Visible Cloaks
Visible Cloaks

deejay.de: ...Musique Plastique (Visible Cloaks, Pedro) rescue a nearly lost soundtrack to a Belgian avant-theatrical work from the 80s. For fans of Nuno Canavarro, Roberto Musci and Vito Ricci.

Seance Centre: ...Musique Plastique and Séance Centre are proud to present Jacques Charlier’s “Art In Another Way”, a 45RPM double LP compilation of the Belgian multi-disciplinary artist’s inimitable chanson regressive recordings from the 1980s.Throughout a long career in the visual arts, Jacques Charlier has maintained a multi-disciplinary approach that includes forays in poetry, underground comics, acting, filmmaking and music. Besides performing with his punk group Terril (sadly, never recorded), Charlier took inspiration from the minimalist sounds of Philip Glass, Steve Reich, La MonteYoung, John Cage, and Meredith Monk. Throughout the 1970s he performed psychoacoustic pieces in Liège, Antwerp, Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Milan and Düsseldorf, and in the astounding performance art video Desperados Music, filmed by Paul Paquay for Belgian television. Charlier hit a creative stride in the 1980s — armed only with a synth, drum machine, fuzz box, and his custom guitar, with occasional duets with vocalist Martine Doutreleau. He recorded a trove of proto-pop tunes which he self-released on three cassettes (Musique Regressive, Chansons Idiotes and Chansons Tristes) between 1984–1987.

boomkat: ...Peter Mekwunye aka Pedro’s self-released side of homebrew boogie pop is a total one-of-a-kind find dating to 1993 Portland, OR, and has been newly discovered by Musique Plastique, who issued Visible Cloaks eponymous debut LP in 2015. Trust that you’ve hardly ever heard such a raw, lo-fi slab so full of soul and vibes as One Kind of Love!As a new arrival from Nigeria to Portland, OR in North West America, Peter Mekwunye assembled a small home studio consisting of casio keyboard, microphone and a multitrack recorder to realise his dream of making and releasing his own music a reality with One Kind of Love. As these things go, Peter self-distributed the album on tape to local shops and it pretty much disappeared without a trace of acclaim In the history books.Fast fwd to the modern day and its rediscovery tees up a total melter of an album for a whole new generation, offering the kind of obscurity that you’d well expect to hear on Awesome Tapes From Africa, especially with its distinctly Nigerian-sounding melodies and loping grooves influenced by Fela Kuti and the piquant dance-pop of William Onyeabor. But this this one ended up coming out in America and therefore kinda by-passed ATFA to end up in its own geo-temporal time-warp.Now remastered from tape by Brandon Hocura at Invisible City, One Kind Of Love’s blend of impassioned pop songs and hushed, spoken word poetry set to wobbling grooves and rhythmelodies possesses a deeply special charm, remaining as testament to the idea of going it alone and finding your place in the world, which, although it only took him 24 years, Pedro has clearly come back into circulation at a time when bedroom boogienauts and dreamers are especially hungry for this stuff - a deeply familiar yet at once alien and enigmatic sort of electronic soul.Highly recommended!

boomkat: ...Pop Negatif Wastad’s eponymous EP from 1989, including all of their self penned songs. This is the first release in a series of reissues from the height of the 80’s & 90’s Welsh music scene."Hailing from mid Wales, Pop Negatif Wastad emerged in the late 80’s as the sole collaboration between Esyllt Anwyl and Gareth Potter. Esyllt cut her teeth in the exceptionally bent no wave group Crisialau Plastig, while Gareth – an actor on the UK soap opera Eastenders – was in the midst of breaking away from his post-punk group Traddodiad Ofnus to form the mighty hip hop/acid techno outfit Tŷ Gwydr. With their backgrounds in experimental pop and the thumping beat of the nascent rave scene looming in the background, the duo took an unapologetic approach to music making with no regard to formulaic sound, gender roles, or expectation.Esyllt served as the mastermind behind the music (along with Gorwel Owen on production – Rhosneigr’s answer to Martin Hannett) while Gareth balanced the project with his dialed vocal style and ideological approach. They developed an emotionally driven and fearless collection of tunes, a charged version of synth pop that elaborated on their experience within the Welsh scene while combining influences from emergent sounds akin to what you’d hear on The Haçieda dance floor (where rumour has it, their Be Music/ Section 25 invoking track “Iawn” was played). Stabs, arpeggiated synths, harsh percussion, piano house leads, concertina melodies, warped samples, and dubbed out delay were quilted together to the chug of drum machines, creating a genre-bending landscape woven with vocals reminiscent of New Order and Joy Division (with the added bonus of being sung in the Welsh language)."

Seance Centre: ...We humans, the nascent beings that we are, still haven’t quite figured out the full potential of music. Dancing, meditating, emoting, protesting; these are all pretty basic. But what if we communicated more complex ideas with music? What if we codified all of our activities with music? This idea came to composer Joanne Forman when she was commissioned to create the soundscape for an environmental exhibition of sculpture called Artifacts from an Alien Civilization in 1987. The sculptures, elaborate ruins that had been found on the moon, begged the question: who created them and for what purpose? Joanne Forman imagined that Earth’s moon was a vacation spot for advanced beings from another galaxy. Cave Vaults of the Moon became a collection of sonic texts describing the fun things that went on there; earth-viewing, collecting information, building and playing. In her mind the sculptures in the exhibit were the remnants of a deserted playground of moon castles.