Released almost exactly a year on from their debut 'Struck' EP, Liam Morley and Dan Valentine return with 'New Brutalism', an exploration of angular, brittle club music. Referencing the stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic of Brutalist architecture (a detail of Preston bus station features on the cover), the 5 tracks here mine looped, blocky source material gradually embellished with more complex percussive and atmospheric layers that are at once robust and introspective. From the opening woodblock/rave dismantling "UK WIll Not Survive" to the heady Hardcore of "Three Day Jag", the EP evokes a distinctly Northern British Weltanschauung, a joyous revelling in melancholy that goes as far back as the earliest dances documented in Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore' - somehow unique to British nightlife. The EP closes with the industrial clang of "Run Out', the cacophony slowly converging into an alignment of percussion and space, trigerring that feeling of re-emerging into daylight at the end of a long night. Blinded by all the light... by all the possibilities. More

Outta the shadows and into the strobe-light, Alex Lewis aka Turinn debuts on Modern Love with a highly rinsable debut double-pack of sawn-off brukbeats and anxious, nerve-riding grooves brewed in the ravines of North Manchester. Turinn emerges from a new generation of producers in the city that include longtime spar Willow, and upcoming producer Croww, soon to offer up his own debut recordings. ?Crooked and rugged AF, but tempered by an acute emotive sensitivity, 18 1/2 Minute Gaps renders a bleedin’ cross-section of mongrel, hybrid style ’n pattern in a breathless, deceptively freehand fashion that comes riddled with an electric blue energy all of its own. ?Committing ten trax of fractious, mutant funk and sore feels, 18 1/2 minute Gaps serves to cap Turinn’s formative phase of production like a lead lid on a nuclear rave implosion; trapping original ‘ardcore ‘nuum, Detroit booty and dank post-punk elements in a perpetual flux of in-the-pocket grooves which ravenously attempt to split at the seams, alternately pushing into Muslimgauze-like buffer zones of distortion or resoundingly wide ambient dimensions, and often both at once. ?On the first plate, this ambiguous dichotomy is epitomised between the rare surge of quick/slow torque in Ovum, which almost sounds like Chris Carter sparring with Burial Hex, and then in his nod to the Italian new wave with Elba, which seems to find the square root between Lorenzo?Senni and some skudgy as heck Kassem Mosse grind, whereas the bittersweet soul of 1625 finds compatible links with his close peer, Workshop’s Willow as well as Japan’s Shinichi Atobe and scene enabler Move D, while Parratactico swaggers into quantum dancehall meters. ?The second disc is no less deadly: the album title track runs at a nexx level Detroit momentum?like DJ Stingray flipping Derrick May and Carl Craig’s Kaotic Harmonies, before ESO cuts in like?a super cranky El-B wearing itchy Primark underwear, and the bone-rattling hardcore jungle of Spawn soon enough gives way to the sweetlad couplet of Petrichor and Ondine, where his elusive, distressed melodic touch really shines thru. ? More

rom the disputed border somewhere between Lancashire and Yorkshire, G..H. claims a no mans land where he is free to decimate distinctions between black metal, grime and concre`te techno by drawing upon an elusive, metaphysical force that’s exclusively common to music rooted in that region; from Muslimgauze and Autechre thru Shackleton and Demdike Stare. The inarguably mongrel Housebound Demigod is G.H.’s debut solo album, following the Ground EP (2011) and his involvement with the hexed Pendle Coven project & HATE, alongside Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, respectively, between 2003 - 2009. It sounds like nothing out there; the result of countless hours at the grindstone, using sound as tonal therapy and a purely expressive sculptural material to best render the feel of his bleak but extraordinarily beautiful surroundings with all the rugged texture and captivating aesthetic of some ancient cave graffiti. The album unfolds as a treacherous topography of boggy drones, entrenched subbass and deforested, windswept feedback, strewn with the charred remains of black metal in opener Screaming Demon Pickups and the hollow-eyed stare down of Angels & Doormen, or prone to bury the senses with unpredictable slow techno mudslides in Mickey Cosmos or the subsidence of Packhorse. More

Modern Love very rarely reaches out to artists outside of its immediate surroundings; it’s happened just a couple of times in the last 14 years. But there’s something about Philippe Hallais that compelled the label to ask him if he wanted to do something together. Philippe has released music on a bunch of cool labels (L.I.E.S., The Trilogy Tapes, Delsin, In Paradisum), but hearing the first tracks recorded for Lighthouse Stories, it was obvious Philippe was hitting on something new: a kinda weird slow/fast dance music that sounded like a Footwork variant sewn up with an exotic production style that was impossible to pin down. These tracks eventually splintered off into different directions, held together by a strong sense of narrative and motion harking back to a teenage obsession with Turntablism, Detroit electro and Ghetto house, and eventually Juke and Grime. Although he’s spent the last few years focusing on more industrial dancefloor variants, for Lighthouse Stories Philippe turned to these foundational influences, as well as his love of mixtapes and sound collages full of unfinished ideas, skits and experiments; all things that inform the flow of this new album.
Lighthouse Stories captures a sense of nostalgia well, but is also a futuristic vision full of that exploratory, vibrant spirit that’s so hard to find in electronic music these days. Frames of reference are hard, but in places it reminds us of the dusted swagger of Anthony Shake Shakir, the acquatic Drexciyan movements of Ultradyne, a loose-limbed take on Shangaan, and of Actress at his most submerged.
But ultimately, it’s an album made by a producer looking to his personal history while forging new ground, pushing ahead with little regard to convention and ultimately ending up with something completely unique: a kind of intimate journal rendered in bright colours and odd shapes.
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The album straddles analogue club music and vocal pop songs - rough, dark, extraordinary. More

