Cloud Holding is NYC-based Bryce Hackford's fifth album, and first for Futura Resistenza. Seven sound sculptures are coaxed out of recorded improvisations by a group of musicians--Ka Baird, Shelley Burgon, Alice Cohen, Michael Hurder, Dominika Mazurova, Camilla Padgitt-Coles--and worked into formless figures that express an always drifting present. Guided by the Suzuki Nobara--a kind of electric koto with many traditional instrument sounds and unique pitch adjustment controls--and the lyric-less utterances of the human voice, Cloud Holding traces delicate outlines in a collaborative sound world that shines with mysterious, searching affinity. More

Refracted through the sound of Detroit’s second wave, Modus, steers ‘Triple M’ across a spectrum of discordant pulsations and contorting energies towards enthralment. The driving rhythms which beckon listeners forward, guide them to a crescendo of rapturous furore and like The Rite of Spring played through faults in the 4th dimension, audiences are left in uproar, exalted in their own movement. More

Artist, producer and DJ Bryce Hackford will release on November 9th 2015 the nine-track album Behind, his second full length since 2013's Fair, and his first for Meakusma. Behind is an expansive collection for Hackford, who draws from experimental, process-oriented composition techniques to create sensorially engaging dance music. An ethos of presence, enrichment and dissociation pervades Behind - by stripping away the constructed-ness of so much dance music, Hackford allows himself to produce music that is as much a joy to create as it is to share. An ambassador of "ecstatic states" as he calls them, Hackford's music suggests heightened temporal zones may be ubiquitous if you allow them to be. Behind is a proposition of such ecstatic states, its music pulsing vitally at opposite ends of the BPM spectrum. Distinctly unmotivated by polemic dialogues around dance music, Behind seeks a more soluble musical space for unmitigated engagement. It is music inspired by transitions, no less vital before sunset as it is after the curtain call. More

For its 12th release, Spring Theory is excited to present a four-tracks EP from Mogwaa, from Seoul, South Korea, his first on the label. The music is by inspired by his experience of living in Peru and Vietnam (more below), and the artwork is a picture of a tapestry I found in Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia. So this record is just an ode to what happens when different worlds meet in an unexpected way and human open-mindness allows colors to fade out on each other to create new tones.
In his own words: “The first track is kind of ode to Lima, Peru. It was the first country that I lived besides Korea so everything was so new to me. And it made lost in thought of their culture: colonial era, dictatorship, and even japanese president. And second track I made it remembering where I lived in Vietnam, a place where the Mekhong river find its way to the sea. Which is full of mangrove forest and mango trees. And third one is scenery of my neighborhood: at some point I could find feelings from my Seoul neighborhood in Peru and Vietnam. And last one is kind of nostaligia for Peru and Vietnam looking forward to coming back someday.
As they influenced me a lot, at some point I could say they’re my holy land so I’ll make a pilgrimage when I’m really exhausted.” More

Refracted through the sound of Detroit’s second wave, Modus, steers ‘Triple M’ across a spectrum of discordant pulsations and contorting energies towards enthralment. The driving rhythms which beckon listeners forward, guide them to a crescendo of rapturous furore and like The Rite of Spring played through faults in the 4th dimension, audiences are left in uproar, exalted in their own movement. More

San Francisco/Paris-based label Spring Theory is back with its fourth release. Called Sweet Bitter Love, it's a four track EP of manic sample-driven house from Keita Sano, a Japanese producer who's been on a roll lately with releases for like-minded imprints Discos Capablanca, Mister Saturday Night, and Strictly Groove Recordings. Sweet Bitter Love kicks off with the tripped-out flair of "Once I Found a Diamond." It's an uplifiting bongo-led cut with dubby melodics that sound like the kind of thing Sleeping Bag Records would have put out in the early '80s. Jacques Renault provides a leaner peak-time version — complete with hard-hitting snares and growling bass — via his "Once I Found a Diamond (Jacques Renault Trouble Funk Remix)." Things take a turn for the delightfully weird on the EP's namesake "Sweet Bitter Love." Starting like a straightforward house cut, it explodes into a psychedelic collage of spaghetti western guitars, tribal calls, displaced jazz fills, and other forms of cleverly sampled soundtrack exotica. The release wraps up with yet another curveball on "Bouzouk." Here Sano lays out a subwoofer-knocking NY garage house rhythm that takes a left turn with frenzied bouzouki playing charting arpeggios through a haze of echoing foreign voices. Taken as a whole, Sweet Bitter Love is that rare idiosyncratic bomb of an EP that will keep your dancers moving and your trainspotters guessing — In other words, it's Spring Theory through and through.
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