Balmat began our journey in 2021 with the release of Luke Sanger’s Languid Gongue. Now, three years later, we turn an important corner as the Norfolk musician rejoins us with Dew Point Harmonics, the first repeat appearance on the label. Sanger’s new album feels like a natural extension of his inaugural record for Balmat: It’s a bewitching collection of esoteric synth sketches that slips unpredictably between consonant repetition, poignant melodies, and gnarled bursts of noise that catch in the ear like burrs in hiking socks.

That natural metaphor is perhaps not accidental. Despite having been composed on Sanger’s diverse array of hardware and self-written software, many of the tracks were first conceived while Sanger was hiking in a particularly wild and isolated section of the Norfolk coast. The field recording that opens the album, on “6am Beach Walk,” was taken on one of his many early-morning walks there, in which he and his dog might go for miles without seeing another soul. The album’s title was inspired by the overnight condensation covering the long marram grass in the dunes, glistening in the early light (and drenching everything coming in contact with it) before evaporating in the morning sun. Indeed, the concept of dew point—the temperature at which water vapor condenses into a liquid—feels like the perfect metaphor for Sanger’s music, in which foggy ambience is distilled into glistening quicksilver orbs, transient spheres of perfection eventually absorbed back into the atmosphere.

A shapeshifting collection of richly detailed and deeply expressive electronic miniatures, Dew Point Harmonics is both a testament to the mysteries of transformation and an invitation to get lost in the wilderness of your own imagination.

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1 Clouds Over Canigou
2 Pyrenees Dreams
3 Clouds Over Canigou (Jamie Paton Remix)
4 Pyrenees Dreams (Slight Return)
5 Clouds Over Canigou (Møzaika Remix)

Luke Sanger brings a calm yin to an energized yang in his new EP, Mountain Dance for Cosmic Pint Glass, with Jamie Paton and Møzaika remixes. Limited to150 x black 12? vinyl with hand finished screen-printed sleeves.


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“Music is my forever cove,” writes Portland, Oregon’s Luke Wyland of the ideas that give shape to Kuma Cove, his latest album under his own name. Though named after a real place on the Oregon coast, Kuma Cove casts its gaze far beyond the sightseer’s line of vision. Recorded live in the studio and blurring obvious lines between computer-based composition and electro-acoustic instrumentation, it is an album about flow, borders, transitory states, and shelter. Composed of discontinuous ripples and repetitions (“I’m forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse,” Wyland says), shaped into richly emotive arcs, and informed by his experience as a person who stutters, it is also an album about identity, self-expression, and the energies that sluice through and across what we perceive as linear time—like floodwaters seeking an exit, like streams running into the sea.

Artist’s Statement:
I made this record while spending significant time in the woods by the Sandy River in Corbett, Oregon,
where I've had my studio for the last five years. It is a diary of spontaneous live recordings edited to highlight the moments of clarity that emerge from long-form improvisations. These compositions express a slowing internal rhythm. An unwinding. A somatic recalibration as I enter middle age. A newly empowered vulnerability.

Here are the internalized cadences of my stutter, flowing freely from my fingers. The musicality of my disfluency is revealed in its frictions, elongations, and foreshortenings. Disruptions in linear time, where the bubbling cadences of my stutter find unexpected pathways, reveal the elasticity of the present moment. This is my idiosyncratic language, shaped and inspired by my disability. Subliminally mirroring internal processes, neural firings, cognitive entanglements...

The title, Kuma Cove, refers to a beloved cove on the coast of Oregon my wife and I return to yearly. There has always been something so magnetic about coves. The way they cradle one from the overwhelming enormity of the ocean beyond, muting a primordial fear. I experience these improvisations as ecosystems I'm able to inhabit for stretches of time, embodying the particular rhythms and sensorial textures within each. Music is my forever cove. Everything you hear is created live in Ableton on a setup I've been honing for 15 years. I celebrate MIDI and computer music as an extension of self and strive to make it as expressive as any analog instrument. I was a visual artist for the first half of my life and quickly adapted those skills to composing and producing on a computer. The transition felt natural within the landscape of DAW's interfaces, especially as a synesthete. Ableton and its community of Max creators continue to surprise me with its expansiveness.

