Cindy is the eulogized muse behind Palmbomen II’s newest collection of twilit dance music. Cindy reveals herself over a series of four 12” EPs bearing her name (Memories of Cindy Pt. 1 – 4), each one constructed by Kai Hugo, the persona behind Palmbomen II, as an autonomous episode of melodic house laced with remote, otherworld fidelity.

Hugo turns each of the four Memories of Cindy parts into late-night TV transmissions hosted in the fictional, sunny and slightly warped world of Carmel Vista, California. The show takes form as Real Talk (scripted and directed by Hugo, “starring” Hugo as himself alongside Damon Palermo of Magic Touch as show host Samantha), providing a separate view of the Palmbomen II venture: a surreal, neo noir-ish California dislocated by the no-frills aesthetic of its music and the tragicomedy of its imagined characters.

The first three Palmbomen 12”s, Memories of Cindy Pt. 1 – 3, will be available exclusively on vinyl. Memories of Cindy Pt. 4 will be available exclusively as a “box set” including the first three 12”s. Each set includes a unique, pre-tragedy polaroid portrait of Cindy taken by Kai Hugo. Edition of 350.

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CAT: RVNGNL39E

Release Date:
May 05, 2017 (digital)
May 05, 2017 (physical)

Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, Helado Negro’s Private Energy is an engrossing statement achieved through lyrically personal and political avant pop music.

Private Energy carves a deep groove through the electronic music landscape, challenging to best Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange’s previous accomplishments under the Helado Negro moniker. Half a decade and half a dozen albums later since Helado Negro’s 2009 debut album Awe Owe, Lange has cultivated an untraditional approach to songcraft that places his voice on an adventurous musical impulse without shying from familiar pop appreciation.

The hymn of Private Energy initially sounded in 2014 while Lange absorbed accounts of the unjust death of Michael Brown and felt a sharpened sense of vulnerability and anger as a minority. Lange’s creative drive veered toward catharsis – he sought to make music that would protect as a form of protest. The music of Private Energy was shaped to demarcate the artist’s pride of being, preserving and persevering, and celebrating, as Lange puts it, “my brownness, my latinidad.”

For the marginalized, the personal is always political. This truth is not exploited by Lange but used as a platform to examine fluidity in love and amongst various genders. Singing “porque soy una mujer, porque sigo siendo tu hombre”, (“because I’m a woman, because I’m still your man”), on Private Energy’s opening track “Tartamudo,” Lange subverts the expectations of the “latino man,” embracing instead a genderless expression of affection and sexuality. And yet the title “Tartamudo” means to stutter; Lange acknowledges the challenge of articulating one’s progressive ideals and the personal demands of stewarding the Helado Negro project.

“Transmission Listen” is another exemplary selection from Private Energy, a song so effortlessly tuneful and seductive it sounds beamed in from the radio waves of an outer world. Or alternately, an inner world. Speckled and reverberant, it’s a love song as much as a purely joyful sonic experience. “Young, Latin, and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin” are prideful lyrically but complicated texturally, fusing restrained synthesizer voicings with sparse percussion and an interpolation of rhythmic tones. Here, as elsewhere, though, Lange’s distinct voice is the spine of the music’s ambulatory energy.

Though Helado Negro is essentially a solo project, the contributors to Private Energy were numerous, demonstrating Lange’s compassion for community and collaboration. In line, the lyrics to “It’s My Brown Skin” work as a central tenet of Private Energy and an intimate invitation to the varied cast involved and surrounding. Identity is celebrated as a possible personal shelter of sorts, yet complicated and humbly inclusive within abstract territories – i.e. the real and surreal worlds, inhabited by fellow humans and those that don’t identify as human alike.

“My brown me is the shade that’s just for me / I’m never not missing anything but me”, the song’s lyrics state, offering insight into the infinite possible variations for individuality and self-invention that animates the music and ethos of Private Energy.

Helado Negro’s Private Energy will be re-introduced to the public via RVNG Intl. in expanded form on May 5, 2017, appearing on vinyl for the first time alongside new CD and digital editions. Supplemented with three brand new “versions,” this iteration of Private Energy will continue the strong narrative of Helado Negro’s spectral and transmissive 2016 opus.

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CAT#: BIS027

Release Date: March 31, 2017

Jacques Bon motions through the day’s early energy of Dawning Light. True to the record’s title, Bon composed the four tracks for his debut EP on Beats In Space Records in the morning sun, reflecting and refracting the colors of daybreak from his compositions.

Burning spheres aside, Bon draws inspiration from his past in Paris, where he slung records at Daphonics and started the record store Smallville with Pantha Du Prince, and his time in Hamburg, where he frequently helms the legendary decks at Golden Pudel. Both cities and their scenes offer crucial cues for Bon’s productions across Dawning Light and past releases for Smallville and Mule Musiq.

Beginning with licks from his Juno 106, filtered through the glide of a TB303, and foundational fits of his Roland drum arsenal, Bon embraces simplicity in setup to allow for maximum melody. Opening track “Island” assembles the palette of Dawning Light, infusing the EP with a warm glow. “We Are” twinkles like the first blinks of awakening, dusting away night’s sleep with golden beams trickled onto tangled bed sheets.

“Aurora” evokes the first rush of the refreshed energy, shaking off yesterday and centering the mind, body, and soul to power through the hours. The record’s title track bounces with youthful optimism, a fitting end for the four-tracker’s mission of morning praise.

Each 12″ on Beats in Space Records features original artwork in considerate and serial form. Andrew Kuo’s prismatic painting holds Dawning Light in good polychromatic company, the geometric colors a soft-coded entry point for Bon’s music. Constructed by WWFG, direct mail order copies of the 12” features a removable vinyl BIS logo cling.

Jacques Bon’s Dawning Light will be released March 31, 2017 on Beats In Space as a limited edition 12” and across digital formats. Physical purchase includes a free, high-quality, multi-format download.

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CAT#: RVNGNL25

Release Date: April 1, 2014

I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision for I Shall Die Here with Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak), the tried and true sound of The Body is cut to pieces, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the newly minted partnership.

The Body’s brutal musical approach, engraved by drummer Lee Buford’s colossal beats and Chip King’s mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, becomes something even more terrifying with Krlic’s post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal’s already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow.

Formed in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. The duo remained in Providence for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. A handful of precursor releases readied the band for seasoned explorations across their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011).

The Body’s curtailing of formal classification figured heavily on All the Waters. The album’s employment of the Assembly of Light Choir’s classical chorales alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming in turn prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring.

The earnestly experimental undertaking of I Shall Die Here is expertly aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body’s longstanding engineers and creative collaborators, and noted producer Krlic. Krlic’s own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with last year’s celebrated Excavation (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife.

