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

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

DJ Support: Gilles Peterson and Lauren Laverne on 6Music, with club play from the likes of Axel Boman, Peter Kruder and Erol Alkan.

Photay drops epic acid breakbeat magic on ALWAYS COSMIC. The A-side features his remix of United Freedom Collective’s ‘Always Open’ (featuring the vocal talents of Falle Nioke) in both original and instrumental form. With early plays by Gilles Peterson & Lauren Laverne, the hype around this incredible track is building for good reason. There is an exceptional combination at play: slick, detailed, hifi dance production with powerful, prodigious talent on the drums – we call it ‘the PHOTAY advantage.’ The B-side brings expansive cosmic dub versions, the first track derived from the Always Open session, the second from Photay’s recent remix for Conclave & Toribio. Deep, emotional stuff that doesn’t lose track of fun-factor with sheer, un-fakeable excitement in the rhythm section!

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

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

Recorded at the Philharmonie de Paris and one and a half years after releasing his magnum opus "Music For Animals"—described by PopMatters as “a musical waterfall of monumental proportions”—Nils Frahm shares a new live album, due for release by his LEITER label on December 6. In what’s becoming a tradition, it follows 2013’s "Spaces", a Pitchfork Album of the Year taped at shows over the preceding 18 months, and 2020’s "Tripping With Nils Frahm", also released as a film. "Paris", nonetheless, is Frahm’s first live album from a single night, March 21, 2024, and contains ten tracks over a running time of 84 minutes.

Frahm’s performances have always been known for expanding upon his studio recordings, and "Paris" is no exception. Drawing on his substantial catalogue, the German composer and producer reworks tracks from various albums, and also adds the brand new, luxurious and strangely gripping ‘Opera’ to the track list.

If he leaves the stage to the same uproarious jubilation with which he was initially greeted, "Paris" makes it clear why he’s been so in demand. He’s been booked, frequently for multiple nights, at halls around the world, including Sydney’s Opera House, London’s Barbican and LA’s Orpheum Theatre. Indeed, the LA Times wrote, “Watching him at work, and hearing the audience react, is a little like watching an athlete at the top of his game.” Expect nothing less from Nils Frahm on "Paris", a vital document of this ingenious, gifted musician’s endless pursuit of fresh perspectives.

All tracks written, produced and mixed by Nils Frahm.
Mastered by Zino Mikorey, recorded by Terence Goodchild.
Vinyl cut by Andreas Kauffelt at Schnittstelle.

All tracks published by Manners McDade Music Publishing Ltd.
Cover artwork and design by Studio Torsten Posselt.

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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
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Following on from 2016’s Doing It In Lagos: Boogie, Pop & Disco in 1980s Nigeria, Soundway Records return to that blistering set for the first and only officially licensed re-issue of the highly coveted debut album from Steve Monite, featuring the single ‘Only You’ that recently seeped its way into popular culture. Lovingly restored and remastered on 180g vinyl with liner notes.

Shooting, space-synth sounds ripple and vibrate, incessant grooves keep the tracks in motion and Nkono Teles production, a producer often overlooked for his hand in the Nigerian boogie sound, sets the LP into orbit. An album that was largely overlooked on release in 1984, the track list includes the latter day hit ‘Only You’ and ‘Things Fall Apart’, the melody of which was lifted for Young Franco’s 2020 single ‘Fallin’ Apart’.

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WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
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Rival Consoles has been concurrently in the foreground and background of electronic music since the late 00s; conjuring tense melancholia for Black Mirror soundtracks, playing in front of 10,000 dance fans at Drumsheds, selling out London’s Barbican Hall, and logging an expansive, wandering collection of synth-sculpted albums that explore a myriad different styles and aesthetics—but always with human emotion as their lodestar. Landscape from Memory, the ninth studio LP from the UK producer and musician born Ryan Lee West, finally blossomed following a frustrating fallow year away from the production desk. For West, having spent the past decade producing and writing in a habitual way, falling out of love with creativity meant a slowing of the clock that makes him tick, a sense of being swallowed whole by some elementary force. However, the time out also made room for his most invigorating record yet.

Partly stitched together from a scrapbook of discarded audio snippets, Landscape from Memory demanded a degree of openness and vulnerability in its assembly. “There is a kind of strange beauty to it because it involves the past, present and future in a very strong way,” offers the Erased Tapes mainstay. He set to work massaging melodic kernels into full tracks, like the skippy, haunted club shuffle of memory-jogging lead single ‘Catherine’, which is dedicated to his partner. “It’s extremely open, just a naked melody on drums, so exposed as an idea… I think because she was so excited by it, I was like, ‘Oh, yeah, I'm excited too, actually, I just didn't realise,” he reflects.

Appropriately, the title track became the first piece of music that made West “feel an emotional reaction after a long time of having zero reaction”—closing the record transcendently in a fever dream of euphoric synthwave—although ‘Catherine’ can be understood as the spark that lit the fuse, bristling with energetic joy. Similarly, ‘Known Shape’ makes a play for an otherworldly dancefloor, melding a loping drum pattern to a twitchy soundscape. Granted, some of the standout moments of the LP can be found lurking in its weirder, wilder corners, from the broken-sounding synth that runs like a rough river through ‘2 Forms’, to the head-nodding, disembodied bounce of uncanny valley bop ‘In a Trance’. “I remember making that in a New York hotel room, starting it, when Robert (Raths, Erased Tapes founder) was doing something on his phone and I was just being annoying in the background,” recalls West of one of several pieces made on the road. Yet Raths expressed his excitement about the track as he was hooked instantly.