I'm forever searching for a better descriptor than looping, which feels too simple and flattened by overuse. I envision sonic loops as tangled masses of time, three-dimensional knots spinning on tilted axes, or overlapping wreaths refracting out a myriad of colors. My practice is continually refocusing my ear to what is revealed in the repetitions, searching for the fingerprint of each. I find it incredible how technology lets us manipulate time like this. Nothing on this record is quantized or locked to a universal bpm. Experiencing numerous tempos at once feels important. Recordings as mirrors. Freedom from expected (conversational) flow as we hold time for each other.
-Luke Wyland, August 2024

Artist Bio:
Luke Wyland is an interdisciplinary artist, composer, and performer based in Portland, OR (USA). Wyland has been releasing critically acclaimed records for the past 20 years in the groups AU and Methods Body, as LWW, and under his own name, working with such labels as New Amsterdam, Beacon Sound, Balmat, The Leaf Label, and Aagoo Records. As a person who stutters, Wyland’s approach to music is informed by his idiosyncratic relationship with language. Wyland believes deeply in the cathartic power of live performance as a means for collective healing. Through an interdisciplinary art practice that focuses on improvisation, somatic embodiment, bespoke tuning systems, the cadences of disfluent speech, and time manipulation technologies, he’s collaborated with choreographers, high-school choirs, filmmakers, sound designers, and renowned musicians such as John Niekrasz, Holland Andrews, Colin Stetson, and Abraham Gomez-Delgado. He’s also the co-creator of the “It’s A Fucking Miracle” dance class with Tahni Holt.
Wyland has toured nationally and internationally and performed at the Whitney Museum, Ecstatic Music Festival, Issue Project Room, PICA’s Time-Based Arts Festival, End of the Road Festival, and Les Nuits Botanique, among others.

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Balmat began our journey in 2021 with the release of Luke Sanger’s Languid Gongue. Now, three years later, we turn an important corner as the Norfolk musician rejoins us with Dew Point Harmonics, the first repeat appearance on the label. Sanger’s new album feels like a natural extension of his inaugural record for Balmat: It’s a bewitching collection of esoteric synth sketches that slips unpredictably between consonant repetition, poignant melodies, and gnarled bursts of noise that catch in the ear like burrs in hiking socks.

That natural metaphor is perhaps not accidental. Despite having been composed on Sanger’s diverse array of hardware and self-written software, many of the tracks were first conceived while Sanger was hiking in a particularly wild and isolated section of the Norfolk coast. The field recording that opens the album, on “6am Beach Walk,” was taken on one of his many early-morning walks there, in which he and his dog might go for miles without seeing another soul. The album’s title was inspired by the overnight condensation covering the long marram grass in the dunes, glistening in the early light (and drenching everything coming in contact with it) before evaporating in the morning sun. Indeed, the concept of dew point—the temperature at which water vapor condenses into a liquid—feels like the perfect metaphor for Sanger’s music, in which foggy ambience is distilled into glistening quicksilver orbs, transient spheres of perfection eventually absorbed back into the atmosphere.

A shapeshifting collection of richly detailed and deeply expressive electronic miniatures, Dew Point Harmonics is both a testament to the mysteries of transformation and an invitation to get lost in the wilderness of your own imagination.

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We’ve always been careful not to call Balmat an ambient label, because we like having the freedom to move, to drift, to morph. But with our 11th release, we turn our ears—proudly, blissfully—to a strain of ambient at its most timeless. The appropriately titled Dreams & Whispers comes from Warsaw’s Bartosz Kruczynski, who has recorded under a number of guises, Earth Trax, as well as his own name. Over the years, he’s touched upon deep house, breakbeats, acid, techno, electro, IDM, and more; often, the throughline running through a given album is simply the refusal to remain in any one place for long—well, that, and his unusually nuanced ear for harmony and texture.

Those qualities come to the fore on Dreams & Whispers, which might be the most focused encapsulation of Kruczynski’s atmospheric sensibilities to date.. Across 14 stripped-down tracks for shimmer and pulse, Kruczynski evokes overlapping styles in ambient—warm vibraphones, taut arps, massing strings, lonesome delay chains —but always with his own twist. Fitting the album’s title, the album is loosely divided into two distinct moods: The A-side, “Dreams,” is charged with subtle movement, rhythms spreading out like rings around skipped stones, while the B-side, “Whispers,” plunges into a zone of shadows and hush. The two complementary moods flow into one another like the faces of a Moebius strip, yielding an album that’s intuitively shaped and rich in emotion.

