I am the Neon Wizard, join me, fateful explorer! My wand crackles with the power of forgotten circuitry, as I travel between neon-lit realms. Realms where magic fuse with machine, where spells are coded in luminous arrays of numbers and symbols.

I provide you the soundtrack to my vast wanderings!
credits
released April 18, 2025

NW is NW

The Five Magics were casted at Cirrus Studios between the time periods of 1380, 1986, 2025, and the year 3000

Wizard Hand drawing by James F
Layout by NW

Cassettes available soon on Weregnome Records.

Subsoil loops and excerpts taken from a series of live improvisations in different groupings.

First appearance of this mysterious desert nomad. Big tip!

“Watt” needs to stay! Support “Watt – Musikkneipe und Bar” here: www.openpetition.de/petition/online/kulturkneipe-von-schliessung-bedroht-rettet-das-watt-2

Long, long overdue reissue of this gem from the depths of The Skaters dreamweaving dimension, released as a limited tape through Spencer Clark’s Pacific City imprint back in 2008. Comprising a period of extreme and vital activity for both Clark as Monopoly Child Star Searchers and Black Joker and his kindred spirit James Ferraro under his own name – ‘Marble Surf’ or ‘Discovery’ – and a myriad of identities like Liquid Metal or Edward Flex, this split finds these intrepid explorers on each side of a scrying mirror.

Conjuring the Angel Snake entity as a vessel for unlocking the unconscious, Ferraro takes up the A-side with hypnotic wooden percussion sustaining queasy tape processed keyboard lines that intertwine amidst a growing haze of hiss. About halfway through the digression an announcer boombox voice cuts up the scenery for a serpentine dance around the discarded remnants of civilisations past and future. Clark’s Monopoly Child rides a beaming synth and muffled percussion accents on his trademarked keyboard thrills, all ascending and descending runs brimming on the horizon, not quite here, not quite out of reach, fading out to a galloping murk smeared by hallucinatory flute-like sounds and portamento accents that float in harmonic suspension.

Truly visionary and arresting stuff from these true purveyors of the netherworld, due to be rediscovered in these times of poor half-reassessments of the given past. It was never a dream, it was always a dream.

Finally, HDK has a J.S. Bach cover album in its catalog! 🎉​

It was a serious flaw, fortunately now the problem is solved thanks to our hero Benedict Roff-Marsh, an electronic musician who lives in Australia. The pop-star born in Thuringia in year 1685 (one of the first pop-stars in history in fact) has many fans in the southern hemisphere too, and Benedict is evidently one of them.

In truth, Benedict is keen to point out that this album is actually a tribute to Wendy Carlos and her “Switched-on Bach” (1968), one of the first Bach-exploitation albums ever released and certainly one of the most brilliant and beloved.

Benedict is a multifaceted and inventive guy; discover for example his activity of inventors of virtual synthesizers here:

benedictroffmarsh.com/instruments/

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This album of electronic adaptations of Bach’s music prompted us to include in the cassette a booklet containing a retrospective of our most beloved Bach & Classical exploitation albums from the 70s and 80s: a very useful guide for those who want to discover some discographic gems such as “Bach for Computer” by Carlos Futura or “Bach to the Future” by Latin Rascals.

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But now let’s give the floor to Benedict Roff-Marsh who tells us something about this album:

“It is 50 years since Wendy Carlos released “Switched-On Bach” (October 1968). Electronic music existed before Switched-On but suddenly it hit the general consciousness as well as crossing the Rock/Pop/Classical divide. This is the record that launched a thousand careers.

My record doesn’t attempt to break any new ground, merely to give myself the opportunity to explore what Wendy did as well as the totally amazing music of Bach – the greatest composer ever. This makes my record another in a long line of what I call “Moog Does…”

My record is “Plugged-In” because now the instruments are all Plug-Ins: VST, Racks Extensions… Software with not a dusty knob in sight.

Notes all by J.S. Bach. Played by unknown people who put MIDI Files on the internet. Arranged by me (with a few stray notes moved or added by me to suit my arrangements). Sounds created by me ‘in the mix’, but totally with a feel for what Wendy Carlos did in1968.”

When does new hope arise from the ruins of yesterday, and when does hope for the future fall apart into ruins? When does that moment come? Can we catch it, tune into it, hear it?

Adam Badí Donoval is no stranger to these stark and abandoned landscapes. Some of them were already captured on his debut album Sometimes Life Is Hard And So We Should Help Each Other (2022, The Trilogy Tapes). His approach hasn’t changed — he remains a master of sculpting frozen time, of capturing those moments when the world forgets to move forward and, with a deafening murmur, begins to gnaw at its own tail. On his second album, released by mappa, he returns to similar sonic anomalies, infused with a strong cinematic quality. His sounds erode the edges of memory and conjure situations we seem to remember, even if we’re not sure from where. A mirror where the image and the mirror wholly coincide is a seven-part series of these phantom memories.

It sounds like The Caretaker, if his ballrooms were infected by echoes drifting from Burial’s late EPs. Or like The Disintegration Loops, resonating through the concrete walls and elevator shafts of socialist-era Eastern European housing blocks. Some of the raw field recordings carry the same disturbing, yet deeply vulnerable intensity of Klein’s soundscapes. Donoval is also a key figure in the community around labels like Warm Winters Ltd. — which he runs himself — as well as mappa and Mondoj.

In one track, you can hear the wail of a swampy siren, the voice of musician and singer Adela Mede. In another, there’s something that resembles bells tolling across the land, strongly referencing the name of Hungarian writer László Krasznahorkai, whom Donoval mentions in the credits.

Donoval’s sonic insights are, all at once, as light as a feather drifting on the breeze — borne by a melancholic hope — and yet as heavy as the wreck of a giant ship lost in endless darkness, like a shadowed thought quietly hibernating in the subconscious.

My side project Culturist returns with a new release: “Returning to the Dungeon Rave”

Prepare to descend once more… into the dungeon rave

TAPES: grimestone.bandcamp.com/album/culturist-returning-to-the-dungeon-rave

A young woman gets raped by a mysterious man-creature. Years later her son begins a horrific transformation into a similar beast.

Watch on OK.RU