Written and Recorded by Sonja Tofik in Stockholm and Paris 2023 Visual by Viktor Fordell?Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab, Rome
With 'Respire', Stockholm's Sonja Tofik presents a collection of works that cluster around themes of disunion and contemplation. In two halves, tiers of synthetic materials are layered into sullen reveries with organic components and concrète treatments, and as the obscurity of their genesis reaches a crescendo, these delicate and foreboding compositions find further means of communication the more they blister and bloom.
More

The oblique and annihilating transmissions emanating from the workshop of Polar Inertia have been issued intently and surely over the last decade and more. Environment Control grants access to the biggest consignment to date, with eight tracks of mesmeric play that are fraught with clinical impulsiveness and astringent rushes.

Opening with a didactic panegyric to transmutation, Polar Inertia swiftly counter our recoil with an ominous display of pressure on 'Smothering Dreams'. The intensity is sustained-as if to suggest that there's now no way back-until the menace relents on 'Artic Horizon', its shimmering gravitational pull amounting to an idealism after the unease that delivered us here.

Credits:
Recorded by Polar Inertia between Montfort and Ivry 2022-2023
Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab, Rome
Drawing by Jonas Rönnberg
Photography by Marcel Engdahl
northernelectronics.se
More

Recorded by Anthony Linell & Jonas Rönnberg in Muskö, Sweden 2021 Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab, Rome
northernelectronics.se

“The collaborative project of Northern Electronics' founders, Anthony Linell and Jonas Rönnberg, has never ceased to confront with their coupling of industrious delirium and pensive austerity. By now we know that only adrenaline can make sense of the toxic ensemble of purposes at the heart of Ulwhednar. Meditating on higher flights of thrill and disorder than their previous record, and with an acknowledgement of their Stockholm roots, 'Area 08' induces fever and anticipation with every gesture.

The opening tracks make a raucous yet resolute introduction to proceedings, eventually issuing one of the album's most exquisite moments of reprieve with 'Akalla/Broken Swords'. However, it is the second half of 'Area 08' that formally admits their latest work has crossed a threshold yet unexplored by the pair. A suite of villainously propulsive tracks spit embers of caustic balms as they careen out of reach with the engorged march of 'Commuter Madness'. Cunning in as many ways as it is earnest and audacious, 'Area 08' is a welcome alarm from the nucleus of the mission.” More

For her second release on Northern Electronics, Vallmo (appellation of Melina Akerman Kvie) strengthens her proficiency towards an electronic elevation with each and every track being a crevice offering kaleidoscopic gleams into a poetic narrative extracted from the slightly autotuned yet softly metallic voice. What Virgil is to Dante, the piano is to the listener: a fragmented leitmotif and a guiding cicerone into the nimbus that is "Othem". Dual in nature, the album comprises seamless transitions between divergent idioms, figuratively as well as literally. A false dichotomy conveying the opposing pairs tender and bold, distinct but evading and with a direction every so often forward as inward. "Othem" is an opus in equal parts melancholy, magic and mimesis. More

Anthony Linell puts a steely force at the foreground of his latest EP, Sheltering Skies. Blunt force tension builds, layer upon layer, as an anatomy of mechanistic torsion is worked in across an opening pair of tracks. Linell holds out the respite and oxygen for the EP's closer, undercut by aching feedback that just threatens to go again. More

Marking his second for Northern Electronics, Rune Bagge's new album, Grab a Star, narrates a melancholic thread through a brilliantly luminous astral-electro scene. Carving an achingly delicate relief through six tracks, there's a neon hinge to the emotive mechanisms at work, offsetting the meditative armature with sheer torque and a blustered spirit. More

Ecstatic Northern techno from Evigt Morker! Restless with giddy excitement and fidgeting through candescent swells, Evigt Morker's latest EP deploys a familiar, playful edge to degrees that were only hinted at in previous excursions. Ecstatic polyrhythms compound the wealth of fizzy details into prudent club missions with a bright yet rugged edge. Quality stuff! More

Repress!

Beautiful soundscapes and deep techno previously only released on cassette, 'Outlines (Repurposed) 2013-2019' is a compendium of Anthony Linell's sketches and supports from a seven-year period. Capturing an incongruous assignment together, these liminal works frame moments of transport between process and material that are otherwise private and archived. More

A buoyant expedition into the abyssal depths of aesthetic shock-outs and scorched techno rhythms by E-Saggila on his latest release for Northern Electronics named Blaze. Treading lightly through a range of tempos and atmospheres, each track deftly leans into measured bouts of whiplash and recoil with affective consequence. Nothern Electronic going into the depths, but never forgets about the raw dancefloor energy! More

Throttling his focus into a number of studious and reflective releases in the last years, Anthony Linell's new EP breaks for a chaotic descent into a sinuous and muscular syntax to reveal some of his most refined yet ravenous works. Seamlessly arranged, each track finds a unique way of balancing syncopation to kindle unease at the peaks. More

Repress!