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Panoram makes soundtracks for daydreams gone sideways. Picture the scene: an afternoon nap with the television on, quietly, in the corner; snatches of conversation drift in through the open window. Wandering, half-formed thoughts take unexpected detours; before you know it, there’s a movie playing out against closed lids, the colors bright, the characters unfamiliar. Accidental rhythms, incidental melodies, imitations of life, messages in code.

Across 17 fragmentary, sketch-like tracks, Panoram carves a labyrinthine path in which nothing is what it seems: a fantasy world of breathy vox pads, faux guitar, detuned synths, bursts of flute and orchestral percussion, and even the occasional cheeky cartoon sample. It’s chillout music with a chilly edge, ambient with a darkly ironic undertone. (The briefest glance at your news outlet of choice should be enough to confirm that the title—Great Times—ought to be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism.)

Panoram has been making music under his principal alias for more than a decade now, releasing albums on labels like Firecracker, Running Back, and his own Wandering Eye. (He has also performed and recorded with Amen Dunes, and has co-production credits on Amen Dunes’ forthcoming Sub Pop album Death Jokes.) Panoram’s output has ranged widely, taking in abstract pop, classical composition, twisted takes on library music, and cyborg funk. One record of “bio-acoustic transmissions” came with a cannabis leaf pressed in clear wax; his 2021 album Pianosequenza Vol. 1 gathers his experiments on the Yamaha Disklavier. But Great Times offers the truest picture yet of a project that has never been easy to pin down.

Loath to overshare details about his personal life, Panoram instead lets the music do the talking, using his cryptic tracks to express the slipperiest sorts of ideas—the thoughts that take root where anxiety, distraction, and the most fleeting traces of grace commingle. Panoram’s approach flies in the face of contemporary ambient orthodoxy, with its emphasis on immersion and uplift. Great Times expresses something thornier, more difficult to translate, yet also more tantalizing to contend with. Its 17 tracks offer a chance to get lost—and an invitation to remain in the maze as long as you like.

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Coral Morphologic and Nick León’s Projections of a Coral City marks a series of collisions between distant
worlds: the organic and the artificial, the Eocene and the Anthropocene, sea and cement—and even, perhaps, ambient music and activism.

Coral Morphologic are the Miami duo of marine biologist Colin Foord and musician J.D. McKay; since 2007, they have used a variety of multimedia projects to generate environmental awareness of marine biodiversity—most notably Coral City Camera, an underwater webcam streaming live from an urban reef ecosystem in PortMiami.

Their citymate Nick León is a linchpin of South Florida’s contemporary leftfield electronic scene, with releases for Tra Tra Trax, Future Times, and NAAFI, and credits on records by Rosalía, GAIKA, and Iceboy Violet, among others.

This collaborative project dates back to 2022, when Coral Morphologic mounted a monumental projection-
mapping installation on Biscayne Boulevard. For five nights in late November and early December, macroscopic films of corals played out across the exterior of Knight Concert Hall. The installation was, on the one hand, a glimpse into a possible future, imagining how the city’s skyline might appear if unchecked global warming and rising seas led coral reefs to colonize the built environment. But it also represented a look back into the deep past, a reminder that Miami is literally built from marine limestone mined from the Everglades. Its concrete foundations began life, eons ago, as a marine ecosystem—the same ecosystem that may one day reclaim them. As above, so below.

As an album, Projections of a Coral City is a suite of interconnected movements spread across two sides of vinyl. The tones are watery, the mood elegiac, the colors a washed-out pastel. Forms that appear static on the surface gradually open up to reveal hidden depths teeming with microscopic movement. You might detect resonances with other aquatically minded works—Jürgen Müller’s Science of the Sea, Harold Budd’s liquid piano compositions, even the slow-moving melancholy of Dr. Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale. But ultimately Projections of a Coral City creates the impression of a world unto itself—a hauntingly beautiful space at the meeting point between sorrow and hope.

——-
Balmat is a label with a cloudy outline. Jointly shepherded by Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne, two friends living in Cardedeu, Catalonia, and on the Balearic island of Menorca, Balmat grew out of Lapsus Radio, a weekly show born almost ten years ago. Balmat’s mission is simple: to foster new ideas, expand upon personal obsessions, and put enveloping sounds out into the world.

“Balmat” means “empty” or “void” in Catalan. But quite apart from any negative connotations, we prefer to think of it in terms of possibility: a space waiting to be filled.

