TRACKLIST
1.1 Soft Opening Machine
1.2 Liquid Sound Waves
1.3 Limitations
1.4 M And A
1.5 Gummi Twist & Crawl (Die Koffer sind leer)
1.6 Sunglasses
1.7 Orion Stars
1.8 Back From The Primitive Galaxy
1.9 Cheapo Sounds
1.10 Afterhour


Stefan Schwander hat bereits eine unglaubliche Fülle an Musik geschaffen und ist ein fester Bestandteil auf der berüchtigten Achse um den Düsseldorfer Salon Des Amateurs. Mit seinem Projekt Harmonious Thelonious erforscht er seit mittlerweile 12 Jahren die Welten von panafrikanischen, südamerikanischen und nahöstlichen Rhythmen in Kombination mit einem minimalistischen Electronic-Sound, aus deren Zusammenspiel er mittlerweile seinen ganz eigenen Groove destilliert hat. Für sein neues Album mit dem herausfordernden Titel "Cheapo Sounds" wendet sich Schwander von bereits erprobten Rezepten ab. Eine musikalische Neuausrichtung, die zunächst in der Veränderung der Produktionsweise selbst begründet liegt: So ist die gesamte Platte unter Verwendung nur eines Instruments entstanden, der Monomaschine, die den Klang der 10 Stücke mit ihren sehr physischen Sounds erheblich prägt. Es stehen nicht mehr polyrhythmische Tracks im Vordergrund des Geschehens, sondern das Verweben von mehreren Melodien und Akkorden über einem Grundgerüst von spröden, simplifizierten Beat-Konstrukten und schroffen Basspulsen. Bei genauem Besehen ist dies mitunter eine neue Vision einer alten Herangehensweise: Standen in Schwanders Proberaum zwar auch alte Verstärker, die primitive Rhythmusbox, die programmierbare Drummachine oder Synthesizer wie MS-20, kamen diese jedoch auf "Cheapo Sounds" nicht zum Einsatz. Allerdings ist die Idee, mit der dieses Instrumentarium assoziiert wird, eng mit der DNA dieses Albums verwoben. Als der New Wave den Punk und die letzten Rockismen abgelöst hatte, entstand jener spezielle, neue Geist, den Stefan Schwander in den neuen Stücken einfangen wollte. Eine WavePlatte mit dem Verständnis von Techno. Und tatsächlich ist es ihm gelungen, damit auch den Bogen zu der grundlegenden Idee des Projekts Harmonious Thelonious selbst zu schlagen: Eine Art von Dance-Musik, die wie eine gute Clubnacht nicht nur zu einer schablonenhaften Formel verkümmert oder GenreErwartungen bedient, sondern das Publikum herausfordert und in sich sowohl Jazz, Krautrock, Industrial, Punk, Dub und Disco verhandelt. More

We're delighted to kick off our 10th anniversary celebrations with a release from an artist we've long admired, Dusseldorf's Harmonious Thelonious. His explorations into minimalism and polyrhythms have been staples in our sets since we were first connected via the Salon des Amateurs, and we couldn't be happier to welcome him into the Highlife fold with one of his brightest sounding records yet - documenting his musical adventures in Uganda.A1. Versteckte Muziek, A2. George Villa ft. Leo Palayeng, B1. Company, B2. It Never Rains In Jinja ft. Ocen James More

The new tunes, condensations of the 2016 album: the waist-deep sway Blinky - the title may be read as a tribute to the artist Blinky Palermo - and the pumping Shark Dance. Walkmen set too loud, ghetto-blaster too quiet, crosstalks in the bazaar, sun-bleached fabrics shimming in the Mediterranean wind. Tolouse Low Trax's Rivera Remix drags on a hoarse scratch, relentlessly spurring on in the rhythm of approach, into the distance, a sand fortress, where a yearning horn is calling, promising comfort. Wolf Mueller's remix of RFS (Vol. 3) does not detour, and takes no prisoners. Breaking straight into the aluminum can factory and shreds what he can find. Love actually, of course. A four-fold rattling and clanking, overdriven speakers, the groove is dirty. Dancers rub against each other and on the walls. The disco machine is a human.
Tracklist:
A1. Shark Dance
A2. Rivera (Tolouse Low Trax RMX)
B3. Blinky
B4. RFS (Vol. 3) (Wolf Müller_RMX) More

Harmonious Thelonious's ethnomusicologic journeys to the African continent continues with a burning package of 3 rhythmic tracks inspired by American minimalist music and African rhythm patterns. A primordial soup of polyrhythms and dense harmonics hypnotise the body into movement, transporting the origins of dance music to neoteric audiences. More

After releasing a brilliant and stomping three-tracker on Kontra-Musik White Label last year, ex-Durian Brother Harmonious Thelonious returns to the Kontra-Musik family with an absolute gem of a record. This is everything we want dance music to be: characterful, playful and impossibly funky. Harmonious Thelonious is a master of crafting organic sounding rhythms but arranging them in a manner that reminds one of a 1970's car factory. Primal pulses running through modern assembly lines, gears and pistons covered in green lianas. The result is a perfect symbiosis between living tissue and mechanical parts - dance music for primitive cyborgs. More

