One look at the sleeve of Haarlemmerhout, the new album by Dutch electronic musician Coen Oscar Polack, and you immediately know he is a romantic soul: blossoming trees in spring and blue skies with fluffy clouds. It’s urban escapism. It's the park in which you want to get away from other people, it’s the place you want to forget time. And that is also what he wants his music to sound like.
Coen Oscar Polack made a name for himself on the Dutch Narrominded label. With The Skipping Monk (2009) he took us on a sound documentary through India, and on his last offering, Fathomless (2013), a collaboration with IDM-artist Herman Wilken from Hydrus, he made a soundtrack for an expedition to the depths of the arctic ocean and the inaccessible mangroves in the Bay of Bengal. After several collabs with the noise lords of Glice, Polack is finally back with a full solo album. For Haarlemmerhout he seeks inspiration closer to home, in his hometown of Haarlem, and guess what: he never sounded more exotic.
Haarlemmerhout is a park in the south of Haarlem, made famous in the book Camera Obscura (1839) by Romantic writer Nicolaas Beets. On his album, Polack gets really close to everything in the park and pulls you into the fiber. He uses local field recordings of pigs from the petting zoo and bird traveling northwards from Africa to their homes in the north. He tears the sounds apart and builds them up with layers of synths and electronics. It’s a thin line between reality and synthesis, and that’s exactly the point. Like a heavenly merge between the pristine field recordings of Chris Watson and the sweeping electronics of William Basinksi.
On Zelfopoffering in een zwemmer (‘Self-sacrifice in a swimmer’) you hear swirling streams and fluttering synths and in Welke bezweerende of magnetische kracht (‘What spellbinding or magnetic force’) Polack alters the sound of a squeaky fence into an emotional, tear jerking ambient-piece, before giving his take on new age on the breathtaking आवारा (Awaara (hindi), meaning: drifter). It’s not a slick piano playing to a backdrop of a friendly Bob Ross-like creek, but a true symbiosis of natural and synthetic sounds, reminiscent of the melancholic works of Fennesz.
Haarlemmerhout by Coen Oscar Polack is out now on Moving Furniture Records.

With Voices is the newest recording by Dutch composer Rutger Zuydervelt under the moniker Machinefabriek. True to its title, the album’s eight pieces exhibit Zuydervelt’s use of cassette recorders, tone generators, radios, synths, and other hifi curio to construct bewildering aural architecture around vocal work from Peter Broderick, Marissa Nadler, Richard Youngs, Chantal Acda, Terence Hannum (of Locrian) and others. These human voices are featured as musical instruments rather than mere vehicles of lyrical content, resulting in a sub-linguistic mosaic of primordially stirring moods.
The initial spark of With Voices was kindled while Zuydervelt was in Taipei creating music for a dance company. In the final days of his trip, a dancer named Wei-Yun Chen caught Zuydervelt’s ear with an instagram video featuring a voice that turned out to be Wei-Yun’s own (she would end up on the album’s seventh movement, a piece that features dissected bits of Taiwanese poetry amid low-pitched murmurs and whispering fogbanks of static). The encounter stirred Zuydervelt to create a single 35 minute soundscape upon which each vocalist on With Voices was encouraged to improvise, be it talking, reading, singing, or wordless, guttural intoning. Such vocal smatterings were then used to determine how the other tonal elements should be arranged, dictating where each musical passage would ultimately lead. “The idea was for everyone to just do what came naturally” he recalls, “the element of unpredictability was important to me.”
Indicative of this approach “III” (the tracks are simply titled with Roman numerals) slowly winds like ivy through staccato phrases spoken by Zuydervelt’s peer Peter Broderick, whose micro-incantations skip along mechanically only to telescope into monastic grandeur at the track’s midpoint; the vibrations of vocal cords are often stretched to a seismic hum to form the heavy implements in Zuydervelt’s toolkit. On “V”, tape recordings of Berlin electronic artist Zero Years Kid (aka Joachim Badenhorst) sputter with their own apparent intelligence like a faulty AI attempting to interpret reels of human speech in some ruinous library of the distant future. Finally, a siren-like Marissa Nadler leads the suite to its lullabic endpoint with overlapping wisps of harmony devoid of accompaniment ending the album on an angelic note.
In these moments, like much of With Voices, warm-blooded arteries seem to have grown around bits of well-designed artifice to form something warmly alien, soberly futuristic, and inherently satisfying. More than simply an album of collaborative features, With Voices is a mutating collage of modern minimalism that challenges as often as it comforts. There is an alchemical, metallurgical quality that arises from Zuydervelt’s unique way of merging humanness with abstraction, harshness with beauty, and unintelligibility with familiarity on what may be the most affecting Machinefabriek release to date.