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Yellow Vinyl Repress!

When we established Balmat in 2021, neither of us could have imagined that within two years, we’d be putting out an album by one of our musical heroes: Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq. The British producer has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs µ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment.

Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them µ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s—coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N’ Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label—and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forwardlooking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album’s title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early ’90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles.

There’s no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more selfaware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like µ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas’ first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light.

Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones (“Marmite”), horror-film themes (“Belt & Carpet”), jungle breaks (“Mesolithic Jungle”), and even house music (“Houzz 13”), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never—to our ears, anyway— feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. We hope you feel the same.

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Balmat co-founders Philip Sherburne and Albert Salinas have been fans of Shy Layers’ lilting, Balearic pop for years, so when Shy Layers’ JD Walsh asked us to listen to a set of demos he was working up with fellow Atlanta multi-instrumentalist Jeff Crompton, we jumped at the chance. And once we heard their work in progress, the decision was almost immediate: We have to release this.

Together, Walsh and Crompton are Anagrams, and their debut album together, Blue Voices, might initially seem like a departure from Balmat’s habitually electronic terrain. It’s not ambient music, but it’s also not not ambient music, at least to listeners in the right frame of mind. The two musicians, who met when Walsh moved from Brooklyn to Atlanta in 2016 and began collaborating a few years later, see the music in similarly ambiguous terms. “I like it because it’s not jazz,” jokes Crompton, a veteran and credentialed jazz player. “And JD likes it because it’s jazz.”

Crompton is a musician (and former high-school band teacher) with deep roots in Georgia’s improvised and experimental music scenes; his credits include shows with Eugene Chadbourne, a guest appearance with Godspeed You! Black Emperor, and a collaboration with Duet for Theremin and Lap Steel’s 12-hour drone performance at Knoxville’s Big Ears. On Blue Voices he plays alto and tenor saxophone, clarinet, electric piano, and organ. Walsh has been releasing music as Shy Layers since 2015, when he started self-releasing on Bandcamp; the following year, Germany’s Growing Bin packaged his first two EPs as a self-titled album, and in 2018, Tim Sweeney’s Beats in Space label put out Shy Layers’ sophomore album, Midnight Marker. Where those records channeled Walsh’s playful harmonic instincts into wistful songwriting with tropical overtones, on Blue Voices he lets his experimental tendencies take the lead. Playing acoustic and electric guitars, electric lap steel, bass, Moog Matriarch, modular synth, and programmed drums, he concentrates his energies on richly textural layers and abstract assemblages of tone color.

Across the album’s 11 tracks, there are faint echoes of familiar touchstones: the atmospheric twang of Daniel Lanois’ pedal steel on Apollo: Atmospheres and Soundtracks; the mercurial modal runs of Ethio- jazz; the late-summer calm of Fuubutsushi; the versatility of players and composers like Patrick Shiroishi and Sam Gendel, who are asking similar questions about where jazz ends and some other, nameless territory begins. Mostly, though, what Blue Voices captures is the quixotic sound of two restless musical imaginations making it up as they go along, two voices discovering a shared language in a hitherto unexplored shade of blue.

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Minor Science—aka UK-born, Berlin-based musician Angus Finlayson—makes his Balmat debut with Absent Friends Vol. III, the third installment in a shape-shifting series across a variety of formats and platforms. And with it, he pushes forward his vision of ambient music as neither static vista or merely mood-setting atmosphere, but rather a dynamic matrix of textures, sensations, and even rhythms.

The first two Absent Friends—a 2014 set for Blowing Up the Workshop, and a 2017 cassette and web player for Whities (now AD93)—were hybrid affairs, part DJ mix and part collage, mostly featuring music made by other people. Then, in 2020-21, Finlayson developed the project into a live show of his own material. Armed with hundreds of bespoke stems created in his studio—idiosyncratic FX chains, feedback loops through cheap rack gear, heavily post-processed field recordings, found voices, etc.—he would improvise on four CDJs, mixer, FX, and live synths, extending techniques he learned as a club DJ into a live context, accompanied by visuals by Stockholm-based artist Paul Witherden.

