Seven suites of deep and sprawling sonic meditations built around ‘call and response’ improv sessions between Randy Raine-Reusch and Michael Red.

Slow and tempered recordings of Asian flutes, African harps, temple gongs and a myriad of obscure instruments from Randy Raine-Reusch's deep collection mutate and ebb into swirling gossamers of tone. Sonic incantations stretched and magnified further by Red's Sends. An otherworldly play between light and shadow worlds; at times idyllic and light-filled, at times dark and eerie– all engrossing. Dream-reality reconciliations weave between the spectral world of Michael Red's sound processes and the direct physicality of Raine-Reusch's playing. The tension across the pieces builds between the live playing and processing techniques, dutifully revealing a growing familiarity with collective transcendence through sound (bigger than the sum of its parts). Real-time interactive dream music.

Initially realized over the course of a few days in Randy’s instrument museum in Vancouver BC [December, 2014] 'ERAS' is made up of processed, and sometimes multi tracked, improvisations between Randy and Michael. Through these sessions Randy would choose instruments he sensed possibilities within, and Michael then revealed and sculpted these possibilities. Both resonating, sensing sonic structures, environmental nuances, and further worlds in each other’s art, all within the moment. Being present for each other, they acted on instinct, trusting a first thought, trusting each other; committing, responding to that commitment, then mutating and letting go. Always moving forward, synthesizing and letting the living moment lead the way.

The recordings were left to distill and mature for many years before the composers felt it was ready. With minimal judicious edits and a very light dusting of FXs, both careful to preserve the direct and intuitive process that permeates the recording, ERAS now emerges.

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Total Annihilation Beach is the latest collection from Caveman LSD, one of the handful of monikers of Special Guest DJ / uon / sometimes just shy. Their releases under this name have always had the character of sonic transmissions – crushed sine-waves hurtling out of a wormhole, remote pirate radio bandwidths, whale-song picked up on radar, and so on. Here, the signal seems to come from a place whose remoteness is not defined by distance, but adjacency: these are alternate reality bops.

What does it sound like? Kind of solarpunk, but dirty; not at all an artifact from a hopeless culture. Percussion at the forefront; warm timbres and tones – never have I heard this producer play with tabla and tambourine loops as they do in “Lost Hours,” the opening track of the EP. The buildup holds tension and dynamics tight, with a vocoder-smoothed moan – sampled from the caveman’s own voice, on the low – alternating between two notes; when the beat decompresses for the first time two and a half minutes in, one hears the amorphous and cavernous pads we know so well from shy. “Bottle Service Angels” picks up with another acoustic drum loop, and a clap entering 18 seconds in swings the rest of the track into your hips – there’s even an alternate percussion interlude

sandwiched in the middle. The drums are turned over by a distorted and delayed wave, almost like a cop siren, which finds an answer in the track’s final seconds: we hear them blaring, but distantly (the demo version of this track, from spring 2020, was called “ACAB Beat”).

The B side begins with a textured, heaving slab of ambience: “The Sun Will Sink Into the Ocean.” It is perhaps the sun one sees setting over “Total Annihilation Beach” – a phrase that came to shy while tripping on LSD in San Francisco, which felt to them like a post-apocalyptic haven for the rich. Seems on point. There is a machinic repetition to the track, but also sweeping curtains of sound that move like mist. But what comes at nightfall? Not cops, not raiders nor bottle service angels – nothing, actually. Just a void into which one lobs praise. “H6 Remix” adapts a Mesopotamian hymn to the divine wife of a moon deity, dated to 1400 BCE; the strings of the sampled oud playing it out are rich and trail beautifully with reverb. Caveman LSD’s gesture of remixing such a song reads sincere – the reality we inhabit is likely just as brutal as the one to which these transmissions belong; however, in both, honor exists. Love follows.

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“Somaesthesia” is for the body, for how the body feels and how the body communicates with its soul. It was written through a year of growth and sickness, which stimmed inflection to a body at rest, a body aroused, a body communicating needs, a body happy, a homeostatic body, a friend body.

These four songs drift through different dimensions of somatic sensation. Deep corporal sensuality, spectrums of control of self, identity, and their relation to others, plateau, release, extra sensorial touch, extraterrestrial encounter, novelty, experiment, finding self where you thought you stood alone, finding self in bass, basing self in body.
Do not disembody, hold closeness to body, trust body, body as a litmus, body as a truth, truth as unmovable, unmovable as grounded, rooted, dense body, flesh body, REAL body, this is your body, feel your body feel.

Somaesthesia: the faculty of bodily perception; sensory systems associated with the body; includes skin senses and proprioception and the internal organs

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Over the past decade, Vienna-based Florian Stöffelbauer – also known as Heap, has built a consistent reputation as a skilled DJ, producer and Neubau’s label head.

Isla is proud to present his latest effort “False Hope” which explores the intersections between industrial, electro and dark wave – all with a leftfield twist.