I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavation, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory. On album opener “To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me”, a dramatic pause partitions the seismic caterwauling and savage whump of the first half from the ambient, suffocating ripple of the second. From there, the dimensional doom marches on in procession, ceaselessly alternating between shape and shadow.

“Alone All the Way” is an iconic take from I Shall Die Here. An anonymous, distorted voice ruminates on the moral dilemma of suicide, (to paraphrase: escape from suffering, perhaps, but only by unleashing it on those close), before an oscillating snare / crash pattern enters stage augmented by overdriven guitar and fully throttled rage. Dispatches of electronic color complexly fill in the gaps before Buford’s beat transitions into a tribal, Burundi-esque rumble.

King’s strychnine scream serves less as a lyrical conduit and more as a caustic, flammable element to the overall fabric on “The Night Knows No Dawn”, the harsh, droning midpoint of the album. “Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain” follows, wherein the album’s earlier unbridled bleakness is reignited by guest vocalist Ben Eberle and then tweaked in a masterful combination of pounding doom and techno drum patterns.

Nine-minute closer “Darkness Surrounds Us” sends off I Shall Die Here with the prophetic event horizon. A metered stanza of spoken lines booms in hollow space, introducing a passage of thin, searing textures of strings and mutating bass rhythms. Where Buford’s drums are triggered, they pose the final stages of the album’s bitter resolve. The guitar, so indistinguishable here from over-gained bass, proceeds with King’s vocal into inevitable oblivion.

According to the band themselves, they sought to create something wholly experimental with I Shall Die Here. In the course of its creation and recreation, they have attained that rare artistic goal: an album with few precedents and a paradigm shift richly realized. Bobby Krlic’s downcast electronic visions laces seamlessly into The Body’s already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. The onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, and in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.

The Body’s I Shall Die Here is available now on LP, CD and digitally via RVNG Intl.

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CAT: RVNGNL38

Release Date:
September 08, 2017 (digital)
September 08, 2017 (physical)

The Gradual Progression is a transformative collection of new music by Greg Fox. The seven pieces of The Gradual Progression activate spiritual states through physical means, Fox’s rigorous inner rhythms the mandalic vessel for unbound expression and arrangement. TGP signals both a reconciliation of disparate musical ventures and a new nirvanic stage in the artist’s oeuvre.

Fox views TGP as an exploration of selfhood, and more specifically, the search for his true voice as an artist. Though such a journey is by nature ongoing, if not essentially elusive, the discoveries along the path are the musical riches of TGP. For his second solo album, Fox employs new methods of externalizing his polyrhythmic virtuosity into non-physical realms.

This transfer of energy is achieved through responsive environments tethered to various aspects of the performance. Sensors attached to Fox’s drum kit trigger tonal palettes, or virtual instruments invented for each piece, which Fox communes with in the post-Free Jazz manner. That is, locating and emphasizing states of universal resonance in solo and ensemble settings in place of demonstrating individual ability.

This is where the album’s canonic influences – and inventors – are most recognizable. Pharoah Sanders’ Elevation and Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society come to mind, though the guidance of master drummer and holistic healer Milford Graves ultimately made TGP possible. For Fox’s astonishing 2014 album Mitral Transmissions, Graves assisted Fox in adapting software that translated output signals from biological sources to virtual instruments. For TGP, Fox again used percussion to initiate passages whose intensity and vibrancy match Fox’s energetic presence and focus.

Adapting the ‘intuitive gesture’ of action painting, and other responsive means of art-making, Fox developed a musical language constructed to isolate its most emotional and felt states for exploration. The subjective themes that inspired these deep spaces of TGP are numerous: personal loss, self-improvement, and artistic struggle, to name a few.

Another theme, hiding in plain sight, is Fox’s drumming. Years of supplying spin in collaborative bodies (Guardian Alien, Ex Eye, Liturgy, Zs) becomes a symbol of materiality on TGP, of organic animated energy seeking beyond its boundaries. Fox describes this tactile element as “sensing the emotionality and physicality of the world with the senses and through mental processes––about touching the walls of a pitch black room.”

TGP includes contributions from musicians Curtis Santiago, Michael Beharie, Maria Kim Grand, and Justin Frye, all lending various voices through instrument and from within. Fox considers the power of Sensory Percussion, the software program developed by Tlacael Esparza that helped facilitate the vision for TGP, unprecedented – something akin to magic.

Though TGP tackles technical challenges, the inspirational core is the humanist goal of social progress and its parallel pursuit of self-knowledge. Fox strives for a new musical paradigm that focuses less on his drumming and more on its untapped potential as one element in a polyphonic unity. This dissolution of the self into a wider melodic abstraction signifies Fox’s real artistic accomplishment in The Gradual Progression, rendering percussion’s dark matter as an invisible but essential element between rhythm and life.

Greg Fox’s The Gradual Progression is available September 8, 2017 on LP, CD, and digital formats. The album artwork was conceived by Tauba Auerbach.

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CAT: FTS004

Release Date:
October 06, 2017

This vibration is cast into new dimensions. Liberating Eros, it circles the globe, backwards and forwards, flowing to and through us. It is said the artist has a gift— suited for the erotic life of property.

On Eros in Arabia, Richard Horowitz channels this vibration and bends bandit sounds by pairing the ancient ney cane flute with the Prophet-5 synthesizer. Interspersed with other instruments and ideas, like echo delayed Moroccan drumming and self-made magic, these elements deal in duality like the ever-shifting characteristics of the composer: the Hollywood Horowitz who scores films like The Sheltering Sky and Any Given Sunday, and the Morocco Horowitz who founded the Gnaoua Festival in Mogador, attended by 500,000 people every year.

Working in natural succession from end to beginning, “Elephant Dance” demonstrates the central synth and ney node to explore energetic sound patterns Horowitz imagined to be played in the 16th century on the island of Java, around the time Sufi’s may have arrived in Indonesia. Delicately trampling the twenty minute mark, the piece offers an immersive climate of microtones that might, with the primordial matter of love, alter DNA. “Baby Elephant Magic” is “Elephant Dance” but sped up— producing digital baubles that sound less like an Indonesian forest, more like an urban hive of mechanical insect interaction.

The piano on “23/8 for Conlon Nancarrow,” with John Cage technique at play, is played “as fast as possible by a human.” The sounds are driven to derail from the space time continuum. On “Never Tech No Foreign Answer,” a cheap cassette recorder microphone captures the Prophet-5 left to the devices of its master’s inner clock, taking on a frenzied sound form that vibrates in place before bouncing off the tape case walls. Chaos is concentric.