7 months on from TP#4, Demdike return with the 5th instalment in their ongoing research and development series - a double-headed monster split between gnarly reductions on the A-side, and industrial strength edits on the flip. 'Procrastination' edges through Grimey detritus and gunshot snares within a vast open space perfectly primed for that Demdike slow build. 'Past Majesty' on the flip offers up a feral take on some kind of cyber-industrial insanity, somewhere between Ministry and Powell - with a denouement which should probably come with a public health warning attached to it. All we're saying is - watch yr eardrums More

Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow labelmates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. It's been four years since we last heard from them but they now return with "Drop The Vowels", their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013 / early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut 'Like Weather', eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favour of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalised, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener GIF RIFF brings to life a Gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed 'Stay Ugly' breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EP's respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty 'Madmen'. 'Corrosive' flits between a fillibrating, arpeggiated steppers rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while 'Drop The Vowels' further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. Quay ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings. More

Millie & Andrea are Miles Whittaker and Andy Stott, fellow labelmates at Modern Love who collaborated on an occasional series of 12" releases between 2008 and 2010. It's been four years since we last heard from them but they now return with "Drop The Vowels", their debut album. Produced fast and loose through late 2013 / early 2014, it's an album that recalls the strict and stripped funk of Anthony Shakir as much as it does Leila's incredible debut 'Like Weather', eschewing the dark aesthetic both producers are best known for in favour of something much more visceral. It's an album borne from a love of both pop and club music, made to evoke an adrenalised, hedonistic, as well as an emotional response. Opener GIF RIFF brings to life a Gamelan edit stripped bare before the over-compressed 'Stay Ugly' breaks out with a tumbling, broken arrangement situated somewhere between Richard D James and Jai Paul. "Temper Tantrum" and "Spectral Source" follow, versions of tracks originally released on the second and third Daphne EP's respectively, the former a rugged rave anthem tempered by blue strings, the latter a proper dancefloor destroyer recalling Shake's mighty 'Madmen'. 'Corrosive' flits between a fillibrating, arpeggiated steppers rhythm and a brutal jungle breakdown, while 'Drop The Vowels' further explores and strips bare bass & drums before the slow but jacking warehouse killer "Back Down" provides pure percussive abandon. Quay ends the set with something quieter, a sublime coda made entirely from field recordings. More

Released almost exactly a year on from their debut 'Struck' EP, Liam Morley and Dan Valentine return with 'New Brutalism', an exploration of angular, brittle club music. Referencing the stripped-down, utilitarian aesthetic of Brutalist architecture (a detail of Preston bus station features on the cover), the 5 tracks here mine looped, blocky source material gradually embellished with more complex percussive and atmospheric layers that are at once robust and introspective. From the opening woodblock/rave dismantling "UK WIll Not Survive" to the heady Hardcore of "Three Day Jag", the EP evokes a distinctly Northern British Weltanschauung, a joyous revelling in melancholy that goes as far back as the earliest dances documented in Mark Leckey's 'Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore' - somehow unique to British nightlife. The EP closes with the industrial clang of "Run Out', the cacophony slowly converging into an alignment of percussion and space, trigerring that feeling of re-emerging into daylight at the end of a long night. Blinded by all the light... by all the possibilities. More

The second EP from Jack Dice sees a huge leap in ambition for the project, a 5 track session that's more addictive, direct and heady than its predecessor. 'Sip Paint' centres around 'Stash's Theme' featuring rapper and producer Stash Marina, a track that deploys crisp triplets and saturated production straddling mainstream signatures on the one hand and a world of analogue/deviant recording techniques on the other. It's an odd, hyper-addictive track - available here in both vocal and instrumental versions. 'Low Glo', 'Kerosene' and 'Radium Dial' are more subdued and immersive; you could draw lines straight through the material here to a number of different projects Twells has been involved with through the last decade, though he seems to benefit immeasurably from Chambliss' presence. The pair find a perfect balance between their respective disciplines, resulting in an EP that at different points throws stylistic references to everything from Prince's Black Album to The Art of Noise, Drake, Philip Jeck and Evian Christ's DUGA 3 sessions - without ever sounding overworked or too knowing, a feat in itself. More

Includes an insert with artwork by Alex Solman and handstamped sleeves Searing, tormented darkside f**kery from Miles Whittaker and Sean Canty’s Demdike Stare on their rinse and run Testpressing series. A-side ‘Fail’ is a slowly descending panic attack of pealing hi-end frequencies and impending bass doom reaching a pit of noisy no return. B-side ‘Null Results’ bruks loose with a scything jungle attack; frantic 16th note hi-hats and cone-crumpling subs laced with a rudeboy mentasm to incite warehouse capoeira. Come test.

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Earlier on this year Andy Stott found himself playing on the same bill as New York “Heavy Metal hoarders” Batillus. Despite operating in completely different spheres, Batillus had been playing ‘Luxury Problems’, Stott’s most recent album, on their tourbus and suggested a remix.
The result is pressed up on this one-sided 12”, a deadly reduction that pitches the original down into the abyss,...
Andy Stott will be back in 2014 with new material.
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