Territory: WORLD

FORMAT 12” 180g vinyl, printed labels,
A4 printed inlay 170gsm, dl code,
black innersleeve, white outersleeve

TRACKLIST

A. Maintain 04:56
B. The Golden Ratio (Version) 04:43

INFO

Cybotron has re-emerged in our contemporary cybercultural age when artifactual futures begin a transition into a new era of
"Meta".

By combining their knowledge of philosophy, science fiction, and mechanical engineering, at a time when electronic instrument
companies were only just beginning to distribute their products to the masses, two prosumer audio technicians named Juan
Atkins and Rik Davis were able to re-engineer Cybotron – a combination of the words “Cyborg” and “Cyclotron” (an atomic
particle accelerator) – to be used as a home studio performance music that would change the course of independently produced
and distributed electronic music.

Dissolving the boundary between singer, songwriter, and producer, Juan Atkins named Cybotron’s future forward funkadelic
sound “techno” in reference to Alvin Toler’s concept of unlikely “techno rebels” against technocracy. Techno is music that
sounds like technology, and its purpose was to help society survive our collision with a universally felt “future shock” by inserting
an audio virus into the cultural matrix.

Techno’s blueprint spread across the Detroit-Berlin Axis between Metroplex and Tresor. As human society began its transition
from a post-industrial to an information-based market economy, Cybotron enabled a thorough system override of the human
senses towards a tangible man-machine hybridity and showed the world how to channel their emotions and imaginations into
new sound technologies and create new ‘sonic’ spatialities where listeners can transport themselves out of the physical world
into the future. The cover of their debut album Enter (1983) transmitted a fragmented view of a body in motion being digitized
mid-stride, dissolving physical and virtual reality into sonic fiction.

Today, the man-machine hybridity of Cybotron is still the truest form of techno, coevolving in conversation with the technological music they created and inspired. The latest data disk marks a new chapter that reflects a techgnostic musical expression of
the knowledge acquired during their decades-long hiatus. Unlike the dance music industrial replications of the Model 500
formula, acknowledging the content marketing expectations that segments music into specific, sellable genres, this techno
music is self-aware. Cybotron processes dance music tropes spawned from its very own blueprint with a meta-tactical precision
out of sync with our current rave new world.

Cybotron’s return demonstrates a studied engagement with what techno was and should be with a peerless update of Juan
Atkins’ initial inventive idea of do-it-yourself electrically reengineered music xeroxed onto both sides of the 12” – uploaded
directly into the alleys of your mind.
- The Rhythmanalyst





More

Territories: World excl. UK + North America

FORMAT 2x12" 180g vinyl, full printed sleeve, artwork by Cyprien Gaillard

TRACKLIST
1 / A1. Silencio 12:34
2 / A2. Luminoso 08:53
3 / B1. Librarsi 03:04
4 / B2. Infinito 06:17
5 / B3. Colpo 05:05
6 / C1. Volta (Version) 04:02
7 / C2. Infinito (Version) 06:25
8 / C3. Luminoso (Version) 04:49
9 / D1. Volta 05:47
10 / D2. Opaco 08:57
11 / D3. Opaco (Version) 01:54

What are the differences and similarities between human and artificial sound, between oscillations generated by vocal cords and synthesizer voices, voltage amplified by speakers? On Silencio, his latest album for Tresor Records, Moritz von Oswald works with a
16-voice choir to explore this concept.
Drawing from the ensemble works of long-standing inspirations Edgard Varèse, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, von Oswald and Vocalconsort Berlin delve into the space between sounds, creating a deeply textured collection that shifts between light & ethereal and
dark & dissonant.
As masterfully demonstrated in the early work of von Oswald and Mark Ernestus’ influential Basic Channel project, repetition and reduction are key elements here, much in the tradition of techno and minimalism. The vast dynamism of the human voice adds to the
profound weight of electronics while offering up a rhythmic source and sonic noise palette unexplored in von Oswald’s repertoire. In Silencio, von Oswald dredges a dank murk, pulling clouds over a distant pulse. It hangs, ready to take on new forms.
The compositions were written in von Oswald’s Berlin studio on classic synthesizers, such as the EMS VCS3 & AKS, Prophet V, Oberheim 4-Voice and the Moog Model 15. These abstract recordings were transcribed to sheet music for choir by Berlin-based Finnish composer and pianist, Jarkko Riihimäki and performed by Vocalconsort Berlin in Ölberg church in the city’s Kreuzberg district, only few metres down the road from where Dubplates & Mastering and Hard Wax opened their doors for music enthusiasts for many years so long. The recordings of the choral versions were then incorporated into the synthesized parts of the album and brought into anew electronic context; in Silencio, the focus is not on using one means to imitate the other, but to sonically discuss the tensions and harmonies between the two worlds and create a dialogue between them.
The relationship between von Oswald and Tresor Records goes back thirty years, all the way to Blake Baxter’s Dream Sequence in 1991 - which von Oswald engineered alongside Thomas Fehlmann. The collaboration with Fehlmann lived on, seeing the duo team up as 3MB with Eddie Fowlkes or Juan Atkins. More recently, the Detroit-Berlin connection continued as Juan Atkins & Moritz von Oswald present Borderland.
For von Oswald, Tresor Records and also the participating guest musicians of the choir, this release brings together audiences from other musical areas, cross-pollinating; Silencio is an album that stands for itself beyond the musical genre boundaries. More