“Queen of Saba” incorporates the vocals of long-time collaborator, Sussan Deyhim. Described as one of Iran’s most potent voices in exile, Deyhim’s work is in both the tradition of Sufis and the late feminist poet, Forough Farrokhzad. Recently Deyhim and Horowitz worked together on a multi-media performance based upon Forrokhzad’s Iranian New Wave film, The House Is Black. Here Deyhim performs a taḥrīr where vocals go low to high without any semantically meaningful words. Horowitz’s associations with great cultural icons of the Middle East, like these women, soften (in)appropriations.

Less aggressive than its predecessors, “Eros Never Stops Dreaming” introduces the bendir frame drum, the feathery wind of the ney floating above its bowing rhythm with effortless mathematics. “Bandit Nrah Master of Rajasthan” begins where the album ends, an ode to Shakuhachi flute players known to indulge in both trance-inducing circular breathing and espionage.

Horowitz is linked with the worldly sound seeking circles of minimalist and avant-garde New York City musicians, especially Lou Harrison and La Monte Young, with whom Horowitz shared Shandar as a record label momentarily. He recorded and toured with Jon Hassell and collaborated with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jean-Philippe Rykie, and Bill Laswell. Along his travels he befriended Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles, the latter whom mentored Horowitz over decades of correspondence, some of which documents the making of Eros and comes quite literally with this edition.

A record of physical and intellectual love for Arabia, FTS extends this flowing forward and backward – a shimmer that reverses the backward spelling of Ztiworoh. Eros is presented in the ever present. To borrow from a song title, Horowitz remains gainfully employed as an “inter-dimensional travel agent.”

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CAT #: RVNGNL14

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CAT#: ReRVNG04

Release Date: July 8, 2014

Craig Leon’s seminal synthesizer albums Nommos and Visiting are finally re-editioned in definitive form as the Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 for RVNG Intl.’s archival series.

Issued respectively by John Fahey’s Takoma record label in 1980 and Leon’s Arbitor private press in 1982, Nommos and Visiting were the twin brainchildren of studio wizard Craig Leon. Leon’s production was pivotal in realizing the debut recordings by Ramones, Blondie, Richard Hell and Suicide. While those albums broke ground in new worlds of sound, Leon’s own debut album was arguably, if not literally, more alien.

In 1973, the Brooklyn Museum hosted a comprehensive collection of sculptures by the Dogon of the Republic of Mali, a tribe whose religion is based in reveries and recollections of a visit from an extraterrestrial species they named Nommos. Years after experiencing the exhibit, Leon remained fascinated by the idea of alien visitors sharing not just stories of their home-planet, but musical traditions as well. For the classically trained Leon, a puzzle was presented and a challenge in place: what would music sound like if handed down from an ancient alien species? And how best to imagine it?

Upon meeting Fahey in the late 70s, Leon pitched the concept as an opportune time to employ the latest and greatest synthesizer technology available. An avant empathist and eternally free spirit, Fahey enthusiastically green-lighted the project for his Takoma imprint. After a secluded week in an Austin, Texas studio with his partner, wife and collaborator Cassell Webb, Leon returned with a collection of incorporeal melodies generated by the Oberheim OB-X, Roland JP-4 and Arp 2600 synthesizers propelled by primitive rhythms programmed on a prototype of Roger Linn’s nascent drum-machine, the LM-1.

Issued by Fahey with zero expectation of the same radio airplay Leon accomplished with his pop productions, Nommos now stands as an innovative example of cosmic-synth composition that wasn’t made for its time or any other. For this edition, Leon has in fact re-animated Nommos by re-recording the exact audio signals as preserved in the album’s original studio notes. Every patch, tape-delay speed and outboard setting was transcribed as first scored, materializing the best possible audio of an album whose masters were unaccessible to Leon due to a major label merger milieu from years ago.

Additionally, the re-master of Visiting was supervised firsthand by Leon. As its title suggests, Visiting materialized in 1982 as a conceptual continuation of Nommos. The album is in equal measure more improvisatory and constructed than its predecessor. Both albums were intended to be listened to as a set in the first volume of Leon’s Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music (the title was an homage to Harry Smith’s influential collection of folk music issued two decades prior). A creative evolutionist, Leon made subtle edits and compositional additions to both albums to enhance the connectivity and encourage infinite interpretation.

While reissues and bootlegs have appeared to relieve the demand for these records, this collection will stand as definitive versions authorized by Craig Leon himself. The vinyl edition will be housed in a 2xLP set that includes detailed artwork and two essays by Leon. The first tells the complete story of the stargazing Dogon people and their prescient understanding of cosmology. The second details Leon’s adventure in creating the Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1, an epic story bookended on this side of history as one seamless synth classic.

Craig Leon’s Anthology of Interplanetary Folk Music Vol. 1 will be released June 24, 2014 as a double LP set on RVNG Intl.

100 limited edition vinyl sets will be pressed on clear vinyl to encourage continuous, comprehensive listening.

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CAT #: RERVNG01 / RERVNG01.5

Synthesist is the debut album by Harald Grosskopf, the enigmatic percussionist behind Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, and Cosmic Jokers. Originally released by Sky Records in 1980, RVNG Intl. celebrates the 30th year anniversary with this newly mastered and packaged reissue.

Berlin, Germany, summer of 1979, Harald Grosskopf, then 30 years old, was at a personal and creative crossroads. His girlfriend just left him, and Ashra (Manuel Göttsching’s “solo” project) was on temporary hiatus. Harald always considered himself a rhythmic accomplice to his numerous collaborators’ lead, until prompted by some fellow musician friends to pursue a singular creative vision.

Armed with a MiniMoog and Revox reel-to-reel, Grosskopf set off for the West German countryside that fall and isolated himself in a home studio for almost two months to record Synthesist. The temperamental analog synthesizer and sequencing technology created a long learning curve eventually resulting in a harmonious union of man and machine.

The human response undeniably colors the eight songs of Synthesist and aligns the album with some of the more melodic output of the Berlin School of Electronic Music. The title track and “Transcendental Overdrive” almost take on pop qualities. Harald’s live percussion opens up tracks like “So Weit, So Gut” and “Emphasis” for jammed out exploration. Where the album veers into the ambient space clusters of “B. Aldrian” or “Trauma”, it’s hard not to consider Synthesist the nexus of Krautrock, Kosmische, and New Age.

Re-Synthesist, the companion compilation to Synthesist, is an assemblage of reinterpretations of Grosskopf’s work by a new vanguard of electronic and experimental artists including Oneohtrix Point Never, Blondes, Arp, Stellar Om Source, CFCF,James Ferraro, and many others.

