Allgemein
1987
by Benedikt Frey on R.i.O..
When British Airways got privatized and listed on the London Stock Exchange, somewhere in Canada the first Starbucks outside of the US opened, and the Walt Disney Company signed an agreement with the French Prime Minister to construct Disneyland Paris. In the sky above southern Argentina, Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Sudan, Ethiopia, Djibouti, northern Somalia, and the Atlantic Ocean a hybrid solar eclipse materialized for 7.57 seconds, whilst Margaret Thatcher performed for 45-minutes on Soviet television. Some days later, The Simpsons cartoon first appears as a series of shorts on The Tracey Ullman Show, Diego Maradona wins his first Italian soccer championship with Napoli, and Eighteen-year-old West German pilot Mathias Rust lands a private plane on Red Square in Moscow. In the mists of the world’s first conference on artificial life at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the first Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mainland China opens in Beijing, and Prozac gets approved for use as an antidepressant in the United States. Much give way for the future, down there in 1987, the year that marks the title of Benedikt Frey’s freshest mini album, out into the world on R.i.O., the label he runs with some pals in the North of Berlin. It’s a dubby melancholic conqueror, wistfully, repetitive, drilling, absorbing, spooking. It makes you dream. Not particular of the year 1987. But it’s all there: The Red Square, the untouched land of the Val d’Europe, Diego on fuego. Six dark-ish tracks in trance, melancholic dub, downbeat heaven, journey music depths, all full of light and yet so dark. Futuristic dramas linked to a speculative past. In our dreams all might look different. The eclipse may last 27-minutes. You meet Neuromancer cyberpunks and blade running Ghost dogs, all taught to hack by Phrack. Cristal clear melodies, sampled voices, and veiled basslines, analogue scopes, and digital ropes, longing for a past that storm into the future. A time where deep listening widens the acoustics into infinity, while neon glows charm the light smog. Benedikt Frey been down there. Or maybe not. His latest music tells stories from the bygone, vested with the forthcoming. Come in and look out. There is nothing to see, yet so much to hear.
Crossed Laces
by Jawad Nawfal on VV-VA, Beirut.
This is the final chapter in the flower series. It was produced through a process of tending to neglected and abandoned tracks, locating and recording the missing parts to bring them to life. This series reflects on the feeling of being rooted to a place, and how that informs and intensifies relationships to sunlight and water sources.
Cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a 1990 documentary that explores the world that William Gibson invented with his book Neuromancer. The bulk of the documentary consists of interviews with Gibson, Jaron Lanier, Timothy Leary and Michael Synergy. A few industrial bands have their music featured as well.
Aya
“This is kind of ridiculous,” AYA says in demonstration of her onstage demeanour. “I’m one person with a microphone, and I’m playing other people’s music. Have you noticed that?”
— AYA’s new dance theory, Crack Magazine, 14.01.20
Field recordings and mobile phone memos drift alongside unusual samples and one-take improvised piano performances. This is musical sketching; a lightness of touch; an album as photographic contact sheet; an audio page of possibilities.
Soundscapes and micro-narratives for a half-remembered, half-imagined bygone era. The Arteries of New York CIty peer into a memory of the past while glitches from the future pump new blood into old conduits.
Of This World
by Electric Sound Bath is the new age and ambient duo of Angela Wilson & Brian Griffith in Los Angeles. Their latest, “Of This World”, began as commissioned pieces that evolved and morphed over several years via purposeful reimagining and unintended happenstance. This long-form creative process mirrored the duo’s own life trajectory and experiences ‘of this world’. The result is a celestial wash of MIDI-driven modular synthesizers crafting slow, unfurling caverns of sound. The type of deep, meditative tones that reward loud and close listening. Allow this music to patiently flow over you, reveling in the crystalline details and heavenly peace.
No Amp

by Jef Mertens on 291.
291 is a subdivision of Dadaist Tapes and releases the solo work of Jef Mertens in limited tape editions available for free, funded by a cycling allowance to work.