Joanne Forman
Cave Vaults Of The Moon

boomkat: ...Rounding up cuts from her self-released tapes, harder-eared listeners will be in their element with Atnif’s brace of unforgivingly noisy and clenched monotone grooves, all inspired by the brutalist architecture of her home country, and each laced with a sliver of pathos that rescues them from the abyss.

Butter Sessions: ...Following on from their contribution to the Butter Sessions Come Together compilation released in March this year, Melbourne’s Polito deliver their debut EP Ultraparallel. Polito is the collaboration between musicians Robert Downie and Finnian Langham and dancers Arabella Frahn-Starkie and Hillary Goldsmith. The ensemble integrates improvised techno and contemporary dance to form well-considered and captivating performances. The spirit of these performances are masterfully captured on the 12” record. On the transition between mediums, the group states; “we always aim to capture the unpredictability and liveliness of our improvised performances when we record, and try to sculpt the feeling of continuous movement which is so intrinsically tied to Polito’s identity.”Ultraparallel consists of four tracks that were extracted from studio sessions, emerging organically whilst jamming. The EP’s introduction Hornet’s Web wields mutilated samples of vocals and spoken word, paired with abrupt rhythms to forge anomalous techno. The eponymous track Ultraparallel, recorded in 2018, is a dark and brooding arrangement with a murmuring melody and an infectious recurring bassline. Polito reflects; “this track is from the first batch of studio sessions we had as Polito where our intention was to create more discrete ‘tracks’ which could be played by DJs, rather than the longform compositions more similar to the live performances which we had recorded up to that point.”Turning the record over, Seventh Limb embodies the music for dance nuance by infusing dub with sounds from outer-space. Polito reveals; “we wanted to explore creating something more in line with the mood of our live performances, which are typically slower and have a rather meditative atmosphere. The more relaxed tempo allows the dancers to move at a sustainable pace and gives the musicians more space to prepare and manipulate the various musical elements in real-time. The result is our first formal exploration of ‘the chugger.’” Ultraparallel’s finale Sublunary is a playful sequence mingling electronics with an airy clarinet and saxophone.Attuned to their audience, Polito imagines how their music will be consumed throughout the creative process. They comment “while making music in the studio, we try to transport ourselves mentally to hypothetical dancefloors the music we’re making could be played on, adding moments and sounds which would excite, energise, disorient, or have some other desired somatic effect. We’re also considering not just how the music sounds, but how it would ‘feel’ when played on large sound systems.” Ultraparallel ultimately presents a refreshing visual take on literal dance music; a considered and holistic approach to enhancing the experience of listening and moving.

The Wormhole: ...The shadowy forces behind The Tapeworm are delighted to announce the latest release to come flying out of The Wormhole. On a limited edition split LP two of Europe's foremost exponents of the tape loop go head-to-head, recorded within the hallowed environs of a former Buddhist Monastery – with dramatically un-Zen results.On one side, Italian composer Marta De Pascalis mixes loops and analogue synthesis to create densely layered collages of glowing melodic shards and growling bass distortion, her hypnotic minimal synth figures warping and whirling around each other before dissolving into entropic oblivion. 'Her Core' is a rusty, sand-blasted slab of heaviness that provides the perfect continuation from her two solo albums – a hall of mirrors collapsing in on itself, over and over.Meanwhile, Howlround is in full contraction mode on 'Hard Core', heading directly into the murky innards of a quartet of vintage reel to reel machines and using live tape delay to create syncopated rhythmic pulses, crackles and squelches that founder member Robin The Fog describes as 'accidental gabber'. Originally rising to notoriety through sonic portraits of entire buildings, here Howlround dramatically scale down the subject matter to concentrate on mapping out the endless psychedelic dimensions of a circuit board, discovering a whole new world of creative potential in the process.Both sets were recorded live at London venue Iklectik during the fall of 2017 at "A Can of Worms", an event to celebrate The Tapeworm's 100th release. What's perhaps most remarkable about this LP is that it captures a pair of artists in a snapshot, in parallel. Here, Howlround shakes off the back catalogue, stepping out of the comforting confines of the studio. De Pascalis plays harder than ever before. Both artists taken by a moment, into the harsh glare of the unknown. The fact that each has created their noisiest and most abrasive work yet will surely be seen as a happy coincidence. A can of worms, indeed…

EM Records: ..."Ecological Plantron" was a CD released in 1994, the audio document of an installation held in 1994 at a gallery in Tokyo. The Plantron is a bioelectric interface developed by botanist Yuji Dogane; it was designed to give voice to plants, using electronic means to make audible the energy of the natural world, prioritizing the non-human aspects of nature. Dogane was assisted in the project by composer Mamoru Fujieda, who helped to convert the vegetal energies into audible sounds. Though they stress that this is not music, the recordings that Dogane and Fujieda released are actually quite musical and not at all unpleasant in the way that some other non-musical sounds might seem. There is an attractive gentleness and an intelligent flow here, a vibrant energy, and one can sense that the plants are communicating, waiting for us to understand.

Provenance: ...The contemplative and stretched out twin to last year’s A Body of Full Of Tears, Sia Ahmad continues to revisit her most formative inspirations on Facade, blurring aged textures into contemporary expressions on this newest addition to the Shoeb Ahmad oeuvre.Less claustrophobic than ABFOT and clearer in sonic detail, Facade picks up threads of familial reality, gendered safety and mapping place to weave into a tapestry of disembodied found sound, lush harmonies and widescreen metronomic presence. Once forgotten and now again inhabited, the songs here continue a journey to reclaim what drove Ahmad to create and explore.All profits from sales go towards ongoing contributions made to Aboriginal Legal NSW/ACT and Pay The Rent.

hellosQuare: ...Agency's stream of consciousness art-punk might seem miles away from their previous and parallel bands - A Drone Coda, Hoodlum Shouts and Spartak - but the influences that have always been in the background come to the fore with this piece of power pop in the style of Husker Dü and The Stooges on this debut single. On the flipside, Assad (Ben Andrews from My Disco/Agents Of Abhorrence) pulls apart an Agency instrumental and sets it adrift in a wash of Islamic prayer calls and Jakarta street sounds.