Absent Friends Vol. III is an album of studio versions of the music developed for the live show. But in Minor Science’s world, even a category as simple as “studio versions” is slightly opaque. “Most of these tracks weren’t ‘composed’ in the studio,” Finlayson explains: “The sounds started out as stems and source material for the live show, and might not have been intended to go together—but then through performance, they settled into shapes that worked. I then recreated those performances in the studio.” That organic process of ideation and realization might help explain the unusual coherence of the album, in which sounds and textures flow seamlessly from one to the next, sometimes seeming to stand still, and sometimes looping back. There are virtually no melodies, few recognizable motifs or riffs, yet the eight-track album nevertheless moves with a distinctive logic and a determined sense of purpose, from the frozen-in-time shimmer of the opening “Introduction” through the early cuts’ studies of space and light; from the seemingly autobiographical “Summer Diary” through the rushing trance (yes, trance) arpeggios of “Contingency” and on to the dulcet denouement of the closing “Gather Your Party (Dispersed Mix).”

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Ylia—aka Susana Hernández—had a remarkably productive 2020. In addition to releasing her debut album, Dulce Rendición, on Barcelona’s Paralaxe Editions, she penned compilation tracks for Lapsus Records, Hivern Discs, and Super Utu/Stars on Earth.

But professional success can be deceiving: The following year was, personally speaking, terrible. Her grandfather died. Her father died. Her cat died. And she ended a relationship. “That’s a lot of things all at once, no?” she says.

Her second album, Ame Agaru, is not necessarily a record of that year, but it is, she says, a response to those life events—a record of grief.

The new album is clearly a continuation of the ambient investigations of Ylia’s debut, but it differs in key ways. Where Dulce Rendición was exploratory and faintly cosmic, Ame Agaru—a Japanese phrase meaning, roughly, “the rain lifts”— captures a melancholy sense of stillness. And where her debut was largely electronic, on the new album, Ylia has folded in a number of acoustic elements, even when they are not recognizable as such. Her partner, Alejandro Lévar, lends fingerpicked acoustic guitar to the glowing dronescapes of “Todos los Cuerpos”; multi-instrumentalist and bandleader Tete Leal adds flutes, clarinet, and soprano saxophone to “Ame Agari”—or “after the rain”—which opens the album with a moment of contemplative calm, the kind that follows an extended deluge.

One track, the dub techno-influenced “Flowers in June,” grew out of Ylia’s live sets, but the rest are the fruit of improvisational sessions at home in Málaga, five minutes from the beach—jamming and then refining, searching for the ideal expression of a feeling as it was first captured. Searching for the spontaneity behind the stillness. In places, Ylia even incorporates piano, an instrument she has played since she was 10, yet has never included on one of her recordings before. For the most part on Ame Agaru, she seeks ways to fuse piano with synthesizers and electronic processes. But on the closing track, “El Único Adiós Posible,” she leaves us alone with the instrument in all its stark, unadorned beauty. It is a profoundly moving conclusion to an album defined by its economy of means and purity of expression: a cycle

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When we established Balmat in 2021, neither of us could have imagined that within two years, we’d be putting out an album by one of our musical heroes: Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq. The British producer has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs µ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment.

Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them µ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s—coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N’ Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label—and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forwardlooking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album’s title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early ’90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles.

There’s no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more selfaware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like µ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas’ first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light.

Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones (“Marmite”), horror-film themes (“Belt & Carpet”), jungle breaks (“Mesolithic Jungle”), and even house music (“Houzz 13”), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never—to our ears, anyway— feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. We hope you feel the same.

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CD!

When we established Balmat in 2021, neither of us could have imagined that within two years, we’d be putting out an album by one of our musical heroes: Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq. The British producer has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs µ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment.

Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them µ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s—coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N’ Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label—and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forwardlooking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album’s title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early ’90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles.

There’s no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more selfaware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like µ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas’ first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light.

Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones (“Marmite”), horror-film themes (“Belt & Carpet”), jungle breaks (“Mesolithic Jungle”), and even house music (“Houzz 13”), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never—to our ears, anyway— feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. We hope you feel the same.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
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Germany
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When we established Balmat in 2021, neither of us could have imagined that within two years, we’d be putting out an album by one of our musical heroes: Mike Paradinas, aka µ-Ziq. The British producer has been an inspiration to label co-founders Albert Salinas and Philip Sherburne since the 1990s. In fact, his album-length remix project The Auteurs Vs µ-Ziq was one of the very first pieces of electronic music that Philip bought, way back in 1994. To have the opportunity to release his music now feels like a real full-circle moment.

