots, small synthetic drums, minimalist jaw harps, obsessive alarms, light footsteps on a gravel path, a few propellers, many layers of slow time.The sea’s waves break against this shoreline where our mutant from the 1970s seems to have washed up. He isn’t looking for a fight, and he isn’t looking to show off. However, as the custodian of utopian leftovers from an open agreement between artifice and artful making, he is clever and skillful in a thousand and one little ways. His voice is stubbornly discreet, but also able to take flight, carrying with it words devoid of preciosity and over-categorization. This is a voice that prefers attention to affectation. Bresson-like, it knows how to recount when recounting is needed, articulating both quivering fatigue and deep doubt.Joined now by others, the mutant feels supported, loved. He withdraws, and an assertive, childlike voice moves into the foreground. The mutant accompanies, discreet but fully present. And what better medium for this finely woven poetry and play of childhood’s expression, both clumsy and bold.- Anne Lardeux (translated from French by Simon Brown)

conatala · World Standard - 「麦秋」: Wheat Harvest1982, the season from spring to summer. Two young men in the peak of their youth, eager to immerse themselves in the recording of a single cassette tape.In March of that year, Soichiro Suzuki and Michio Kojima began to claim the group name “World Standard”.The music was produced in a room in Kojima's parents' house in Nishi-Ogikubo, Tokyo, making full use of ping-pong recordings on two cassette decks. With the focus on guitars, mandolin, and ukulele played by Suzuki, Kojima's upright piano, which was placed in a room between Japan across the corridor, was occasionally added. In addition, percussion was recorded using the echoes of the bathroom; toys such as pianica and trumpets, and drums made of cardboard were used as musical instruments.In the background, the sound of the TV and the subtle sounds of everyday life were intentionally mixed into the music. Listening to the delightful performance - Kojima's grandparents, who he lived with, occasionally opened the sliding doors and came to see the boys recording. They would even have lunch together from time to time.As they repeated their recordings while the tape turned, the young men felt like they succeeded in intercepting the soundscapes of the world - like a folklore in a far-off distant country to one corner of the city of Tokyo. They were so excited.In contrast to the techno pop and new wave sensations that swept the musical subcultures of Tokyo in the 80's, the analog and acoustic sounds they played were somewhat nostalgic. Instead of edgy and futuristic synth sounds, they intentionally tried to portray in the sound the scenery captured on the monochrome screen of an old European movie, and the Japanese houses of the 1950s where they were born and raised. They yearned for the landscape on the veranda. D.I.Y. - a time when there was no word for bedroom recording. Suzuki and Kojima dreamed of nostalgic, new, popular music that no one had heard on cassette.This work, "Asagao", is the first cassette work in a series of several demo tapes produced before the debut of "World Standard" (produced by Haruomi Hosono from NON-STANDARD label in 1985). In addition to being distributed among the members' friends, copies of the cassette tapes were sent to NHK-FM “Sound Street” (Tuesday personality: Ryuichi Sakamoto) - a demo tape special that had started broadcasting from the previous year, as well as cassette magazine “TRA” and Alpha/YEN labels who dubbed and passed out about 20 copies of the cassette. The original tape was restored by remastering, without changing the order of the songs at that time, and will be released for the first time on vinyl LP."Asagao" was remastered by Masato Hara. The cover was redesigned by Yu Yokoyama from the original design of the cassette, and all other design work and configurations, including the inserts, are also handled by Yu Yokoyama. Scheduled to be released in September 2020.conatala · World Standard - 「プリマ」: Prima