GARDENIA is an existing land located at the Limpopo province of South Africa, right at the border with Botswana. The place's real name is Mmabolela and it's a private nature reserve covering 6500ha of subtropical savanna and part of Limpopo River. In November 2019 I had a chance to visit the location and participate in an annual residency for composers and sound artists called 'Sonic Mmabolela', initiated and curated by Francisco López. We lived in an isolated property in the middle of savanna having a unique opportunity to exist in undisturbed touch with the African wilderness. For the past decade or so, Polish musician Michal Jacaszek has been exploring a new, resolutely modern chapter in Eastern Europe's long, storied love affair with classical music. His creations are painstakingly crafted collages of electronic textures and baroque instrumentation. All the natural sounds later used to create Gardenia were captured there — during longtime recording sessions over the virgin interior of Mmabolela Reserve. The album's field recording content was selected from several hours of birdsong, calls of frogs, insect noises, sounds of trees, bushes, grass as well as non-living natural elements like stones or shells. These field recordings were later digitally processed and used as part of 9 musical arrangements. However the recording sources and the location of Gardenia is defined, it was not my intention to document a South African natural soundscape nor create any other kind of strict concept album. More

2022 Reissue of Fennesz - Black Sea. Repressed on 2 x 10" Vinyl

Christian Fennesz takes his time. He's been a busy guy all through this decade in terms of collaborations, live records, remixes, and so on, but he's only released a few proper albums under his surname, and each has been brilliant. Just before the new millennium he released the 1999 album Plus Forty Seven Degrees 56' 37" Minus Sixteen Degrees 51' 08". It took the blissed-out sense of surrender that My Bloody Valentine specialized in into a harsh and assaultive realm, and the album can seem downright terrifying if you listen to it in the right mood at the proper volume (loud). 2001's Endless Summer established itself immediately as an experimental electronic music classic, and its unique mixture of melody, song structure, and processing has loomed large over the decade. And the eclectic 2004 release Venice solidified the idea that Fennesz was at the very top of his game, developing his keen compositional sense and ear for texture in parallel. Well, a new Fennesz album, Black Sea, is on the way (hopefully) next month, and this lead track certainly keeps expectations very high. Beginning with some of Fennesz' trademark neo-industrial gurgles, it folds in bits of guitar and strings rather beautifully, creating a cluster of sound that trembles, seeming to wait for something. And that something moves in gradually in the form of a massive cloud of distortion, a fine white mist of harmonics mixed with a dark undercurrent of rumbling bass. The tension between these elements is so well balanced, each individual element remaining in the mix even as the sound field becomes impossibly dense, that it's no surprise that it takes a while to get it just right. And as it begins to draw down about five minutes in, you can't help but wish that another full Fennesz album was following behind it. Soon." Fennesz uses guitar and computer to create shimmering, swirling electronic sound of enormous range and complex musicality. "Imagine the electric guitar severed from cliche and all of its physical limitations, shaping a bold new musical language." - (City Newspaper, USA). His lush and luminant compositions are anything but sterile computer experiments. They resemble sensitive, telescopic recordings of rainforest insect life or natural atmospheric occurrences, an inherent naturalism permeating each piece. More