Hey!

Our latest release is a lush 6 track EP from a good friend of ours, working under the name of Alpine. Living in the english countryside, just outside London, Alex Smalley, the lad behind Alpine. has been putting on outsider audio experiments and performances for the past couple of year in disused barns and venues hosting friends like Keung Mandelbrot and Signals, whilst also performing himself with Simon Bainton as Pausal. His solo work as Alpine. is a beautiful microscopic sound journey through otherworldy textures and audio undergrowth. Download sample track here.

cheers! thor

Hello there!
Always gotta be contradictory, don’t we?! Just when i say we’re going all digital, we then go do another limited run of 100 cd-rs! :)

[hpll037] The Village Orchestra – I Can Hear The Sirens Singing Again

Glasgow’s Ruaridh Law is as prolific as he is talented, with a multitude of aliases and projects to his name. From the prose inspired electronics of The Marcia Blaine School For Girls, his drone project as Accrual ( with Alasdair Satchel), the infamy of The Village Unit (live spoof ragga collaboration with fellow Marcian, Production Unit), his more techno leaning club sounds as TVO, plus several varied releases to his name as The Village Orchestra.

This project, ‘Sirens..’ was originally inspired after Ruaridh was introduced to the the magical surrealism of Takashi Miike’s ‘MPD Psycho’, a Japanese television series horror/comedy/art masterpiece akin to Lynch producing a mashup of Garth Marenghi vs. ‘The Ring’. From a conversation with one of the organisers of Glasgow’s Triptych festival came the idea to do a live soundtrack to the first episode to the series for one of the Triptych events. For the performance, and appearing on this recording, Ruaridh invited several other friends into the fold, including Konx-om-pax(Display Copy), Production Unit(HPLL), Erstlaub(HPLL), and Chris Dooks(Benbecula).

At just shy of an hour in length, it’s a deathly beautiful journey into sound processing and manipulation, through varying scenes and emotions, sounds and textures slipping into and out of your range of perception; standing aesthetically in it’s own sonic right, but also as an immersive and engaging aural mystery as your brain tries to piece together the sonic c(l)ues into a cohesive narrative.

Physical release is in a limited run of 100 numbered CD-Rs, cased in slimline DVD covers with minimal manga inspired art design from Matheu Ranson, with liner notes about the process and idea from Ruaridh, and also a unique different comic cut-out in each copy.

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We’ve had a lot of requests to keep doing some physical releases – it won’t be for all releases, but we do plan a few other ones in the upcoming months – aside from this Village Orchestra CD-R, we should actually have a couple of coloured 7″ due out before the end of the year too.. stay tuned!

hey! keeping up with the onslaught of amazing releases, we’ve got a brand new three tracker from Glasgow’s finest proponent of dubstep, mr Ali Gravious! Entitled the ‘Futurist EP’ and based around a theme of modernity in science fiction and architecture, these three tracks are guaranteed to excite yer eardrums! Grab a 128 download of ‘World Of Tomorrow‘, listen to streams of the release over at last.fm, or buy the full release in 320 or FLAC here

cheers! thor

Our long time friend and collaborator, Robi/Tigrics, has just delivered us another amazing unique-sounding EP, his latest in a whole series planned for 2009 – the Brokenret (Friskfisk mixes)

In this latest 3-tracker, he’s brought on-board one of his best friends, and his favorite musician, another hungarian lad named Friskfisk, aka Lóránt Keresztes. Friskfrisk is quite the reclusive figure, living out in the countryside, and only making tracks for himself and his friends – he has never released anything in the past and doesn’t plan to in the future, so we feel very proud to have his work published here with Tigrics!

Between Tigrics’ fetish for home made modular synth kits, and Friskfisk’s strict no computer policy, the sounds created and used in this EP are simply mindblowing, free flowing over tight rolling 606 patterns. Two of the tracks are collaborative remixes of tracks from Tigrics’ earlier ‘Brokenret‘ release, the parts of which he took over to Friskfisk’s studio to work on, while the last track is a new composition they worked on over the same time.

‘Boko (friskfisk mix)’ takes the original and turns the momentum up to 11, sliding in a tough unstoppable drum pattern under the original melody, while adding layers of squelches and low-end bustle to propel the track forward.

The ‘Snyki mix with Friskfisk’ eschews some of the more wired frequencies of the original, reshaping the rhythms and synths into an epic onslaught of hyperactive drums and spring-coiled micro-edited melodies.

