Xhin's debut album on Stroboscopic Artefacts, 'Sword', showcases the breath of his vision. As the second full-length release on Stroboscopic Artefacts, 'Sword' stretches the remit of the label's identity ever further. Produced and recorded in Singapore, Xhin plucks sounds from the outer edges of electronic music and
fuses them together. Xhin's approach revels not only in a hybrid sound palette but it's also an album designed for multiple contexts. It’s a record typified by duality. Xhin's process seamlessly traversed analogue and digital production, and 'Sword' harbours electronic music that ranges from brutal club sounds to deep and delicate murmurs. It's clear from the way the album is crafted and layered that Xhin is a skilled sound designer. The tracks seem to have been worked on from a 360o perspective. His muse? The void. But rather than soundtracking the abyss, 'Sword' is a strategy, an attempt to negotiate a way out. Part of the answer that he proposes abandons the shadowy recesses of melancholy in search of the ecstatic. 'The Secret Closet' depicts a dream state in frosted tones and icy ambience that is returned to again with the discordant jangles of 'Inside'. 'Wood' picks up the motive once more. At the kernel of 'Wood' is melody that Xhin composed on the
piano and then digitally processed into a state of bliss. However, 'Sword' refuses to languish in a romantic hinterland and the ambience is off set by aggressive,
weighty cuts. 'Fox and Wolves' is Xhin ripping into any nostalgia that opening track 'The Secret Closet' promised. Equally 'Teeth' gnashes and writhes over a bed of deep beats. 'Vent' is fortified with metallic rasps and built from the droning aggression that characterized Xhin's early Stroboscopic Artefacts releases. Even
at its darkest, its most violent, 'Swords' envisions the club as a place of refuge. Proposing a collective acknowledgement of the void, where dancing fends off its grip, and realization is paradoxically escapist. 'Sword' could not be more aptly titled. Xhin creates allusions with track titles that snatch images from a post-modern fairytale: woods, wolves, foxes, wardrobes. Xhin appropriates the fairytale hero's sword and the weapon becomes symbolic of a struggle, a tool against the void. A way out of dystopia. Journeying to the crispy cusp of experimentation and musical questioning, 'Sword' is one of those rare creations that emerge when a producer has absolute artistic freedom. The 10 tracks navigate parallels and paradoxes allowing Xhin to cut a deft mark across the album format.
Tracklisting:
1 - The Secret Closet
2 - Fox and Wolves
3 - Teeth
4 - Insides
5 - Wood
6 - Medium
7 - You Against Yourself
8 - Vent
9 - Foreshadowed
10 - This Is What You Drew While You Were Half Asleep More

‘Cutlass’ is the 12? that precedes ‘Sword’ Xhin’s forthcoming full-length album on Stroboscopic Artefacts. Four tracks from the album have been selected and spliced into completely new forms by four producers with very separate agendas. The minds, computers and analogue tools of Surgeon, Dadub, Pfirter and Perc have extracted new visions from Xhin’s ‘Sword’ with nothing short of scientific precision. A cutlass just like a sword but with a slightly curved blade, and accordingly the way that Surgeon, Dadub, Pfirter and Perc cut into these tracks is experimental and left of the centre. The four producers’ remixes uncover latent facets of ‘Sword’, adding not just anticipation to the release of Xhin’s album, but also widening the scope of Stroboscopic Artefacts’ soundscape. More

Stroboscopic Artefacts is proud to welcome on board Singapore-based Xhin. “Fixing the Error” is an enormous peak-time club killer. Xhin knits together the sinister sound of the revolt of the machines. High frequency drum machines and ferrous sub-bass synthesizers are working urgently against the clock. Close your eyes, dissolve, step into dystopia. You are transported into a post-human cityscape where strobes reflect off smelting metallic sounds and deafening alarms wail. These warning codes, layer upon layer, fashion a vision of a metropolis gorging itself on sprawling noises. The flip side, “Link” has no narrative. Instead, this deep, brooding slice of dub-techno is composed of pure atmospheric pressure. The undercarrige slithers and slinks, interrupted by crackles of lightening and prehistoric rumbles. The result is a construction created in a cold palate of pyrite grey: bubbling, spherical and terrifying. This is dark. This is urgent. This is Xhin. More

Special remarks: Limited capsule collection 3/3 from Midnight Shift
Tracklist:
A1. The Stream
A2. The Stream Lock Groove 1 (Vinyl only)
A3. The Stream Lock Groove 2 (Vinyl only)
B1. My Favourit Thing
B2. Slow Move

Info:
After releases on the Ninja Tune-backed label R'COUP'D, the mysterious Prequel Tapes surfaces with an EP for Midnight Shift. Composed of 3 tracks and 2 locked grooves, SHIFT LTD 003 fossilises transient moments in between gridlocks of tight grooves. Like a scan of light sweeping surreptitiously across a dungeon of darkness or a blinking throb pulsating from the corner of one's eye, these are the brief but blinding moments of illumination that capture time suspended on the edge of two worlds. Memory capsules slow-releasing an industrial mythos back into the clubbing consciousness.

Prequel Tapes is a work of deep synthesis. Teenage recordings orchestrated into densely layered tapestries; a deeply emotional study on a life characterised by a shifting relationship to electronics. The pieces serve as a chronology of desire and reflection, reconciling a nascent passion for industrial music with a history in the club.

There is a temptation to draw comparisons to Mark Leckey's excavation of UK rave culture, Lee Gamble's junglist memories or the hauntological approach of the Ghost Box label, however this is clearly a personal trajectory aesthetically distant from an English past. Oscillating between utopian to claustrophobic, the evolving synth work, deep techno atmospheres and traces of the clangorous energy of early European ambient and industrial tell a distinctly German tale, forged between the forest and the autobahn.

More

Special remarks: Limited capsule collection 2/3 from Midnight Shift
Tracklist:
A1. The Nearness Of Flames
A2. Acid Symphony (John Beltran remix)
B. Acid Symphony
Short info:
Following the first of the 'SHIFT LTD' capsule collection by Xhin is an EP by Kirk Degiorgio with a remix from John Beltran. Full-bodied tracks fill in every frequency corner - 'The Nearness of Flames' as a headspin stomper, while 'Acid Symphony' weaves an acid line into a rich tapestry. Ambient producer John Beltran reimagines the original with a sunrise touch.
More