This isn’t a regular ‘original film score’ album. After working on the sound design and music for Joke Olthaar’s slow-paced BERG film, Hugo Dijkstal and Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) decided to re-arrange the sound into one long 30-minute piece. In the film, Hugo’s auditory magic is blended with Rutger’s minimalist drones to create an immersive bed for director Joke Olthaar and cinematographer André Scheuder’s striking black and white footage of the Slovenian Triglav mountain range. To best translate the experience into a sound-only piece, the duo decided to create a new aural adaptation of the film by editing the foley and score into a new longform composition. So despite the fact that you might not call this an ‘official’ soundtrack album, the meditative quality of the film is accurately preserved. ‘A movie for the ears’ might be a trite description, but it definitely applies to this audio journey.
The second track of the album is a different beast. Created in a much earlier stage of the BERG film, it was an attempt to create a soundtrack with guest Peter Hollo (Tangents, FourPlay String Quartet, raven) on cello. Peter and Rutger were in contact for years already, but this was their first time working together. Inspired by Joke Olthaar’s ideas about her film and what its music could embody..., Peter recorded a few cello improvisations from his hometown in Australia. These recordings were re-edited and combined with Rutger’s electronics, into a half hour piece that served as a proposed base for the movie’s soundtrack. Compared to the first track on this album, BERG (score sketch) is a much more dynamic and (relatively) dramatic affair. Further in the working process of the film, it was decided that the music needed another direction –a more minimal approach was needed, an approach that was more about adding texture and very subtle colour, and blending seamlessly with Hugo Dijkstal’s mix of nature sounds. Luckily, the piece with Peter Hollo is preserved here on this album, because as a listening experience it’s a very welcome inclusion to this album.

First released in 1959 under the title 'The Fascinating World Of Electronic Music By Kid Baltan And Tom Dissevelt'. Than this edition under the name 'Electronic Music'. And finally reissued in 1968 under the name 'Song Of The Second Moon: The Sonic Vibrations Of Tom Dissevelt & Kid Baltan'.

Jason Kohnen (Mansur / The Kilimanjaro Darkjazz Ensemble / The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation) returns to his experimentations within the realms of Darkjazz with The Lovecraft Sextet's second full length 'Nights Of Lust'.'Nights Of Lust' dives into the wonderful world of (seedy) B-movies and 80s teenage angst films. Inspired by the soundtracks of John Carpenter and Angelo Badalamenti. This time fusing Darkjazz with Synthwave to create a wonderfully unique mutant musical concoction. Think of the movie 'The Thing' located in a Twin Peaks scenery with an 80s setting. The remarkable artwork and its concept is inspired by the 50's 'Nights Of Horror' comic book series by Joe Shusters. The two new music videos for the album are part of a collaboration with Dutch filmmaker Kevin Kessels, using footage from the superb short film 'Alma'.

Specters is the new collaborative album from Dutch duo Dead Neanderthals and LA-based composer and Skeletonwitch founder, Scott Hedrick. A lush and heavy offering, Specters is the perfect compliment to previous collaborative album, Ghosts.
Scott Hedrick – Electric Guitars
Otto Kokke – Synthesizers
René Aquarius – Drums

Mixed and mastered by Marlon Wolterink at White Noise Studio
Art by Pierre Schmidt > @dromsjel
Typography by Jamie Lawson > @polystudiodesign
Black LP edition of 50
Citron (Yellow + Clear) LP edition of 125
Satsuma (Transparent Red + Yellow) LP edition of 125