Paradinas, of course, needs no introduction. Under a slew of aliases, chief among them µ-Ziq, the British artist revolutionized leftfield electronic music in the 1990s—coincidentally, this year marks the 30th anniversary of his debut album, Tango N’ Vectif, for his friend and sometime collaborator Aphex Twin’s Rephlex label—and his label Planet Mu has built up a formidable catalog of visionary, forwardlooking records, mapping virtually every corner of the electronic spectrum. With 1977, he turns the clock backward in a sense, and not just with the album’s title: Rooted in classic ambient and electronic sounds, these 15 tracks evoke the anything-goes spirit of the early ’90s, before the tools and tropes had calcified into cut-and-dried styles.

There’s no shortage of familiar sounds on 1977. There are echoes of raves and chillout rooms and transmissions from the fringes of techno; there are detuned synths and glistening reverb tails and, above all, gauzy vox pads, the eerie glue that holds it all together. The title, he says, is meant to invoke a general sense of nostalgia, bookmarking a year in his boyhood when he became more selfaware. More than anything, 1977 sounds like µ-Ziq distilled: Stripped of his signature breakbeats and customary chaos, Paradinas’ first-ever strictly (well, mostly) ambient album presents the essence of his music in a whole new light.

Along the way Paradinas touches on dark-ambient drones (“Marmite”), horror-film themes (“Belt & Carpet”), jungle breaks (“Mesolithic Jungle”), and even house music (“Houzz 13”), which marks the first bona fide dance-floor moment on Balmat to date). Yet the album never—to our ears, anyway— feels expressly retro. Rather, Paradinas plucks timeless sounds out of the ether and gives them a gentle tap, spinning them into unexpected new orbits. At times, 1977 feels like an experience of extended déjà vu: When we first listened to it, we had the sense that we already knew this music. It was as though we had heard it years ago, perhaps on a battered cassette tape lent to us by a friend, and been searching for it ever since. We hope you feel the same.

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Pop Sensation - A groovy and sensual rhythm for a laid back evening with spring reverb Fender guitar and space echo Moog as featured guests.

Sounds In The Night - Walking at night into the city after the rain when every sound seems to reverberate on the wet concrete. Modulating guitar over ambient dark jazz and noir.

A - Pop Sensation
B - Sounds In The Night

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Repress!

Vinyl LP presented in a deluxe edition with printed innersleeve and a special transparent obi strip; the cover is also printed internally. Hand numbered.

Making music is trying to start over again every time. It’s a matter of questioning and approaching. It’s never settling for the sound that fills the world around. It’s looking for a door in the sky. And maybe find it, open it, go beyond it. Rod Modell and Gigi Masin, this time together, are offering each other vibrations and insights. The former lives between two lakes, the latter between the Venetian lagoon and the sea. Everyone on their own shore, building electronic bridges in semi-darkness to allow us to cross too.

No words would be needed to explain this work... It is the meeting of two people, an exchange of different points of view. A way to meet and then break up. Rod has reworked a piece of Gigi making it his own... and so did Gigi with a piece of Rod. A magnificent intersection of sounds and thoughts... remaining suspended to watch the passing of time, to listen to the noises and silences of life that passes inexorably around us.

Track 1: RED HAIR GIRL AT THE BUS STOP 19'31"
Track 2: SUMMER MORNING AT LIGHTHOUSE BEACH 15'43"

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After more than 45 years forgotten in the personal archives of Jean Schwarz, Transversales Disques is very happy to release this previously unpublished recording which brings together the great Don Cherry and his friend, composer Jean Schwarz, pioneer in electro-acoustic music and member of G.R.M.
This concert was recorded in 1977 at the Paris MIX festival (Théatre Récamier) organised by G.R.M and hosted by director François Bayle. An elegant mix of spiritual jazz and electronic sounds around this astounding quintet made up of JF Jenny Clark, Nana Vasconcelos and Michel Portal.
Remastered from the original master tapes. Exclusive pictures and liner notes

A1 - Intro
A2 - Doussn' Gouni - Part 1
A3 - Doussn' Gouni - Part 2
A4 - Bells One
B1 - BellsTwo
B2 - Berimbau
B3 - Whistles
B4 - Theme 1
B5 - Bando
B6 - Tribute to Ornette

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Volume 2! MUNIR aka MIDNIGHT RUNNERS on his 5th drop with STAR CREATURE, hits us again with some diggin' deep dug ups from his corner of the world. This one picks up where his TUGBOAT EDITS VOL 14, HAUNTING ECHOES and NUSANTARA VOL 1 left off. Tidal waves of jazz funk, space disco & boogie.

