DIALOGUE was conceived as a series of musical letters written back and forth between Luke Slater, Anthony Child (aka Surgeon), KMRU, Lady Starlight, Speedy J and harpist Tom Moth (of Florence + the Machine) at the height of the pandemic between 2020 and early 2021. Using the common language of rhythmic ambient electronics, each DIALOGUE features three actors in a sonic conversation of longform improvisation between 15 and 25 minutes in length, with Luke Slater the common denominator. The results are a brooding, psychedelic exchange of melody, texture, bass, oscillation, key changes and volume swells, which organically merge into complete compositions. It’s music that both reflects and transcends the artists' common reality of isolation – a meditative, consciousness-expanding conversion of musical ideas born from necessity. Cosmic but not escapist. And very much of its time.

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First released by Cazzo Film in 2001, ebo hill’s Bonking Berlin Bastards has long achieved the status of an underground punk porn classic. Like the Cazzo productions of director Bruce LaBruce, hill’s vision was both ahead of its time and a playful distillation of 90s and early-2000s Berlin Zeitgeist: queer, industrial, hypersexual, exhibitionist and fueled by electronic music. The story is told in large part by the soundtrack, to be released for the first time on Ostgut Ton sublabel A-TON. The music follows a group of squatters, punks and drag queens as they fuck, party and stumble their way through an empty city at the turn of the millennium. Approaching these themes more through location than plot, the film’s narrative freedom is also a narrative of freedom; between chance encounters and sex in public, atop the maze of roofs in the city’s former East, bent over bridges and moaning in ecstasy at oncoming traffic, pants down in telephone booths, packed into sex clubs, in the shadows of abandoned factories and techno clubs lost in time. Composed by improvisational techno trio AeoX and noise / industrial producer Rouage aka CNM (respectively), the music spans a broad range of appropriately pounding industrial, weird techno, noise, ultra-stoned ambient, improvised dub and electro. It’s a sonic spectrum that connects Berlin’s queer hardcore techno and squatter party scenes from which AeoX and Rouage emerged, drawing a direct line between the likes of Berghain-forerunner OstGut (a primary meeting point for the film’s cast & crew) to the more industrial, breakcore and noise- oriented independent party collectives and locations who provided multiple settings for the film, including Grüne Hölle and Stellwerk.

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Following 2019’s New Atlantis LP under his experimental techno alias Efdemin, Phillip Sollmann’s Monophonie is a project dedicated to uniting different strands of utopian music. His approach: combining and recontextualizing rare historical instruments of sonic research of Hermann von Helmholtz (19th century) with the self-designed, microtonal instruments of Harry Partch and metal sound sculptures of Harry Bertoia. The result is a psychedelic investigation into just intonation – alternative tuning systems that create unique sets of harmonics not found in conventional scales. Monophonie recasts these sounds into new rhythmic environments where epic kosmische, polyrhythms, acoustic techno and microtonal glow are interwoven into a rare music. Over nine tracks, the album explores multiple forms of minimalism, from unwavering repetition to paired-down chords and sparse sonic environments. But it also seeks to expand the sound spectrum of Partch’s custom built organs and melodic percussion instruments as well as Bertoia’s sonambient singing metal rods into a atmospheric otherworldliness. Monophonie was first composed in 2016 and premiered at Berlin’s Volksbu¨hne theatre in 2017, before it went on to the renowned Ruhrtriennale and Kampnagel in Hamburg. It was performed by one of Germany’s premier neue musik collectives Ensemble Musikfabrik together with Sollmann himself on von Helmholtz’s original double siren, with set design by Michael Kleine and wardrobe by Peter Kisur of Honeysuckle Company.

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In the afterglow of rave’s white heat, the mid-90s were a period of going as far out in all directions as possible – and Luke Slater’s The 7th Plain tracks were certainly about exploration of the deep space of the imagination. Cosmic, analogue, orchestrated, they still represent some of the most emotionally intense music ever to come out of the techno realm. Like its predecessor, Chronicles II is divided between previously released material from the aforementioned albums, as well as four unreleased future classics: “Silver Shinhook”, “Wand Star”, “I Think I Think Too Much” and “JDC”. In contrast, Chronicles III is made up solely of music from the General Production Recordings label catalogue and stylistically skews less toward percussive techno-funk and more toward free-form broken rhythms – though tracks such as “Lost”, “Time Melts” or “Millentum” stand strong as hybrid pillars of both.