As diverse as it is powerful, the 7 tracks featured here almost feel like nocturnal tales, chalking out Heap’s observations wandering through the streets of a silent city, with cigarette smoke permeating the air and sirens ringing in the distance.
The cinematic essence of the release emerges from the very beginning, with the atmospheric beauty “Diall” transporting us straight into some late-80s scenery of Kraftwerkian nostalgia. In “Jetzt Oder Nie” a sharp knit of drums is placed on top of the grave frequencies of the bass: it’s indeed “now or never”, the moral imperative of the release, requiring us to take action.
Throughout the whole album, hypnotic sounds punctuate the dark space, bouncing between the polyrhythmic and uplifting energies of “Inner peace” and “No Palm Too Big”, a sneaky slow-burner with a nocturnal groove and Gayna Rose Madder’s robotic voice reciting the stream of consciousness of this urban wanderer.

“Trist” rises slowly yet powerfully thanks to its mystical synths covering the ground and preparing us for what comes next.
The title track “False Hope” holds the unique charm of a creature effortlessly floating in between dualities. As obscure as it is airy, as delicate as it is forceful, this hybrid composition is rich in details and plot twists.

At the end of this journey, “Losing time” reminds us of the urgency to take action expressed at the beginning of the album. In a rarefied canvas, an off-kilter solitary sound comes in, starting off as insistent as a car horn in rush hour, and evolving into a beautiful instrument arpeggiating the melody.

Here Heap concludes his narrative for now. We like to imagine him walking away, a shadow fading in the smoke of the city as the first lights of the day appear.

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Portal to the underworld: five pulsating tracks transport you between heaven and hell, featuring a collaboration with NAP and a remix by D.Tiffany. A Potion Activated.

Give in to the temptation of The Forbidden Plum. Take a bite and let the juice drip. Your journey begins with a hypnotic seduction, stoking the flames of desire as the voice in your head whispers, Want it so badly.

Dark and sexy, the flames get higher. The walls sweat on your descent as you lose control. Flood lights sweep over the crowd of bodies, cutting through smoke. Horns cry out in urgency—Miss Sweetie’s Inferno. Sludge bubbles over into the dungeon, alive and radioactive.

Dungeon Babez are the past and the future speaking with one voice. Moans echo in the grimy humidity, a druggy throb. You catch a glimpse of sky through the static haze and it’s like looking through memory. Something wet glimmers. Catch the droplets, sip sip and float away down the lazy river...

Do U Feel Me? This polyvocal track sounds like how it feels to be on the dance-floor, vibrating in union of body and spirit. Surrender in this dank chamber of voices echoing incantations. When you look into my
eyes, you are looking into your own soul.

D.Tiffany answers Maara and NAP’s call and response with a driving, elemental reply. A lost island reemerges from the depths of the ocean floor, breaking through the water’s surface. A message in a bottle floats over and washes up on shore. You open it and write something back. Ritual dance around a bonfire as the wind howls. Something large and dark passes overhead like a storm cloud. The air is electric. The sky bursts.

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Pillow Queen, the production duo of D. Tiffany and Vani-T, continue their sonic, sensous charting of the dancefloor in their new 3-track release Calling Me, a collaboration with the vocalist, writer and sex worker Ruin. Sexual drive has always been in the alchemy of Pillow Queen’s music, but at the fore is a wider, more encompassing erotics – one of the spirit and uninhibited body. Such is the force Ruin and the girls incant on this record.

The opening track, which also gives the release its title, begins with wide, introspective chords. “Calling Me” is spacious, and takes its time to build over 10 and a half gorgeous minutes, riding on at 118 BPM. Akin to some works of Robert Leiner or John Beltran, it’s a track situating spirituality in the genre of trance via the builds and flows of the music itself, rather than gimmicky cues of “Eastern” Goa vocals or overblown psychedelic drama. As always with Pillow Queen, the vocal samples are pitched and twisted with the greatest care.

By their third release, one can begin to note the duo’s characteristic gestures, and “Tunnel Vision” is somehow emblematic here: those pitched vocals, synth loops frayed out from filters, and crisp, bright drum programming that makes 134 BPM feel like the most natural metronome your feet and ass could follow. We hear Ruin for the first time two minutes in: “You cannot tunnel vision me”. She speaks of a “dance without dogma” in between short choral swells, picking up on the theme of a rewritten divine that figures into Pillow Queen’s Burn Me Up (2020). The phrase “dance without dogma” refers to the writings of Gabrielle Roth, a dancer and author noted for founding the 5Rhythms movement-meditation. Roth’s phrase “sweat your prayers” has also been held aloft as an ethic of the party series Radiant Love, where this EP's final track, “She’s Hot Magic,” was intended to be performed live by Ruin and D. Tiffany. Again we start airborne with birdcall and floating chords. Picking up a kick drum after 3 minutes, and a bassline after 5, this is truly some deep-dancefloor-7AM-body-and-soul-fully-merged shit. Concurrently, we hear Ruin asking us “Unconscious floor, do you know what good touch is?” and “Can you trust this sound?” No doubt, we are being called.

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