Killer early 90's R&B / New Jack Swing from JORDANA and produced by Alex Hill from Timex Social Club.

A deeper dive into the production archives of Alex "Landy" Hill (Timex Social Club) reveals an unreleased 90s bay area demo project with vocalist Jordana and songwriter John Pruitt. Nine tracks total, written and recorded in Alex's makeshift apartment recording studio. Tape restoration by PPU.

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We go through life. We shed our skins. We become ourselves.” This line from Patti Smith was going round and round Felix Manuel’s head as he gradually constructed Under Tangled Silence, his first album in six years and a record of a literal creative rebirth. Felix originally began it in earnest in 2020 Covid lockdown, but a catastrophic hard-drive meltdown destroyed almost all his work and sent him close to psychic collapse himself. However, ultimately this pushed him to rebuild from scratch and in so doing to confront and reassess every part of his musical and psychological processes. The result is utterly extraordinary. Felix was a child prodigy as an instrumentalist and his advanced musicality has always been prominent in his music, but here he has put himself front and centre as pianist, harpist and more. And this sense of exposure as a performer interweaves with an unflinching emotional openness too. Where sometimes electronic production as advanced as this can use intellect and techniques as shields from soul-baring, this is the sound of someone who can boldly say “I feel things, I cry all the time, and I'm not afraid to say it or show it in the music.” But this doesn’t mean there’s a move away from the soundsystems and dancefloors where Felix made his name as a uniquely innovative vinyl DJ. Even just in the opening track “A Tune for Us”, minimalist piano ripples and jazz drumming flow into the breaks of vintage jungle – and as the structure of the LP unfolds, a deep ambient meditation like “Hold” can sit very naturally in between the futurist dancehall of “L’Ancienne” and the high-definition acid house mind movie of “Galaxy in Silence”. In fact, as with the hands-on musicianship, that gutsy big-speaker electronic impact is delivered with more certainty, more expertise, more personal flourishes than ever. And all of those elements are more integrated than ever too: the sound of a total musical personality emerging afresh is truly something to behold. An already remarkable talent has been refreshed, reborn and is making the music of his life.

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Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBIGxfHCdo

Transparent Vinyl!

Thrilled to announce Barker's new album Stochastic Drift!

Following 2023’s Unfixed EP and his first full-length release since his 2019 debut album Utility, Stochastic Drift builds on Barker’s singular process to capture life’s chaos and reflect on just how much has changed. If his previous records showcased the artist “using ambient materials to remake techno” (Pitchfork), Stochastic Drift pushes Barker’s approach even further into harmonic chaos and dreamy freeform float.

Utility, the fullest expression of the beatless techno experimentation Barker excavated on his cult classic Debiasing EP, arrived to critical fanfare from The Quietus, DJ Mag, Resident Advisor, and Mixmag (who named it their Album Of The Year). The years since the release of Utility have been marked by intense unpredictability: Barker’s own shifting attitudes towards production, moments of professional transition and, not least, a global pandemic, necessitated somewhat of a reinvention.

Stochastic Drift sees Barker creating tracks with a fresh deftness and appreciation for the unexpected. “I’d been working with an approach that was quite deliberate and goal-oriented before, but I realised this wasn’t so helpful in the context of uncertainty. Being suddenly unemployed and stuck at home for an indefinite amount of time, with one disruption after another, it was like the target kept moving and I didn’t know what to aim at.” Barker reflects. “I noticed this unpredictability starting to creep into what I was making, and tracks were ending up a long way from the intentions they started with. So the challenge for this record was to try to embrace that process, to let go of expectations.” The serotonin-spiking lead single “Reframing,” titled after psychological technique for reinterpreting a situation in a positive way, unfolds like a brittle reimagining of Sasha’s eternal prog trance standard “Xpander” until it begins to drift through uncharted territory.

Throughout Stochastic Drift, Barker dives deeper into the world of mechanical instrumentation. Barker explains: “My interest in mechanical instruments is not to replace a human performer, but to explore the tool in a different way, maybe dehumanize it a little bit and look for the potential outside of what humans have already perfected.” Addressing anxiety about the influence of automation in music making head on, Barker emphasises that, regardless of the technology implemented and how this might enable the artist, machines of all sorts, be they robots, synths or instruments, are simply tools. It’s the creative act that remains resolutely human.

“I wanted to explore the link between my internal and external realities, between the chaos of the time and how that was manifesting in my music and ideas,” Barker says of Stochastic Drift. “It’s a transition between lots of shifting realities, describing a process in a window of time that was full of change.” As though finding comfort in unpredictability, the artist pieces together a new sound and in so doing finds a salve for uncertainty.

Sicherheits- und Herstellerinformationen / safety and manufacturer info (GPSR)
WAS - Word and Sound Medien GmbH
Liebigstrasse 2-20
DE - 22113 Hamburg
Germany
Contact: gpsr@wordandsound.netMore