After releasing milestone EPs between 2007 and 2008 on Pheek's Archipel imprint, Immigrant and their home label, Cynosure, the Uruguayan duo MONOBLOCK completed a great 2009. Inaugurating the Spanish Une Label during the summer with their Introduktion EP, Monoblock also released InTensiones, their third record on Mike Shannon's Cynosure. Recent Berlin implants, by way of Valencia, MONOBLOCK start off 2010 right with a superbly executed whole artist EP on Airdrop Records. Bringing together three tracks of very different moods, the Shouting Nonsense EP reflects the richness and diversity of electronic concepts covered by Monoblock. Going from the most rousing and bouncey Tech House in Shouting Nonsense to the more stripped environment of Cienpies and passing through the use of live instruments in Calid.
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Montreal's Minimal Techno veteran Pheek offers up a milestone vinyl release for the onset of this Spring Season. Lumo EP offers four vibrant dance-floor compositions, each delving into its own labyrinthine mindscape, leaving no stones unturned in an ethereal garden of listening. Lumo invites us into exotic, sprawling atmospheres- crafted with excessive care and the unmistakable studio-finesse that Pheek has become known for. Lovers of drums will be assured troves of bass-heavy, broken-beats and skittering, jazz-infused patterns which delicately tease and tantalize as they appear and flicker out. Seasoned prowess in sound-design allows Pheek to convey eerie, forgotten landscapes with periodic, lushly rising elements to bath the listener in unexpected lightness and thrilling serenity. Lumo will surely tantalize even seasoned listeners as it melts heavily saturated layers of depth over unexpected arrangements. The result is a stunning interaction at the crossroads of Minimal House and Techno, nudging the listener toward sturdy grooves while simultaneously introducing new pathways on the way to ever-increasing depth. More

Pineland is the duo made of Budapest's Giash with Montreal's Pheek, both craftsmen of immersive, organic, groovy techno. While they've never met, they offer an extremely efficient workflow that lets them pursue their love for making beautiful and colorfull rhythmics. While their first dub project was release on Only Material Matters (UK), they've been overwhelmed with positive feedback that made them burst into more creative juices, coming up with a very personal EP, named "Grounded."
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Sardinian born, Berlin based producer Hubble is known to create implicitly ethereal moods. His way to keep people off guard as well as making a musical commitment through long excursion is unique to him. On this EP titles "La Rencontre" (eg. Meeting), he crosses paths with his Romanian friend Tulbure. Somehow managing simultaneous dissonance and concretion; ‘La Rencontre’ could be the soundtrack to both your birth and death. It is a boxer who’s mastered the ring, and punch by punch you realize that it has you beat, but you are happy to wave a white flag and succumb to its presence. The space in which the EP operates in is 360 degrees, tempos throb and the listener is transported to total darkness. Your only wish post listening, will be that you don’t have to come back to the world.
Tulbure's track Condor is more of a mindcluster robotic swing that leaves you muted. While both tracks work together, this release is meant to be two variables of parallel worlds of these talented artists.
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The phrase “feux follets” from which Archipel 105 draws its title, comes from the Latin ignis fatuus, and translates as will-o’-the-wisp. The etymology reaches back to old folktales in which ill-intentioned spirits would cast an atmospheric glow at night, in order to lead weary travellers astray. Today, the term refers to ghost-lights - artificial light reflections caused by decomposing organic emissions. Anyway you choose to understand it; this music contains the mysterious and unattainable. Feux Follets are meant to depict an elusive (and perhaps also illusive) ambition. A tense equilibrium colours the constant, foundational sounds with aleatory movements. The compositions are detail-oriented, and boldly explore their tangential elements.
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Enigmatic artists from Eastern Europe had a ace in their sleeve when they came out with the project of Suburbs. They come up with the most mystical sound for their first EP on Archipel under "Plaeisii." The strange classical texture swirl with a very lush rhythm that at first, appear to be extremely predictable but then, as you listen carefully, you get caught up on the most capturing pattern. The main song as well as Amorf both are music for the soul and will be played in very special moment that will have people close their eyes to enjoy the shifting mood.
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More than often, musicians feel that releasing music is giving birth to a baby but no one knows better than women. Stefny Winter realizes a dream by putting out a collection of meaningful tracks, all made in various important moments of her life. More so, some of the tracks were made while she was pregnant, making this project even more special to her. Coming from the 90's as a DJ who would juggle between styles, Stefny explores with no compromises or time stamp, her various tastes through time. "Wind Walker" becomes a savory collage of music that won't really stick to standard styles but will become familiar to any ears.
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Detroit's Eric Johnston who has already brought Archipel a remix of Marc Neyen and an EP on Kalimari now brings us a superb four track 12" entitled "Silly Girl". This whole package is a highly rhythmic affair which while darkly tinted remains very funky. "Stop Calling Me" is the most percussion oriented of the pieces and instantly sucks you into its very well thought out labyrinth of sky high rhythms which are layered just so and double dipped in liquid funk while "Labrador" strips things down a little more and wraps you in blankets of warm and rubbery groove. "Worth It" carries on with the perfect shuffle and utilizes a wonderful blend of warmth and funk which take hold of your mind and feet with an unrelenting grip while it ebbs and flows, building a heated story as it progresses. "Munted" could be three pieces in and of itself but blends them all expertly into one single solid storyline which takes you through mazes of juicy percussion and excellently placed, darkly hued, very deep chords More

