R & D
Consistency

Founded in 2015, Tears|Ov are sound artist/self-taught musician Lori E Allen, classically trained cellist/mixed media artist Katie Spafford and illustrator/prison psychotherapist Deborah Wale. The trio first collaborated on Lori E Allen’s ‘Tears of the Material Vulture’ cassette on The Tapeworm, a re-imagination of a brief collaboration with Madame Chaos of cut-up cablecasts, 1995-1996, on Manhattan Neighborhood Network and Television in New York City. That release served to resurrect a hibernating creative practice between the three friends.Their writing process takes the form of structured improvisation. Allen will create a bed of loops, field recordings or a full framework. She then shares this base with Wale and Spafford who embellish or delete, the three building the pieces through long improvised sessions in London, playing late into the night. During these sessions, the feeling of a songs’ words or the emotional tone of a sound can spark sudden mood changes, altering the arc of the compositions. ‘Crucially the music is improvised – it is never the same twice. There are triggers and moments that signal moving to another part of the music, but the timings and lengths largely depend on our moods and interpretation on a given day/performance. Because of this, the album was recorded with ambient mics capturing multiple instruments. It wasn’t possible to record all the instruments separately as we respond to each others improvisation. Even if the changes are very minor, they really affect the emotion of each piece’ Spafford says.

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!

EM Records: ...These recordings pull back a curtain to reveal the mysterious world of Syntoma and early-80s underground Mexico. Founded by Alex Eisenring in 1980, making use of synths and drum machines and driven by a freedom-seeking DIY ethos but informed by a "rock-jazz-prog-experimental" background. These 70s-born influences throw crazed funhouse mirror reflections onto later Kraftwerk, UK synth-pop, post-punk and pure pop forms. The first five tracks are instrumental, evidencing some intelligent melodic and harmonic conceptions; the same can be said for the remaining female/male vocal tracks, but the sense of otherness is boosted as the vocal stylings combine a definite UK 80s feel with an unplaceable geo-temporal essence, spanning decades and continents. Primarily a trio during the period of these recordings, 1981-84, Syntoma transcends the era and stands apart from their peers with a surprising melodic sense, harmonic adventurousness, interesting arrangements and, above all, an atmosphere of freshness and enthusiasm. Available on CD and 12" vinyl with liner notes and lyrics.