Last track ‘Külön’ is driven along by a constantly shifting synth line which snakes from the low-end up through endless permutations, buttressed against a subtle polyrhythmic beat structure.

wow, super nice to have the 10-20 album included in FACT magazine’s top 20 albums of the year so far, alongside such excellent company as Omar-S, Mountains, Alexander Nut’s Rinse mix, and more..

factmagazine.co.uk

Nick Luscombe has kindly asked me to DJ down at the Concrete bar in the Hayward Gallery, situated in the excellent sprawl of the Southbank’s ’60s architecture – next saturday, 28th march 2009. Should be excellent – i’m heading off tomorrow for a week’s snowboarding, just getting back next saturday afternoon so i should be totally amping up coming back – got a nice crazed uptempo and weird set all worked out for it!

Come down if yer in town!

More details:
myspace.com/nickluscombe
www.haywardgallery.org.uk

hey there!
if you’ve been following our blog recently, you will have heard me make mention of this already and also heard arcadeagle. Album now fully ready for release!

Official release date is not till a few weeks away till it hits the usual download stores, but available here and now in both 320s and FLAC.

Here’s the press release:

10-20’s self titled album is a claustrophobic hulk of a release, constructed from parts of discarded machinery, short-circuiting currents of krautrock, broken hip hop structures, dense aquatic substreams and spectral elements, all of which are funnelled towards a single cohesive hypnotic pulse.

Based in devon, the coastal and elemental forces of the producer’s environment is evident in the scope of intricate sounds layered and woven into rough shorn textures, where only a filtered ghostly impression of club-land’s influence can be discerned within the resultant sound.

Displaying a versatility in composition the album follows an arc from opening track ‘miluvs’’s vaccum sealed melody, the vertiginous ascent of ‘nei’; the viscous sluggishness of ‘jjuvxszla’, confused machine-funk of ‘wdtrhjvelgrad’, and the amniotic warmth of ‘InB’; culiminating in the post-gravitational trajectory of ‘arcadeagle’ and dub-soaked pressure of ’sA’ before the elegiac closing descent of ‘unde’.

cheers! thorsten

stunning new two track single now online from Production Unit!

[hpll033] Production Unit – Half Of A Hole

Production Unit: a member of longtime art terrorist music makers, The Marcia Blaine School For Girls, alongside The Village Orchestra and Beaker, and also one of the DJ forces behind Glasgow’s forward thinking monthly club, Numbers.

Here he presents two distinct tracks woven together through a maximal use of low-end and dancehall derived rhythms and space.

The more technoid attack of ‘A Little Hope’ comes on with a thundering beat and a snaking synthline, before the wall of bass surges forward and shredded vocal textures create a hypnotic hook, all building toward an epic finale, before finally collapsing into a shimmering pool of syrupy ambience.

‘Dem Sirens’ on the other hand is a languid and woozy half time steppa, with a slow kick drum pounding out an incessant and skewed, almost hip hop beat, punctuated with finger clicks and tightly locked transparent layers of synth and melody, like a skunk hazed boogie down productions instrumental.

You can listen to full previews ovr at Last.fm

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Its’ been a wee while since, we’ve released an album, but we’ll soon remedy that, with an amazing debut from a cornwall based lad, going under the name of 10-20. We’ve just decided on the final tracklisting for it, and i’m due to upload it to Twerk for mastering. Some narcotic slow techno, weird interesting rhythmic contortions and just general awesomeness! More details next month and should hopefully be available then too…

Aiight, our first release of 2009 is a three track EP from our favorite hungarian noisemonger, Tigrics, entitled ‘Brokenret’ – Immaculately produced dark uptempo acid tinged tracks, with nanoscale attention to details; First track ‘Snyki’ is a hard wired current of fidgety rhythm, frequencies to fry you head, and turbulent synth; but it’s second track ‘Boko (Katchkanari Acid Mix)’ with it’s monster squashed introduction building up to a runway juggernaut beat for only the freakiest dancefloors, which really kicks off! The EP closes with ‘Volatile’, a more melodic epilogue, to wind down a lovely release.

Listen in full over at lastfm
Buy FLAC or MP3 on the release page

thanks!

yar! happy new year to everyone! many thanks for all the support in 2008, and stay tuned for a fresh start and load of ideas for Highpoint Lowlife going forward into 2009!