After releasing the excellent 'Wormhole' on Japan Excursion Joint 3, the most talented Stefny gives us her debut solo Archipel 12", "Echinodon", featuring remixes from Bruno Pronsato, Isomer Transition and a newly birthed project of Somfay's called Flourish. This package, by all means, is set to infinitely clutch and grab ahold of many a mind. "Echninodon" is wonderfully fanged, each maxilla locked and loaded, ready to capture the entirety of the mind's resources and set it into intricate motion. It possesses a hypnotic prowess of such a level which makes it difficult if not impossible to shift one's attention away from it. If lucid dreaming is possible while one is awake, waking dreams within wakefulness, this is sure to cause just such a condition to arise, leading to deliciously formed headscapes where every scene is endlessly novel and created out of the finest of mental interior brushstrokes and every individual shade and colour is endless in its depth. "Silofai" is a part of this continuum, this waking dream during wakefulness, and it has just as many details to show for it. It's scenery is subtly tinted with just the right balance of funkiness and steamed, warm, darkness while its patterning winds around itself like a fractal, coiling, technicolour serpent. Isomer Transition's remix of Echninodon takes the original and strips it down to a darkly tinted scape of low Hz funk which is set to broadcast its seed throughout plenty a cortex where its staccato, anodyne, roots will infinitely branch off. Bruno Pronsato brings us two versions of Echinodon, one exclusively digital and one for the vinyl. His versions wrap the original in spirals of darkly jazzed percussion with mind encompassing, breathy yet heavy, girth, and spread open the doors of hypnosis as far as they can open until they have no other option but to unhinge, to detach and enter the labyrinth. Flourish takes Echinodon and modifies it into a downtuned chamber of spitting ophidian darkness where original elements are folded in on themselves and inflated into new forms More

Without much need for introduction, Archipel welcomes the talent of Minus's Niederflur who bring with them the darkly blinding "Lumen EP". A lumen is a unit used to measure the perceived power of light and this EP is most definitely very powerful and certainly can be perceived as such. This is where the line between something as intangible as light is crossed and becomes tangible as one would feel an intense and warming heat which goes so far as to manifest itself as something with mass. Title track "Lumen" is the focused, convex lens, knife edge point of light which focuses a small portion of the sun's energy so densely it could initiate many a blaze. "Masse" is as dense as the most solid of gems and radiates dark light like heavy water and is sure to corrupt any Geiger counter within its radioactive reach while "Flor" stacks itself as high and wide as it can go, building further and further upon itself, and just as one would think it could build no further, it rotates itself back to within and further densifies, an inescapable sort of density of which one is eternally locked pleasurably within. "Flucht" raises one into the blackest skies of night and flies hour after hour through blood orange clouds filled with the atmospherically scattered light from what was temporarily civilization below but is now just a memory shaded in the delight of being closed within the phosphorescence of late night fog.
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Returning to present the third in Archipel's excursion series is label boss himself, Pheek, and his partner in aural beautification of the world, Stefny, who both bring their passions together to form "Japan Excursion Joint 3". The record begins with Pheek's "Voices in the Fog" which eerily and most definitely very pleasantly does seem to resemble, in the mind's eye, extra-dimensional voices in a superbly thick and warm blanket of fog which rolls and swirls as it crawls through dark pre-dawn evergreen forests, carrying with it the scent of geosmin and fir sap. "So Worried" is a little more delicate but just as enchanting with opalescent melodies weaving their way through gentle layers of rhythm which are ever evolving and forming new patterns which crawl over the entire surface of the mind. On the other side of the same wax coin we find Stefny's piece "Wormhole" which gets right to the point and prepares you for a superheated and electrified journey between interdimensional space as all the colours of memory from your past, present and the deja vu of your endless futures come together and wrap themselves together to form one of an infinite of superbly glowing singularities. Pheek now closes things of with a helping of warm "Chicken Sashimi" which is intensely layered with an array of piquant and very flavorfully rich tastes that collide to form a single and constantly growing, changing, hypertaste, leading to no less than the fullest of enjoyment and satisfaction.
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Rudolf returns to Archipel's vinyl series with a thick, heavy and subtly moody body of work entitled "Wax Poetic". Throughout the entire record is a pleasurable, weighted atmosphere that has a peculiar glow all its own which feels like it could bead up into a phosphorescing condensation, dripping down dark concrete walls. "El Hombre de la Mascara" sends ripples through solidifying slurry with its rolling, mammoth, percussion which has been laced with scratchy, hissing textures and warped, angled vocal snippets with a round melodic bell which cameos precisely where called for. "Piedra Libre" is a percussive statue in motion feeding its textured, plasticized, limbs into itself and evolving into subtly ever more detailed structures. "The New Ax" strips things down a little but is still very much filled with rich and juicy textures, the occasional vocal cut and otherworldly stringed instrumentation all tightly wrapped within a rolling cocoon of rhythm. "Silvias" injects a little bit of funk into the release's overall textured package and contains a plethora of shifting colours and patterns to play within while being lulled further deeper into its coiled structure.
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With the dawn of the new year, label boss Pheek wakes things up with a new slice of very cozy house with his trademark liquified rhythms, "Slaughter House EP". Without further ado, grab a hot cup of cocoa with honey and start massaging your neural-net with "Right On" which is filled to the lip with Pheek's heady, cuddly and mesmerizing warmth dotted with buried essences of jazz precisely strewn about. More

