Finis Africæ
Amazonia

smilingc: ...Aset was a feminine goddess of ancient Egypt. She had the magical prowess to cure the sick and bring her husband back from the dead. Over 5,000 years later, a collective of individuals deeply involved in community improvement initiatives and the struggle for justice and equality would gather in the Washington, DC metropolitan area to form a social movement of their own. They named themselves after Aset, the ‘Goddess Of The Immortals’, and their power was diffused through song. They had a unique approach as a record label to incorporate local D.C. youth and give them a space to develop their musical talents.This compilation explores the back-catalog of Aset, anthologizing three distinct projects that they were focusing on from 1986-1988. Aset’s first release was a debut album from Latonya, the niece of one of the Aset members. She was eleven at the time of recording and sang about divorce, dancing, and love. She was set to be the poster child of Aset with a follow-up LP planned, but ultimately, the recording process became too demanding for Latonya and her parents. Moving forward, Aset split their creative energy into two follow-up groups, Treo & Whax. Treo was a trio of high school gals in harmony singing about relationships. Their song ‘Demands Decrease Desire’ discusses the strain we put on our significant others that pushes them away, and the group touched on a romantic-electro sound through their two releases. Whax was Aset’s male counterpart to Treo, they were meant to represent the sillier side of Aset. The group was led by two high school boys who recorded a lone 7” called “Can I Take You Home?”, and we were fortunate to receive an unreleased extended mix of this song that adds a dubby delayed breakdown.Far from commercial, “A Totally New Sound” is a collection of the songs from these three acts that demonstrate how Aset crafted an electro-soul sound that is absolutely their own. All the projects were guided and produced by the label director, Mba Mbulu. He maintains Aset to this day as an online university, one of the first-ever free internet colleges. Mba continues the spirit of Aset as a political writer.Album remastered and restored as a single LP pressed at 33rpm. It comes with a Smiling C logo sticker, and an inner sleeve displaying Aset archival material, and an interview with Mba Mbulu.

zamzamrec: ...⧘❒ ⧙❍Surprise Barbue, duo piece of Kevin Valentin and BenjaminMoutte. Ode for synthesizers. Robots with a chlorophyll tastewearing neon pink wigs. They illustrate shaded cinematic frames.They paint misty asteroid vignettes as a tapestry.Cosmic patches, raw textures, arpeggiators either hypnotic orsharp. The character of each keyboards is expressed in a preciseand careful mix, flowing into a synthetic stream in fluorescenthues.With Kabukichō, their debut LP for Zamzamrec, the compositionwas based around the creation of mini landscapes with cosmicand mythological atmospheres. The sounds evoke Sci-fiuniverses, psychedelic ambiances as well as early music andrepetitive music, not to mention the allusions to the pioneers ofelectronic music. Each influence takes place in the differentscenes of the same story.Like their first EP Super Barbu, released on cassette in 2019(ZZ56), the recording creates a unique contemplative experience.Ascending phases and striking chords, frenzied and upliftingsections, for a both rhythmical and meditative effect. While the«live» matter and experiments are remodelled and transcended.The sound becomes denser, more melodic and more balanced.The whole album is shaping by the coherence of a narrative work.Concept album, astral travel, hallucinatory and luminous. Weenter Kabukichō, as we enter in a Philip K. Dick novel : alteredstate of consciousness, parallel universes and Suddenly thevoid...

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.