Although Synthesist has been unavailable on vinyl for almost three decades, it doesn’t fetch unfathomable collector fees. Selecting Synthesist as our first reissue is more about the connectivity to a new audience than the scarcity fetish for a select few. It’s about sharing Harald’s story and celebrating an album musically accomplished and compelling from start to end.

The Synthesist LP comes as a deluxe package on post-consumer recycled goods, including a unique reverse bound record jacket and full color liner notes by Harald Grosskopf in English and German. The Re-Synthesist compilation is only available with vinyl purchase, both available digitally through our usual storefront suspects.

Composed, arranged, and performed by Harald Grosskopf.
Produced by Harald Grosskopf.
“Space Sounds” performed by Udo Hanten.
Recorded by Eberhard Panne and Harald Grosskopf.
Basic tracks recorded late 1979 at Udo Hanten’s flat.
Additional recording & mixing at Panne & Paulsen Studios, Frankfurt, Germany.
Photography by Detlef Maugsch.
Original artwork by Siegfried Kottler.
Remastered by Graeme Durham at The Exchange.
Liner note translation by Mike Burns.
Art direction by Kevin O’Neill.

Sample Tracks

Videos

Harald Grosskopf – Synthesist (Excerpt) from RVNG Intl. on Vimeo.

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CAT: RVNGNL40

Release Date:
October 20, 2017 (digital)
October 20, 2017 (physical)

With a melodic cluster dripping into a pool of dark water, UkabazUmorezU’s arrival ripples as an apex in Sugai Ken’s continued construction of a deeply resonant, enveloping sound world. Upon contact, UkabazUmorezU gently and generously unfurls across aural alleys and streets mundanely but mystically detailed with recontextualized Japanese rituals and tradition.

Sugai’s compositional language took its most cohesive form in the producer’s almost decade long career with the 2016 album On The Quakefish. Evolving the sound design intuited on 2010’s ToKiShiNe and 2014’s Tada, Quakefish utilized an all-seeing, all-knowing edit for wider screens and wilder properties. The sable stage set for UkabazUmorezU is both bottomless and forgiving, a rich soil for new experiments to grow in Ken’s self-described “style that conjures [the] subtle and profound ambience of night in Japan.”

A lived experience of traditional Japanese music’s conversation with environment, and vice versa, forms the melodic make-up and metaphysical philosophy conditioning UkabazUmorezU. Upon imagining a landscape, Sugai decomposes the image (and the images within the image) and replaces it with a sound representation – an artifactual terrain, tethered to but abstracted from the natural world.

The eleven pieces which form UkabazUmorezU dovetail meaningfully with the invented album title, roughly translating to “slow and steady wins the race.” Made up of recordings sourced and appropriated from the local performing arts center of Kanagawa, Japan (where Sugai lives), his daily surroundings, and Sugai’s tool kit of electronic synthesis, UkabazUmorezU evokes tranquil patience while never settling into a single style or still of sound for too long.

Sugai Ken’s upbringing among a generation of Japanese artists exposed to Western culture becomes the basis for another part of UkabazUmorezU’s ritualistic experimentation. On “Sawariyanagi,” for example, an atmosphere inspired by the yokai monster Yanagi Onna finds itself speaking through a Western electroacoustic motif. Elsewhere on “Ganoubyoshi” a processed “hoarsely voice of the elderly” is treated with a reverence reserved for the realm of symphonic music – the micro and the macro receive equal amounts of mindful care in the cerebral ceremony of Sugai Ken.

The profundity of UkabazUmorezU’s nighttime arrives, in part, upon the idea that what remains hidden is limitless. While one might be horrified by the concept of negative space, Sugai views this obscured horizon as an invitation for a tempered type of spontaneity. A heartfelt connection to his personal trajectory and the folk history of his country allows Sugai Ken’s UkabazUmorezU to calmly throw itself headlong into a jumbled sound experience sometimes beyond our conscious comprehension.

Sugai Ken’s UkabazUmorezU arrives October 20, 2017 on LP, CD, and digital formats via RVNG Intl. A cassette mixtape, Japanese Avant-Elektriciteit & Hypocotyl Mix Vol. 3, will be offered in limited edition through mail order with the vinyl version of the album. Sugai Ken joins Visible Cloaks for a series of shows in his native country this November.

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CAT #: BIS019

Release Date: March 3, 2015

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

Kai Hugo works in two guises. Palmbomen is a group-oriented collaboration suited for live dynamics and instrumentation, while Palmbomen II is geared toward solitary production with an austere toolset: classic sequencers, time-tested drum machines and their contemporary counterparts. Hugo’s foray as Palmbomen II makes its debut on Beats In Space Records with the eponymous full-length Palmbomen II.

Guided by voices hardwired into machines of house productions past, Hugo found his footing on the road most travelled by pioneering dance producers by following a spontaneous ethos to create Palmbomen II. The live ideology applied to Palmbomen’s 2013 album Night Flight Europa guides this path, yet the true vehicle of Palmbomen II is optimized with a single driver-seat.

Recorded during a summer lockdown in his mother’s attic in their hometown of Breda, The Netherlands, Hugo monastically set forth making Palmbomen II with tools of a seemingly distant trade: machines – to program and to play – and tape – to record the results. By reversing the perceived potential in hardware versus software production, Hugo returned to the creative core sometimes blinded by too much screen glow: make good music and the rest will follow.

“Program the rhythms, arrange the harmonies, play these together, and record to tape. That’s it,” says Hugo. By virtue of Hugo’s reductive approach, Palmbomen II is flagrant with moments that fall outside an “ideal” mix. The album is imbued with a literal human touch. One hears Hugo riding Oberheim DX faders in real time, improvising Arp 2600 patches at the turn of a track, and dripping sweat across Roland TR-909 keys.

Beyond the process of Palmbomen II, the album adheres to two metaphysical atmospheres: his mother’s attic and The X-Files. The attic’s liminality inspired a routine practice of tracking four songs a day for a solid week throughout different parts of the summer. A solitary binge of sorts, the fourteen tracks of the album represent only a portion of the escapist trove Hugo yielded.

Simultaneously, Hugo’s binge-watching of the 90s / early aughts sci-fi television show colored characteristics in his music. Set in Vancouver, The X-Files’ early seasons are felt in the wave-crashing, deep forest melodies of “Cindy Savalas” and “John Lee Roche”, while the languid rhythms of “Carina Sayles” mirrors the human condition as morphed by the show’s extraterrestrial encounters.

Palmbomen II possesses the qualities of an artist slowly slipping from one reality to the next, yet it welcomes listeners to experience this transcendence in tandem. By toeing the primal lines drawn in early electronic production, the base – and bass – from which Hugo explores the fringe remains musically bright and in sight.