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The string of Cómeme releases in its 14th year of existence does not stop! We are back with an artist whose tracks you’ve been hearing in the sets of the most free spirited and forward thinking DJs: None other than Bufiman has joined the catalog of Cómeme with a fantastic release: original,modern, and irresistibly danceable. 5 tracks featuring B- Boy Rhythms, outer space fantasy and dance floor utopia – in a way you’ve never heard this exceptional artist before. Since 15 years he’s a resident at Düsseldorf’s legendary “Salon des Amateurs” and has released on other wonderful labels such as Versatile,Safe Trip Records, Dekmantel Records and Fasaan Recordings – and under his other alias “Wolf Müller” on Themes for Great Cities, Growing Bin Records and International Feel. Due to living in a small flat with too many neighbors, childhood Jan could not pursue his dream of playing the drums, so he started to work with drum breaks on a program on Windows 95. Since around 25 years he’s now collecting drum samples, however you won’t hear any of these on this record. During the pandemic, Bufiman had to change his approach. Unable to work, due to the ban of all dance events he found a job opportunity as a night shift caregiver in a small town near Düsseldorf. This meant that he had to sit in a bus for at least three hours a day. To kill time somehow, he took out his Nintendo Switch portable game console and stumbled across Korg Gadget: a modern music program that he never particularly liked.The many hours on the back seats of the bus changed his relationship with the app as it was his only way of shortening the hours of commuting. The “Switch Beats” EP is the result of this particular time in his life, and once again we see that marvelous things can happen, when your ways of creating are challenged in an unprecedented manner. Let’s ride...

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‘Fog’ is one of most obscure and dark italo instrumental works done in 1984 late at night in Riccardo Cioni’s garage/studio by his trusty Stephen Head experimenting on PPG Wave 2.2, Linn 9000 and Phophet 5.

Mondo Groove release this 12? 45rpm involving 4 key figures of analog electro: Morgan Geist (Metro Area), Tiger & Woods, N.O.I.A. and Daniele Baldelli.

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Four years after Nuova Napoli, Nu Genea are back with Bar Mediterraneo, a new album and journey, which projects the
sounds of the Neapolitan duo formed by Massimo Di Lena and Lucio Aquilina even further.
Nu Genea's Bar Mediterraneo is an idea of a shared place where people meet and fuse together; a space that leaves its
doors open to travellers and their lives, always exposed to the whims of fate. Some of this can be experienced through the
multitude of sounds that come together in the tracks, layers of different acoustic instruments, voices and synthesizers
merging in a unique musical blend.
Opening up to the voices of many different people, separated by languages but united by the sea and the music, Nu
Genea's hometown, Napoli, becomes a true place of encounter.
You can hear this all along. In "Gelbi", a gorgeously deep and propulsive Ney flute plunges into murky waters of the
melancholic Tunisian dialect sung by Marzouk Mejri. In "Marechia'", unbridled happiness and sun ooze from the delicate
vocals of Célia Kameni and create an acrobatic bridge between French and Neapolitan language. In "Straniero", your
soul is arrested from the moment the slow spell-binding mandolin ignites the hypnotic patterns recorded by the legendary
Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen. In "Bar Mediterraneo", the title track, bittersweet guitar’s riffs, analog waves and choirs are
overwhelming the song giving you what you would like to hear on a boat trip along the Amalfi Coast.
Nu Genea couldn't afford to overlook their firmly anchored roots into the Neapolitan culture and its dialect with "Tienaté",
where the power of neapolitan language (interpreted by Fabiana Martone) supports those quarter-tone strings and the
uncessant folk-disco groove that spreads to the entire song. In "Praja Magia", repetitive mandolin riffs lead the song,
giving space to a choral yet tight vocal line that speaks of Varcaturo, a village close to Napoli. In "Rire", a volley of poetic,
deceptively laidback, lyrical fury interpreted by Sicilian Marco Castello intimately combines with a highly musical, multitextured
instrumental backbone and the swoon of a chanson in its heart. In "La Crisi'', the lyrics of a Raffaele Viviani’s
poem from 1930 have been adapted to a laidback jazz-funk groove in full NG style. In "Vesuvio", revaluing the evocative
verses and powerful mantra of Vesuvio, Nu Genea re-adapted to the dancefloor a folk song by the working-class band E’
Zezi from Pomigliano D'Arco, combining the voices of a school choir with Jupiter-6 arpeggios and bold percussions.
Bar Mediterraneo is the place where people constantly return to transform curiosity into participation, tradition into
sharing, unfamiliar into familiar. When travellers come through its “doors”, carrying their treasures of words and emotions,
they aren’t strangers any more. They take part in a shared experience, enriching themselves and others by leading to
unexpected musical journeys.