Jesse Somfay returns to Archipel's vinyl series with a shimmering mini LP dipped in the richest sunlight from a collective of sunrises and sunsets caught in the amber of memory. "Amaranthine Reverie" denotes a shift in Somfay's perspectives to a more sideways and bucolic frame of mind. This package is a looking glass forcing perspectives to skew awry and slowly expand as the thin membranes of bubbles might do so as they float higher into a blurry, familiar and yet foreign sky with overtones of an unknowable future. "Answers from the Grave" sets the journey in motion through floral crystaline forests many miles high while slinky gelatanous vines sway every which way, peeling away and revealing "Grasping Stars," a clearing full of the amber chiming of past encounters remembered but changed along the path of time. "Effervescent Seven" takes on an almost sinister and slightly unnerving tone of misty toxic frost breathing inwards and outwards from every possible direction into the sudden
cotton innocence of "Gathering Wool." "Crash into the Clouds (This Time We Fly)" builds in and around itself, drawing from every ounce of
organic geometry surrounding it, into a snowballing blaze of light, a furnace for the mind's eye. Closing things off is "Kisshiine," a place built on a foundation of the moments and memories remembered from early on during life in a saturated amnesiac meadow of parallel synaesthesiac dreams.

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Cesare Vs Disorder and Rudolf, both hailing from London in the United Kingdom, each carry a solid discography on their belts, releasing on labels such as Resopal and Serialism. They now come together to collaborate on a release with Archipel entitled "Burger City" which also features a remix from the very mesmeric Jens Zimmermann.


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With it's eleventh 12" release, Archipel brings you "En Légère Suspension Vol. 2" the second group of remixes of label head Pheek's full length En Légère Suspension, this time featuring Franklin De costa, Lee Curtiss and Marc Neyen. De Costa's remix of "Rien Ne Va" is a husky blend of tensely wound mountainous and rolling low end tendrillar rhythms which are tied up tightly in bright and fizzing deteriorated electric twine. Curtiss employs his trademark elasticity with his take on "Dans le Ventre de L'Ordi" which bubbles up into a rolling molten boil of cochlear space which is pregnant with deep churning cadence. With a stimulating and heady perspective of "Tew Tew", Marc Neyen fabricates an intricate mesh made of quivering slices of the original which is filled to the brim with constantly unfolding mesmeric motion.

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Apophenia, putting together pattern and meaning out of seemingly random sensory input. With Tom Ellis's debut Archipel 12", we are served a plethora of solid binary aural and metaphysical workouts. The titles are alphanumeric and let the music do the speaking, however, keep in mind the 12"s title, which perhaps suggest there may be meaning yet in these seemingly related titles. The two pieces on the A-side are fleshy, rigid swinging, the first with a curious and driven melody rhythmically held tight with a grid-work of percussion while the second track is more stripped down and even more hypnotic and binary.The B-side takes a more corrosive approach with the first track proceeding with a neural network of sharp rhythms and razor precision slices of illusive vocals while the second track buffers itself into a full allotment of an
organized digitized funk frenzy.
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After Marc Neyen's depth filled and detailed digital release "Crumbs", we are now proud to bring you his first 12" outting "Mad Suit". The A side of the same name as the release is a smooth, dark and groovy outing which is constantly in movement. Chock full of simultaneous construction and deconstruction via shuffling third-eye-visual-inducing melodic pulses with just the right hint of fizzing acid jazz flavour sure to sneak past the blood-brain barrier in an instant. The B side contains "Tree Litter" which is a very low slung and heavy affair of the nerve rattling type. It is in a state of constant evolution, warm swaths of melody draping down from cerebral curtain rods, shuddering with an organic elegance leaving us craving only more. More