Recently relocated to Los Angeles to cruise Shaky Town’s alien lanes, Hugo plans to bring his Palmbomen II project to the live stage with an extensive crew of hardware compatriots. Palmbomen II is available now on double LP, CD, and digital formats via Beats in Space Records.

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CAT: ReRVNG10

Release Date:
November 10, 2017 (digital)
November 10, 2017 (physical)

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom’s unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.

Pauline Anna Strom introduced her music to the world in 1982 with Trans-Millenia Consort, a collection of transportive synthesizer music providing listeners a vessel to break beyond temporal limits into a world of pulsing, mercurial tonalities and charged, embryonic waveforms. Strom’s solicitation into the unknown continued through a half dozen more stellar releases during the decade, which, despite their singularity and mastery, slipped into the more obscure annals of want lists and bootleg editions.

Though Strom’s work developed during the dawn of San Francisco’s influential new age and ambient scenes, her music remains non-programmatic, an adventurous tangent diverting from the era’s ideological tropes. The artist’s own path to creative maturation was atypical. Raised by her Catholic family in Louisiana and Kentucky, she was tragically deprived of sight due to complications from a premature birth. This impairment would sensitize her to listenable worlds with great acuity and creative engagement, the loss becoming a formative aspect of Strom’s spiritualist take on the power of music.

Recalling her youth, Strom says she was “a loner and heretic.” Seeking solace and solidarity, she moved to the mecca of California’s counter culture with her husband, a G.I., who was assigned duty in the Bay Area during the decline of the Vietnam War. Having dabbled with piano as a teen, Pauline’s passion for music reignited when synthesizers became central to the serene scene of San Fran FM radio in the mid-70s. Inspired by the electronic music of the instrument’s early ambassadors (Klaus Schulze, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream), Strom purchased a Tascam 4-track recorder and a small array of synths (Yamaha DX7, TX816, CS-10) to navigate her own universe of space music.

As she gained confidence to share her creations beyond the walls of the apartment where she meticulously crafted under headphones day and night, Strom took on the artistic identity of the ‘consort,’ spiriting listeners through epochs described by her evocative musical passages. From this moment and represented within Trans-Millenia Music, Strom proves to be a delicate melodist and meticulous colorist, as well as a sound designer of great drama and inspired energy. The celestial sounds evoke the uncertainty of pre-physical and primordial elements, creating an impression of a world beyond access that Strom has always felt was hers. In the collection’s liner notes Strom recounts, “I have always been in touch with the past more than the present.”

Apart from its mysteries, Strom’s curiosity for the non-present was also suffused with a social bent. She believed that humanity was confined by its inability to access the people of the future, therefore suffering in a kind of group solipsism. Designing a world of music that rooted itself in all times but the present, Strom’s alter ego, the Trans-Millenia Consort, became a musical activist for triggering this state of heightened consciousness.

Exemplary passages highlighted in Trans-Millenia Music were selected from the three full-lengths originally issued on vinyl in addition to a group of four full-lengths self-released on cassette. This substantive body of work challenges the canonization of new age and ambient music as one-size-fits-all categories. Strom’s music induces a dynamic range of listening that captivates and intrigues, a cinematic experience rather than a meditation for passive listening.

An open invitation to earlier worlds and a trans-temporal philosophy for living, Pauline Anna Strom’s Trans-Millenia Music is available November 10, 2017 on double LP, CD, and digital formats. Vinyl and CD editions feature original artwork by visionary Karma Moffett, printed inner sleeves and booklet with extensive liner notes scribed by Britt Brown.

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CAT: RVNGNL44

Release Date:
December 08, 2017 (digital)
December 08, 2017 (physical)

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

Visible Cloaks’ Lex proposes a utopian dream language and its accompanying sound, a limitless, delicate space developed by fluid musical techniques and subconscious voices. The six pieces comprising Lex simulate a more peaceful future, their mysteries telling a new tale in an unknown but imaginable melodic language.

Visible Cloaks are the Portland-based musicians Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile. Utilizing software-based composition rooted in randomization, MIDI-translation and chance operations, the duo has established an improbable humanist mode of music from esoteric processes.

Following their self-titled debut album, Visible Cloaks offered Reassemblage, an album simultaneously honoring the post-Yellow Magic Orchestra school of avant musical adventure and diverging from it. Veering from the paths cleared by Japanese and Italian electronic pop and ambient artists of the mid-80s / early-90s, Reassemblage established Visible Cloaks’ own camp in a forest of deep sound canopied by trees grown from synthetic seeds.

The sound represented on Lex is webbed with sculptural arrangements and interpolated by the sounds of alien speech. These strange and serene utterances were created by Doran feeding a chain of multiple dialects and accents through a language translation software to create an auditory poetry of an evolved place and time. Lex features both the final version of this process and earlier, simplified experiments with it (“Keys”).

“The idea – building on ‘fourth world’ or ‘global village’ type concepts – was to create a projected language that was a fusion of many,” Doran explains. “The result was a very disorienting form of non-language that amplifies the lapses in meaning that occur with the inaccuracy of auto-translation software.”

Permutate Lex, a companion short film to Lex made by Visible Cloaks in collaboration with artist Brenna Murphy (who also created the artwork for Reassemblage and several virtualist videos for the album), is an integral counterpart, both visualizing an aesthetic alive with human form and guiding the sonic experience of the first five pieces: “Wheel,” “Frame,” “Transient,” “Keys,” and title track “Lex.”

“World,” the longest piece presented on Lex, is redrawn from a generative composition originally produced for an installation Doran made with Murphy. The original work incorporates LFOs and randomized MIDI-information, and was intended to variate indefinitely. In this ‘fixed’ version, “World” provides a more conclusive view into the impossible musical environments Visible Cloaks make real. Longer than any track on Reassemblage, “World” expresses the deepening, patient intimations suggested by Lex.

Doran says the Lex “attempts to communicate the essence of a world distant enough that it can’t be captured or comprehended from the present, appearing only surreal and inscrutable.” The statement reveals a broader musical philosophy fueling this new moment; an awakened voice woven through complex melodic shapes and phrases establishes communication between listeners and the unknown, here presented by Visible Cloaks as sounds coloring the very edge of the envisionable.

Visible Cloaks’ Lex is available December 8 in LP and digital formats. An exclusive CD version of Lex featuring the audio of Permutate Lex will be available around Visible Cloaks’ soon-to-be-announced Japan tour with Sugai Ken.

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Cindy is the eulogized muse behind Palmbomen II’s newest collection of limitless dance music. Appearing anecdotally in a cable access talk show and a four part 12” EP series episodically scored by Palmbomen II’s patent melodic house and remote, otherworldly fidelity, her story takes stage once more in Memories of Cindy.