TRACKLIST:

A1. Bar Mediterraneo
A2. Tienaté
A3. Gelbi (with Marzouk Mejri)
A4. Marechià (with Célia Kameni)
A5. Straniero
B1. Praja Magia
B2. Vesuvio
B3. Rire
B4. La Crisi

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Following up their initial Warning debut with a split single in 2020, we are pleased to welcome back the fierce combination of Sansibar and Reptant on Warning. For our annual 7” release we invited them to remix each others track in celebration of the friendship that connects us.

On the remix of Lizard Of Oz we got Sansibar adding a catchy vocal sample and shifting the psychedelic electro vibe into some more clubby realms. Reptant on the other side treating the subtile original of My Boom with his signature deep and pervasive production style. The result of those young geniuses coming together again is a thrilling spectacle for any lover of contemporary electro sound.

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Tracklist:

1.Yegle Nesh (Live)
2.Tizita (Live)
3.Belew Beduby (Live)
4.Anchihoye Lene (Live)
5.Abichu Nega Nega (Live)
6.Yetewat Hil (Live)

It’s been a little over ten years since Hailu Mergia re-emerged on the international music scene. Following the first in a series of his classic recordings reissued in collaboration with Awesome Tapes From Africa, Mergia assembled a band and began performing live again after many years driving a cab in Washington, DC. His first show back appeared on the front page of the New York Times along with a stellar review and he took off from there performing his flavor of Ethiopian jazz all over the world in the years since, including Radio City Music Hall and Montreal Jazz Festival.

Finally, we have a recorded document of the keyboard player’s powerful DC-based trio—which practices each weekend in his basement—featuring Kenneth Joseph on drums and Alemseged Kebede on bass. Beautifully captured at one of their fiery live shows at the venerable Brooklyn non-profit cultural center Pioneer Works on July 1, 2016, the concert was recorded by PW staff and mixed by Ted Young with mastering by ATFA’s expert audio extraction collaborator Jessica Thompson. The performance clarifies what many people across the globe already know: in his fifth decade of music-making Hailu Mergia continues to push the boundaries of his remarkable abilities.

Mergia and his veteran band energetically and playfully unpeel layer after layer of harmonic and rhythmic interest out of a spectrum of Ethiopian repertoire. Modern jazz demands constant reinvention and improvisation, night after night creating new works out of known modes and classic standards. This band is unstoppable when it comes to turning age-old melodies (like “Tizita” or “Anchihoye Lene”) upside down and inside out until they emerge as molten new works, often spontaneously. Mergia’s original compositions (like “Yegle Nesh”) shine brighter than ever here as well. Moving from keyboard to organ to accordion to melodica, he deftly switches instruments—often during the same song. Mergia at 77 years old seems to be working harder than musicians half his age.

"Pioneer Works Swing (Live)" brings into focus the kind of onstage group improvisation and deadly solo passages that reach for places Mergia and the band have never gone, on festival and club stages across four continents.

Now that Mergia has released two new recordings along with four classic reissues, he is eager to let everyone hear what he’s been doing on the road since he re-took the global stage for his victory laps. So much more than an old act from yesteryear, Mergia balances his legendary Ethiopian recordings with good old-fashioned sweat-soaked live concert triumphs such as the one we have here.

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It’s been a quiet couple of years for Posthuman’s I Love Acid series, but it’s back with the first of three 12”s to see out 2023. ILA027 comes from Australian hardware wizard Dylab. Three tracks of 3am heads-down-in-the-haze chugging acid DJ tools, with a remix from Vault Wax label head Beyun. As always, out on just 303 copies of hand-stamped and numbered heavyweight 180 gram wax, in a stamped card sleeve. No digital. No represses.

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