The world is spinning, and so is HARMONIOUS THELONIOUS, the latest project by Stefan Schwander (aka Antonelli). The Düsseldorfer's 2010 album "Talking" conquered new rhythmic worlds with Afro-Industrial music fueled by dizzying sequencer patterns, garnering much praise for its global mixture of sound. More

Blawan's new side project Bored Young Adults is up next on Will Bankhead's label The Trilogy Tapes. The Shy Dancers On Bungalowdorf Beach features some restrained and slow burning techno experiments that differ from Jamie Robert's more usual hard-hitting sounds. The seething title track treads the same path as Kassem Mosse or Vactrol Park. The Fentanyl techno of "But We Need This Bench" sounds like an old Regis record played on -8, while devoted fans of the young UK producer's sound will get something a bit more familiar on the menacing hypnotic techno grinder "Check Up From The Neck Up".

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Following the announcement that they've collaborated with perma-masked Zomby on his upcoming LP for Hyperdub, behooded hardware manglers Rezzett return to home soil for their latest, and perhaps best so far, 12" for The Trilogy Tapes. With a very defined, redlining approach to techno and hardcore tropes established across their prior output on Will Bankhead's label, the duo demonstrate there is still plenty of scope for invention on Doyce. In essence you get two versions of the same track either side of this 12"; the A-side is nominally the club cut though there is a feeling of restraint where usually Rezzett deal in speaker bursting madness. The "Yavas" version on the flip is quite something else however, discarding with any rhythmic elements over an eleven-minute journey into mind-bending sonics based around that quite exquisite mangled synth line. More

Blawan's new side project Bored Young Adults is up next on Will Bankhead's label The Trilogy Tapes. The Shy Dancers On Bungalowdorf Beach features some restrained and slow burning techno experiments that differ from Jamie Robert's more usual hard-hitting sounds. The seething title track treads the same path as Kassem Mosse or Vactrol Park. The Fentanyl techno of "But We Need This Bench" sounds like an old Regis record played on -8, while devoted fans of the young UK producer's sound will get something a bit more familiar on the menacing hypnotic techno grinder "Check Up From The Neck Up".

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Terrific record! Eight charged, intimate meditations by Julie Normal and Olivier Demeaux, playing a rickety ondes Martenot and an old church harmonium. Gripping, detailed, stately improvisation — a bit like the ùrlars in classical bagpipe music — which nervily mixes the sternly doom-laden with precarious, other-worldly wonderment. (The ondes Martenot is an amazing twentieth-century instrument — beloved by Messiaen, for example, and Varese. The theme-song of Star Trek is a vocal forgery of its sound. ‘J’aime cette fragilité qui côtoie la capacité de te décoller le tympan sur certaines fréquences inopinément,’ says Julie. ‘Je tiens une bombe dans les mains. J’aime son instabilité, son humanité.’) Wood, breath, blood, eggshells… on the night of a purple moon. Very warmly recommended. More

Four track EP produced by Samo DJ & Elias Landberg. More

Under his Chemotex alias, Marcos Cabral has been one of The Trilogy Tapes most productive artists in recent times. This is his third 12" for Will Bankhead's imprint in less than 12 months. Unlike Cabral's recent album for L.I.E.S, which reveled in its' own distorted, balls-out intensity, Thulsa strives to get a balance between becalmed techno hypnotism, skuzzy grooves and gently melodious intent. This blend is perhaps most satisfyingly mixed on the industrial-tinged clank of "Delta City", though the woozier, scuffled late night warmth of "Music For Security" pushes it close. Twice he heads towards deeper territory; first on the title track's trance-inducing synthesizer loop groove, and secondly on the dubby, locked-in tech-house majesty of "Lorentz". More

Coruscating cut-ups yanked still dripping and yowling from the belly of the beast. Dazzling and invigorating, scary and discombobulating. 'Psychic driving was a psychiatric procedure in which patients were subjected to a continuously repeated audio message on a looped tape, in order to alter their behaviour... often hundreds of thousands of repetitions of a single statement over the course of their treatment. They were also concurrently administered muscular paralytic drugs such as curare... The psychic driving procedure was a chronological precursor to Cameron's depatterning, involving massive doses of ECT combined with similarly large doses of psychedelic drugs like LSD. The intent was to break down the subject's personality — theoretically psychic driving could then be used with some efficacy in establishing a new personality' (Hanson Records). More

Under his Chemotex alias, Marcos Cabral has been one of The Trilogy Tapes most productive artists in recent times. This is his third 12" for Will Bankhead's imprint in less than 12 months. Unlike Cabral's recent album for L.I.E.S, which reveled in its' own distorted, balls-out intensity, Thulsa strives to get a balance between becalmed techno hypnotism, skuzzy grooves and gently melodious intent. This blend is perhaps most satisfyingly mixed on the industrial-tinged clank of "Delta City", though the woozier, scuffled late night warmth of "Music For Security" pushes it close. Twice he heads towards deeper territory; first on the title track's trance-inducing synthesizer loop groove, and secondly on the dubby, locked-in tech-house majesty of "Lorentz". More