Kai Hugo, the artist behind Palmbomen II (and its sister project, the traditionally “live” band Palmbomen), is an idiosyncratic producer that relies on spontaneity as much as structure. Almost identical to the process that prompted Palmbomen II’s self-titled debut (Beats In Space, 2015), Hugo worked through several iterations of each MOC track in a single day before using a comprehensive end edit to create a piece with an immediate, impossible feel.

On said self-titled album, Hugo applied vocals only to the video realizations of Palmbomen II’s songs. On MOC vocals appear as a primary component of and conduit to a stranger, haunted space. Whether contributing to the narrative as spoken word or morose melodies, it’s as disquieting as the echoed vaults from which they come that some other voice is now guiding Kai’s vessel.

This voice and world is Cindy’s, the paradigm depicted in Hugo’s self-scripted and directed videos and films. Hugo’s visual practice provides a separate view of the Palmbomen II venture: a surreal, neo noir-ish California dislocated by the no-frills aesthetic of its music, and the tragicomedy of its imagined characters. The word “palmbomen” is in fact Dutch for palm trees. Hugo’s background fuels the expatriate’s fascination with California as an alternate universe of curious, convoluted culture and mutant music habitats.

The airwaves of the world envisioned for Palmbomen II’s unfolding narrative are familiar, yet discordant, set apart from the gloss of the contemporary with an inquisitive view toward excavating a past that seems contrarily to have long been post-human, or perhaps not only human. The scenes and characters Kai creates in his musical and visual landscapes seem to transmit from another planet, though his own world is the more indistinguishable, alien impetus.

Creating in isolation while contemplating these irregularly scheduled programs, it’s unsurprising that Kai would find solace and stability in Cindy. After her final respects are paid and very existence questioned, a new album of Palmbomen II music – pulsing with odd particularity and evoking a somber, surreal sound of a fifth-dimensional West Coast panorama – appears in her place.

Palmbomen II’s Memories of Cindy is available October 20, 2017 on Beats In Space and collects the three EPs released on vinyl as a complete digital and CD release expanded to feature the fourth EP originally exclusive to the limited box set.

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CAT: RVNGNL39E

Release Date:
May 05, 2017 (digital)
May 05, 2017 (physical)

Exploring the expressivity within intense states of being, Latinx identity, and pluralistic sensibilities, Helado Negro’s Private Energy is an engrossing statement achieved through lyrically personal and political avant pop music.

Private Energy carves a deep groove through the electronic music landscape, challenging to best Brooklyn-based artist Roberto Carlos Lange’s previous accomplishments under the Helado Negro moniker. Half a decade and half a dozen albums later since Helado Negro’s 2009 debut album Awe Owe, Lange has cultivated an untraditional approach to songcraft that places his voice on an adventurous musical impulse without shying from familiar pop appreciation.

The hymn of Private Energy initially sounded in 2014 while Lange absorbed accounts of the unjust death of Michael Brown and felt a sharpened sense of vulnerability and anger as a minority. Lange’s creative drive veered toward catharsis – he sought to make music that would protect as a form of protest. The music of Private Energy was shaped to demarcate the artist’s pride of being, preserving and persevering, and celebrating, as Lange puts it, “my brownness, my latinidad.”

For the marginalized, the personal is always political. This truth is not exploited by Lange but used as a platform to examine fluidity in love and amongst various genders. Singing “porque soy una mujer, porque sigo siendo tu hombre”, (“because I’m a woman, because I’m still your man”), on Private Energy’s opening track “Tartamudo,” Lange subverts the expectations of the “latino man,” embracing instead a genderless expression of affection and sexuality. And yet the title “Tartamudo” means to stutter; Lange acknowledges the challenge of articulating one’s progressive ideals and the personal demands of stewarding the Helado Negro project.

“Transmission Listen” is another exemplary selection from Private Energy, a song so effortlessly tuneful and seductive it sounds beamed in from the radio waves of an outer world. Or alternately, an inner world. Speckled and reverberant, it’s a love song as much as a purely joyful sonic experience. “Young, Latin, and Proud” and “It’s My Brown Skin” are prideful lyrically but complicated texturally, fusing restrained synthesizer voicings with sparse percussion and an interpolation of rhythmic tones. Here, as elsewhere, though, Lange’s distinct voice is the spine of the music’s ambulatory energy.

Though Helado Negro is essentially a solo project, the contributors to Private Energy were numerous, demonstrating Lange’s compassion for community and collaboration. In line, the lyrics to “It’s My Brown Skin” work as a central tenet of Private Energy and an intimate invitation to the varied cast involved and surrounding. Identity is celebrated as a possible personal shelter of sorts, yet complicated and humbly inclusive within abstract territories – i.e. the real and surreal worlds, inhabited by fellow humans and those that don’t identify as human alike.

“My brown me is the shade that’s just for me / I’m never not missing anything but me”, the song’s lyrics state, offering insight into the infinite possible variations for individuality and self-invention that animates the music and ethos of Private Energy.

Helado Negro’s Private Energy will be re-introduced to the public via RVNG Intl. in expanded form on May 5, 2017, appearing on vinyl for the first time alongside new CD and digital editions. Supplemented with three brand new “versions,” this iteration of Private Energy will continue the strong narrative of Helado Negro’s spectral and transmissive 2016 opus.

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CAT: RVNGNL38

Release Date:
September 08, 2017 (digital)
September 08, 2017 (physical)

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

The Gradual Progression is a transformative collection of new music by Greg Fox. The seven pieces of The Gradual Progression activate spiritual states through physical means, Fox’s rigorous inner rhythms the mandalic vessel for unbound expression and arrangement. TGP signals both a reconciliation of disparate musical ventures and a new nirvanic stage in the artist’s oeuvre.

Fox views TGP as an exploration of selfhood, and more specifically, the search for his true voice as an artist. Though such a journey is by nature ongoing, if not essentially elusive, the discoveries along the path are the musical riches of TGP. For his second solo album, Fox employs new methods of externalizing his polyrhythmic virtuosity into non-physical realms.

This transfer of energy is achieved through responsive environments tethered to various aspects of the performance. Sensors attached to Fox’s drum kit trigger tonal palettes, or virtual instruments invented for each piece, which Fox communes with in the post-Free Jazz manner. That is, locating and emphasizing states of universal resonance in solo and ensemble settings in place of demonstrating individual ability.

This is where the album’s canonic influences – and inventors – are most recognizable. Pharoah Sanders’ Elevation and Don Cherry’s Organic Music Society come to mind, though the guidance of master drummer and holistic healer Milford Graves ultimately made TGP possible. For Fox’s astonishing 2014 album Mitral Transmissions, Graves assisted Fox in adapting software that translated output signals from biological sources to virtual instruments. For TGP, Fox again used percussion to initiate passages whose intensity and vibrancy match Fox’s energetic presence and focus.