Some serious hot tracks on this fourth instalment of the Scandinavian Swords series. It breaks with its predecessors' forms. Deviating from the austere brevity that marks Northern Electronics out, Scandinavian Swords IIII: Atlas of Visions completes a survey of the label's confidants and components in the same breath as it introduces a swarm of new artists and genre-collisions. With the swell of the last 12 months behind them, Anthony Linell and Jonas Ronnberg have forged the compilation with a paradoxical formula: Atlas of Visions stakes itself as a milestone release that retains the sure-footed programming of its proprietors yet cuts a new silhouette for what the platform of a Northern Electronics release consists of. Presented across two volumes, Atlas of Visions courses through the hyper-pigmented and infectious fallout zone between club-focused works and the abstract territories of experimental modes. The release compiles egression and intensification into a pandemoniac whole, a refracting design for fractured times. Recommended!!! More

Repress!
A cunningly scattered and frenzied EP marks Rune Bagge's return to Northern Electronics. First appearing in 2018 with his gripping album 'Pink Dreams,' and closely following his contribution to Scandinavian Swords IIII, 'Closure' tears through a vial of wistful timbres and acute blisses for 5 smouldering and hypnotic signals. More

For their first collaboration on an original audio-visual artefact, Ali M. Demirel and Anthony Linell have developed a stunning and unsettling work that studies the Icelandic landscape as a motor of mythology, a snare that binds us in contradiction. Far from being an acoustic summation of the collaboration, this release is a snapshot of Linell's musical contribution at a moment of reflection in the project's evolution. More

An intricate lattice of runaway storms are tailored into E-Saggila's latest EP, 'Anima Bulldozer.' Careering off the edge from its own furious torque at some intersections, E-Saggila resolves the heady gains of the commotion with some of her most soothing composition to date by the EP's close. More

The wicked intensity of Toronto's E-Saggila takes on novel limits for her new album for Northern Electronics. Constructed out of her live works, there's a lack of restraint on 'My World My Way' that could only be forged in the moment. Following on from last year's album for BANK Records NYC, E-Saggila has put together something that addresses the club and the headphones in equal measure. Taking the approach of a documentarian of our virtual landscape, there's a deep motive that underpins the heavy digital signal processing. With plenty of storming mechanical rhythms that embark from gabber's chaotic neighborhood, the samples of voices, conversations, and phone calls, all wind the listener around the desperation that's embedded in the digital world's seamless mediation of our lives. Owing as much to power violence and industrial as to Rotterdam, E-Saggila's affinity for the extremes is as conceptually critical as it is stylistically present. Riding the BPMs high, and binding this all together with ambient music's sensibilities, 'My World My Way' moves in sharp strides between a political statement and a dancefloor assault. More

Noah Gibson marks his first appearance on North Electronics with an EP of plaintive meditations on his innermost causes and conflicts. Acidic enthusiasm spirals out of control in innumerable ways across 'Press On,' routing us through the reflective atmosphere that hangs heavy in the background of the thrilling adrenal spikes. More

This time Anthony Linell cuts his peerless supply four ways in four tracks. Short on hubris, and economical to the point of being cruel, 'Core Field Horizon' relents in all the right places to make the effects of its peaks and troughs impossible to defend against. The opening track is a deluge. Spinning on its hydro-blasted synth line, the gravitational pull erases and ensnares in equal disordering measure. On its heel is the EP's title track, an austere display of the venom in the seam between his club-focused work and his experimental output. 'Evaporating Entities' is one of Linell's most diaphanous works to date, and after weaving through the sky we are abruptly subjected to the gravity of the closing track's nerves. More

'Fuck Varg' is Varg2TM--the artist formerly known as Varg--at his most chaotic and ornate. Streamlining a plethora of techniques and motifs into his inimitable and fearless style, there's reckless charm and misanthropy turbulently sequenced to perfection. The EP comes with baggage. The German metal band Varg issued a cease and desist letter earlier in the year to the artist now known as Varg2(TM). It is an obvious enough move for a band that cites pagans as an influence and theme, but it is a move that nevertheless affirmed a preference for ceasing to exist. Charting a route through the cybergothic psychedelia of the opening track, to the wistful anthemic charge of 'Thirst (Dressed in Nothing But UV Paint and Biodegradable Glitter)', and finally landing on the peak dead-eyed sermon of 'Parasites (Honest Music for Dishonest People) ft. G19', the digital EP's presentation rounds off on a lean and severe remix from VTSS. It's an EP of restlessness, ruins, and ecstatic keyboard mashing because there's not an emoji that's demonic enough. More