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Rauch is a sonic interpretation of the work of photographer Friederike von Rauch, composed collaboratively by Berlin-based producers Felix K, Marcel Dettmann, Sa Pa and Simon Hoffmann. Arranged and mixed by Marcel Dettmann, the recording stands in dialogue with von Rauch’s architectural images of post-World War II European monasteries, including La Tourette by Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis near Lyon, Roosenberg Abbey near Ghent and Maria Regina Martyrum in Berlin. The images were first exhibited together with the music on this LP as part of an installation for von Rauch’s solo show insgeheim (“in secret”), held at the Goethe-Institut Paris during the international Paris Photo art fair in November 2017. While the complimentary relationship between the sounds of Rauch (“smoke”) and the images exhibited in Paris invites interpretation, both can also be experienced as separate artistic entities. On the 42-minute-long LP, drones, modulating harmonic soundscapes and implied rhythms maintain an abstract emotional core while occasionally taking on vaporous, amorphous qualities. Similarly, von Rauch’s images – often borderline abstract in composition – resist being identified by location or spatial context. Nevertheless, they also hint at their spiritual origin. Rauch is part of an ongoing artistic collaboration between Marcel Dettmann and Friederike von Rauch, which includes 2011’s Ash installation and three photographic works for Dettmann releases on Ostgut Ton.

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A-TON is a new edition and platform of Berghain's in-house imprint Ostgut Ton, focussing on ambient, archive and alternative music, differing from the club-focussed records on the main label. Furthermore the first A-TON offering – Chronicles | – marks the start of a series from Luke Slater's The 7th Plain moniker, with remastered, previously released and unheard archive material. First published on General Production Recordings between 1993 and 1996, Slater's The 7th Plain pushed the further burgeoning genre of ambient music towards its boundaries by not limiting itself to mostly beatless synth pads, but by including propulsive beat progressions, nuanced rhythms and subtle melodies. The 7th Plain's extramundane music dodged classification, as heard on the albums The 4 Cornered Room and My Yellow Wise Rug (both on GPR, 1994) – emotional, eerie and escapist music, at the time of release forward thinking records that in retrospect managed to overcome time. Originally recorded at Slater's Spacestation Ø, now all newly mastered for A-TON, Chronicles | depicts the futurist aesthetic and musical agenda of the 90s in a contemporary context, without nostalgia but confidence of its timelessness. With seven original musical pieces and a previously unreleased Ken Ishii remix, The 7th Plain sounds as spirited and relevant as ever.

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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More

A-TON is a new edition and platform of Berghain's in-house imprint Ostgut Ton, focussing on ambient, archive and alternative music, differing from the club-focussed records on the main label. Furthermore the first A-TON offering – Chronicles | – marks the start of a series from Luke Slater's The 7th Plain moniker, with remastered, previously released and unheard archive material. First published on General Production Recordings between 1993 and 1996, Slater's The 7th Plain pushed the further burgeoning genre of ambient music towards its boundaries by not limiting itself to mostly beatless synth pads, but by including propulsive beat progressions, nuanced rhythms and subtle melodies. The 7th Plain's extramundane music dodged classification, as heard on the albums The 4 Cornered Room and My Yellow Wise Rug (both on GPR, 1994) – emotional, eerie and escapist music, at the time of release forward thinking records that in retrospect managed to overcome time. Originally recorded at Slater's Spacestation Ø, now all newly mastered for A-TON, Chronicles | depicts the futurist aesthetic and musical agenda of the 90s in a contemporary context, without nostalgia but confidence of its timelessness. With seven original musical pieces and a previously unreleased Ken Ishii remix, The 7th Plain sounds as spirited and relevant as ever.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: [email protected]More