Adapting the ‘intuitive gesture’ of action painting, and other responsive means of art-making, Fox developed a musical language constructed to isolate its most emotional and felt states for exploration. The subjective themes that inspired these deep spaces of TGP are numerous: personal loss, self-improvement, and artistic struggle, to name a few.

Another theme, hiding in plain sight, is Fox’s drumming. Years of supplying spin in collaborative bodies (Guardian Alien, Ex Eye, Liturgy, Zs) becomes a symbol of materiality on TGP, of organic animated energy seeking beyond its boundaries. Fox describes this tactile element as “sensing the emotionality and physicality of the world with the senses and through mental processes––about touching the walls of a pitch black room.”

TGP includes contributions from musicians Curtis Santiago, Michael Beharie, Maria Kim Grand, and Justin Frye, all lending various voices through instrument and from within. Fox considers the power of Sensory Percussion, the software program developed by Tlacael Esparza that helped facilitate the vision for TGP, unprecedented – something akin to magic.

Though TGP tackles technical challenges, the inspirational core is the humanist goal of social progress and its parallel pursuit of self-knowledge. Fox strives for a new musical paradigm that focuses less on his drumming and more on its untapped potential as one element in a polyphonic unity. This dissolution of the self into a wider melodic abstraction signifies Fox’s real artistic accomplishment in The Gradual Progression, rendering percussion’s dark matter as an invisible but essential element between rhythm and life.

Greg Fox’s The Gradual Progression is available September 8, 2017 on LP, CD, and digital formats. The album artwork was conceived by Tauba Auerbach.

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CAT: FTS004

Release Date:
October 06, 2017

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

This vibration is cast into new dimensions. Liberating Eros, it circles the globe, backwards and forwards, flowing to and through us. It is said the artist has a gift— suited for the erotic life of property.

On Eros in Arabia, Richard Horowitz channels this vibration and bends bandit sounds by pairing the ancient ney cane flute with the Prophet-5 synthesizer. Interspersed with other instruments and ideas, like echo delayed Moroccan drumming and self-made magic, these elements deal in duality like the ever-shifting characteristics of the composer: the Hollywood Horowitz who scores films like The Sheltering Sky and Any Given Sunday, and the Morocco Horowitz who founded the Gnaoua Festival in Mogador, attended by 500,000 people every year.

Working in natural succession from end to beginning, “Elephant Dance” demonstrates the central synth and ney node to explore energetic sound patterns Horowitz imagined to be played in the 16th century on the island of Java, around the time Sufi’s may have arrived in Indonesia. Delicately trampling the twenty minute mark, the piece offers an immersive climate of microtones that might, with the primordial matter of love, alter DNA. “Baby Elephant Magic” is “Elephant Dance” but sped up— producing digital baubles that sound less like an Indonesian forest, more like an urban hive of mechanical insect interaction.

The piano on “23/8 for Conlon Nancarrow,” with John Cage technique at play, is played “as fast as possible by a human.” The sounds are driven to derail from the space time continuum. On “Never Tech No Foreign Answer,” a cheap cassette recorder microphone captures the Prophet-5 left to the devices of its master’s inner clock, taking on a frenzied sound form that vibrates in place before bouncing off the tape case walls. Chaos is concentric.

“Queen of Saba” incorporates the vocals of long-time collaborator, Sussan Deyhim. Described as one of Iran’s most potent voices in exile, Deyhim’s work is in both the tradition of Sufis and the late feminist poet, Forough Farrokhzad. Recently Deyhim and Horowitz worked together on a multi-media performance based upon Forrokhzad’s Iranian New Wave film, The House Is Black. Here Deyhim performs a taḥrīr where vocals go low to high without any semantically meaningful words. Horowitz’s associations with great cultural icons of the Middle East, like these women, soften (in)appropriations.

Less aggressive than its predecessors, “Eros Never Stops Dreaming” introduces the bendir frame drum, the feathery wind of the ney floating above its bowing rhythm with effortless mathematics. “Bandit Nrah Master of Rajasthan” begins where the album ends, an ode to Shakuhachi flute players known to indulge in both trance-inducing circular breathing and espionage.

Horowitz is linked with the worldly sound seeking circles of minimalist and avant-garde New York City musicians, especially Lou Harrison and La Monte Young, with whom Horowitz shared Shandar as a record label momentarily. He recorded and toured with Jon Hassell and collaborated with David Byrne and Brian Eno, Jean-Philippe Rykie, and Bill Laswell. Along his travels he befriended Brion Gysin and Paul Bowles, the latter whom mentored Horowitz over decades of correspondence, some of which documents the making of Eros and comes quite literally with this edition.

A record of physical and intellectual love for Arabia, FTS extends this flowing forward and backward – a shimmer that reverses the backward spelling of Ztiworoh. Eros is presented in the ever present. To borrow from a song title, Horowitz remains gainfully employed as an “inter-dimensional travel agent.”

LP edition purchased directly from Freedom To Spend includes exclusive Risograph printed insert with original Eros in Arabia cover collage and a reproduction of a letter from Paul Bowles and Richard Horowitz’s long documented correspondence.

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CAT: ReRVNG10

Release Date:
November 10, 2017 (digital)
November 10, 2017 (physical)

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

Otherworldly and anomalous, hushed and hallucinatory, Pauline Anna Strom’s unique style of inner space music reaches across time to futures and pasts far from our own. Trans-Millenia Music compiles eighty minutes of Strom’s most evocative work, composed and recorded between 1982 and 1988, for the first authorized overview of the enigmatic Bay Area composer.

Pauline Anna Strom introduced her music to the world in 1982 with Trans-Millenia Consort, a collection of transportive synthesizer music providing listeners a vessel to break beyond temporal limits into a world of pulsing, mercurial tonalities and charged, embryonic waveforms. Strom’s solicitation into the unknown continued through a half dozen more stellar releases during the decade, which, despite their singularity and mastery, slipped into the more obscure annals of want lists and bootleg editions.

Though Strom’s work developed during the dawn of San Francisco’s influential new age and ambient scenes, her music remains non-programmatic, an adventurous tangent diverting from the era’s ideological tropes. The artist’s own path to creative maturation was atypical. Raised by her Catholic family in Louisiana and Kentucky, she was tragically deprived of sight due to complications from a premature birth. This impairment would sensitize her to listenable worlds with great acuity and creative engagement, the loss becoming a formative aspect of Strom’s spiritualist take on the power of music.