“I like music that has a sense of momentum, really pushing forward,” he adds of the ‘Landscape from Memory’ ice-breaker. “And it just instantly has that from the first breath. So I kind of like moments like that when they appear.”

These climatic productions are characterised by their propulsive quality, and driven by West’s own push to step outside his comfort zone, having found inspiration flowing from new and unfamiliar sources. After his self-built Hackney studio suddenly felt too controlled of an environment, West altered course, mapping out tracks away from his desk. To that end, Landscape from Memory is a travelogue of creativity on the move, a collection of postcards from everywhere, and an album defined by its restlessness.

Just like the record itself sprang from conflicting emotions, bliss and dread tussle audibly for dominance throughout. You can hear this tug-of-war in the radiant swell of ‘Nocturne’, an eerie, reverb-drenched meander through classical tones, or the warm piano figures that collide with percussive crunch on ‘If Not Now’. Away from the music, this essence resides in a grainy film photo that in West’s eyes holds the record’s emotional DNA: a serene vista of tall green trees that hide the roaring A12 road beneath this studio. “I just think it’s quite evocative because even though it was an alarming place, it also looks really comforting at the same time,” he muses.

This dichotomy flourishes in that sweet spot between knotty ambient and widescreen electronica, where environmental tones and electro-acoustic textures converge to create a living document of sound. On Landscape from Memory, sonic touches hint at something intimate and familiar: cracking ice, the buzzing of a fridge, the distant hum of the motorway. Investing more time with the acoustic guitar in the initial stages helped West convey this homespun quality. For instance, on ‘In Reverse’, gossamer melodies are layered to create “a tapestry of guitar parts” while ‘Gaivotas’, which was born out of a residency at Lisbon’s synth hotspot Patch Point last February, contrasts “extremely digital synths” with a cheap acoustic guitar that snakes through dense, rhythmic terrain.

“A lot of things that go on in the music are like a guitarist's perspective of treating sounds,” he offers, explaining that much of the record involved “crudely recording” ideas into a laptop microphone. “I just like the honesty of it,” he says of the guitar, also pointing to the record’s additional array of “unusual recording techniques.” Among these, drums were placed on the sofa to create the muffled, deadened sensation on ‘Coda’, where a woozy shoegaze fog and angel sighs build into a jumpy, organic groove. Or ‘Tape Loop’, which “importantly, was recorded with a microphone. So not only does it slow down the music, but also the dimensions of the room the microphone picks up changes,” he explains.

Growing up, West would often mess around with the materials on his parents’ land in the small town of Syston outside of Leicester, hammering nails into wood and “sawing stuff,” which ignited a strong curiosity for making and materials from childhood. He soon found his way into music, starting on the guitar before teaching himself digital production and going on to study music technology at Leicester’s De Montfort University. He later became the first signee to the nascent London label Erased Tapes in 2007, establishing the label's shorthand for exploratory post-minimalism. IO, his debut album as Rival Consoles, came out in 2009, while his output has since evolved across nearly two decades of activity, from the critically acclaimed 2018 offering Persona to Landscape from Memory’s 2022 predecessor, Now Is.

As a multidisciplinary artist he has always been passionate about imagery and how it relates to and inspires music. His 2020 record Articulation was informed by drawings he made in his sketchbook. He has also been experimenting in various motion media, from programming particle animations in Max MSP to filming and editing daily video clips, and manipulating imagery in Touchdesigner or Blender, which would shape the visual counterpart in his live A/V shows since 2015.

As Rival Consoles, West’s calling card is his ability to channel hope, pain, sadness, and euphoria in one fell swoop, twisting the key in the lock of his internal world and telling stories without words. Crucially, Landscape from Memory is as much about zooming in on the details as it is about seeing past the horizon. Like a saturated photograph or an abstract painting daubed with bright splotches, Landscape from Memory is a riot of colour, an album blazing with a sound-shaper’s renewed love for his craft.

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

2026 repress

Tracklisting
A1 Ignez - White Rose
A2 Ignez - Satindancer
B1 Ignez - Immersion
B2 Ignez - Skies We Share

Sales Note
I am back on Somov with 4 recordings showcasing my sound. A dimension where thought does not exist, and I reflect back on all the beautiful moments these tracks hold on the dance floor. Love.

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

Sa Pa launches Dub Techno For Life: a dedicated outlet for the artist’s more dancefloor-focused material - work that has largely sat outside the conceptual frame of his previous releases.

The label’s first release, Girls on Tour EP, opens with “Mokira Ultra Dub”, a 10-minute club rework of Mokira classic “Manipulation Musik”. Originally produced alongside an ambient version commissioned for Kontra Musik’s 2016 Kontra X compilation, the dancefloor mix was ultimately shelved until now. With Andreas ‘Mokira’ Tilliander’s blessing, it finally surfaces as a standalone Sa Pa production. A track too banging to go unreleased.

“Waiting For You” traces back to Sa Pa’s orbit around the giegling ecosystem via FORUM. Once lined up for an official release on the parent label before plans stalled, the track slipped into the archives. Buoyant and disarmingly pop by Sa Pa standards, it finds its place here as the A2 - tuned to the collective memory of mid-2010s German house music.

Harnessing the spirit of Chain Reaction from the abandoned patches and borrowed machines of a rainy night’s recording in Taipei, the B-side’s “Modular System” captures a late-night, one-take modular jam. A broken yet hopeful “World Saving Banger” closes the EP with some raw and IDM-leaning force, showcasing Sa Pa’s new label - and the Girls On Tour EP - as a space for neo dub techno ideals to take shape.

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