Recalling her youth, Strom says she was “a loner and heretic.” Seeking solace and solidarity, she moved to the mecca of California’s counter culture with her husband, a G.I., who was assigned duty in the Bay Area during the decline of the Vietnam War. Having dabbled with piano as a teen, Pauline’s passion for music reignited when synthesizers became central to the serene scene of San Fran FM radio in the mid-70s. Inspired by the electronic music of the instrument’s early ambassadors (Klaus Schulze, Brian Eno, Tangerine Dream), Strom purchased a Tascam 4-track recorder and a small array of synths (Yamaha DX7, TX816, CS-10) to navigate her own universe of space music.

As she gained confidence to share her creations beyond the walls of the apartment where she meticulously crafted under headphones day and night, Strom took on the artistic identity of the ‘consort,’ spiriting listeners through epochs described by her evocative musical passages. From this moment and represented within Trans-Millenia Music, Strom proves to be a delicate melodist and meticulous colorist, as well as a sound designer of great drama and inspired energy. The celestial sounds evoke the uncertainty of pre-physical and primordial elements, creating an impression of a world beyond access that Strom has always felt was hers. In the collection’s liner notes Strom recounts, “I have always been in touch with the past more than the present.”

Apart from its mysteries, Strom’s curiosity for the non-present was also suffused with a social bent. She believed that humanity was confined by its inability to access the people of the future, therefore suffering in a kind of group solipsism. Designing a world of music that rooted itself in all times but the present, Strom’s alter ego, the Trans-Millenia Consort, became a musical activist for triggering this state of heightened consciousness.

Exemplary passages highlighted in Trans-Millenia Music were selected from the three full-lengths originally issued on vinyl in addition to a group of four full-lengths self-released on cassette. This substantive body of work challenges the canonization of new age and ambient music as one-size-fits-all categories. Strom’s music induces a dynamic range of listening that captivates and intrigues, a cinematic experience rather than a meditation for passive listening.

An open invitation to earlier worlds and a trans-temporal philosophy for living, Pauline Anna Strom’s Trans-Millenia Music is available November 10, 2017 on double LP, CD, and digital formats. Vinyl and CD editions feature original artwork by visionary Karma Moffett, printed inner sleeves and booklet with extensive liner notes scribed by Britt Brown.

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Commend’s MoM (Music of the Month) series is an effort to pay tribute to some of our favorite, current record releases from across the globe. Each month, Commend will commission an artist edition poster to be sold alongside the vinyl, exclusively from the store. These visual responses will serve as farther-out artistic context for releases that are extra special to our times (and space).

Our first MoM edition is a layered, “build your own volcano” design by Braulio Amado for Zazou / Bikaye / Cy 1’s Noir Et Blanc, the 1983 mutant electro classic being reissued from its original label Crammed. Riso-printed in NYC by Keegan Mills Cooke, this small edition of 100 posters will fit inside a poly bag with your LP.

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CAT#: RVNGNL25

Release Date: April 1, 2014

If your order contains a pre-order record, it will be held and shipped complete when pre-order stock arrives.

I Shall Die Here is the fourth full-length album by The Body. Sharing their moribund vision for I Shall Die Here with Bobby Krlic (aka The Haxan Cloak), the tried and true sound of The Body is cut to pieces, mutilated by process and re-animated in a spectral state by the newly minted partnership.

The Body’s brutal musical approach, engraved by drummer Lee Buford’s colossal beats and Chip King’s mad howl and bass-bladed guitar dirge, becomes something even more terrifying with Krlic’s post-mortem ambiences serving as both baseline and outer limit. I Shall Die Here sonically serrates the remains of metal’s already unidentifiable corpse and splays it amid tormented voices in shadow.

Formed in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1999, The Body soon relocated to Providence, Rhode Island. The duo remained in Providence for a decade before moving west to their current home of Portland, Oregon. A handful of precursor releases readied the band for seasoned explorations across their debut self-titled album (Moganano, 2003) and on the widely-acclaimed All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (At A Loss, 2011).

The Body’s curtailing of formal classification figured heavily on All the Waters. The album’s employment of the Assembly of Light Choir’s classical chorales alongside more industrial music techniques such as vocal sampling and drum programming in turn prompted RVNG to inquire with King and Buford which darker corners of the electronic universe they were presumably interested in exploring.

The earnestly experimental undertaking of I Shall Die Here is expertly aided by Seth Manchester and Keith Souza, The Body’s longstanding engineers and creative collaborators, and noted producer Krlic. Krlic’s own work as The Haxan Cloak struck a similarly despairing chord to The Body with last year’s celebrated Excavation (Tri Angle, 2013), itself a minimalist evocation of the afterlife.

I Shall Die Here shares similar nether space with the morbidly deviating darkness of Excavation, but remains sculpturally frozen in a sort of earthen purgatory. On album opener “To Carry the Seeds of Death Within Me”, a dramatic pause partitions the seismic caterwauling and savage whump of the first half from the ambient, suffocating ripple of the second. From there, the dimensional doom marches on in procession, ceaselessly alternating between shape and shadow.

“Alone All the Way” is an iconic take from I Shall Die Here. An anonymous, distorted voice ruminates on the moral dilemma of suicide, (to paraphrase: escape from suffering, perhaps, but only by unleashing it on those close), before an oscillating snare / crash pattern enters stage augmented by overdriven guitar and fully throttled rage. Dispatches of electronic color complexly fill in the gaps before Buford’s beat transitions into a tribal, Burundi-esque rumble.

King’s strychnine scream serves less as a lyrical conduit and more as a caustic, flammable element to the overall fabric on “The Night Knows No Dawn”, the harsh, droning midpoint of the album. “Hail to Thee, Everlasting Pain” follows, wherein the album’s earlier unbridled bleakness is reignited by guest vocalist Ben Eberle and then tweaked in a masterful combination of pounding doom and techno drum patterns.

Nine-minute closer “Darkness Surrounds Us” sends off I Shall Die Here with the prophetic event horizon. A metered stanza of spoken lines booms in hollow space, introducing a passage of thin, searing textures of strings and mutating bass rhythms. Where Buford’s drums are triggered, they pose the final stages of the album’s bitter resolve. The guitar, so indistinguishable here from over-gained bass, proceeds with King’s vocal into inevitable oblivion.

According to the band themselves, they sought to create something wholly experimental with I Shall Die Here. In the course of its creation and recreation, they have attained that rare artistic goal: an album with few precedents and a paradigm shift richly realized. Bobby Krlic’s downcast electronic visions laces seamlessly into The Body’s already volatile mix of fissured doom metal and fused verbal spaces. The onset of a new music emerges with I Shall Die Here, and in its shifts, shadows, and reeling voices, the darkest possible formulation of electronic music has been realized.

The Body’s I Shall Die Here is available now on LP, CD and digitally via RVNG Intl.

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