These lean, athletic visions seem to stand testament to a kind of survival – a proof of life. Muscular shapes maintained only to a level of functioning physical survival, of necessity, and no further; filthy, uncivilised, caked in sweat, and battery acid.
Starved of all the adornments of its predecessor; wholly absent of guitar, of piano, of string instruments and natural wooden intimacy, A U R O R A offers a defiant new world of fiercely synthetic shapes and galactic interference, pummelling skins and pure metals.
Performed by Ben Frost with Greg Fox (ex-Liturgy), Shahzad Ismaily and Thor Harris (SWANS) and largely written in Eastern DR Congo, A U R O R A aims directly, through its monolithic construction, at blinding luminescent alchemy; not with benign heavenly beauty but through decimating magnetic force.
This is no pristine vision of digital music; but an offering of interrupted future time, where emergency flares illuminate ruined nightclubs and the faith of the dancefloor rests in a diesel-powered generator spewing forth its own extinction, eating rancid fuel so loudly it threatens to overrun the very music it is powering.
And so, is the ongoing evolution of Frost’s music, conceived as equally the observer, as the catalyst in this music, and harbinger of the idea that so often we think of beauty when in fact we should be thinking of destruction. The result, mixed in Reykjavík with Bedroom Community head Valgeir Sigurðsson, is a machined musical surface, evolved and refined, yet irrevocably damaged.
Curiously, darkness is expelled to the muddy sedge and a confusing irradiant glow permeates A U R O R A, where everything once wounded, remains fiercely animate and luminescent with charged destruction.

‘New Old World’ is a very catching musical project, a cross-pollination between swinging jazz, pop idioms and a dash of classical music (…) The music is intelligently supported by self-made movies recorded at deSingel. The videos show apparent banal fragments from life. Children playing and drawing, a stage being built, dancing people, young and old. But the combination between music and the movie works really well.
At the end, the world explodes. ‘In a playful way’, says Carlens immediately. ‘I wouldn’t go looking for big messages. You have to try and stay hopeful, right? All the kids in the movies are the musicians’ or mine. You know they’re going to be running around here for a long time to come. So you have to stay positive.’

Sisyphus is the new name for the collaboration between Serengeti, Son Lux, and Sufjan Stevens (formally s/s/s), whose new project under this moniker is a self-titled album partly inspired by the art of Jim Hodges, and commissioned by the Walker Art Center and The Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music series in Minneapolis/Saint Paul.
Asthmatic Kitty Records and Joyful Noise Recordings will release the record more widely on CD/LP/Digital on March 18th, 2014.

Ryan Lott's most recent album as Son Lux, last year's Lanterns, communicated an ambivalence with the modern world, with Lott yearning for an escape to undefined "alternate worlds". His new EP reconfigures songs from Lanterns and includes a contribution from Lorde; his previously sanguine outlook has been scrubbed away, darkened, and clouded over until it resembles something closer to weary skepticism, if not outright cynicism.

The first full-length from Valentin Stip, Sigh, will see release on Other People next month.
A friend and musical associate of DARKSIDE member and Other People chief Nicolas Jaar, Stip is in many ways an artist in the same mold. At 21, he's already toured with Jaar (who's not much older) and released a few EPs on Jaar's old label Clown & Sunset while in college. A pianist by trade, Stip makes frequent and impressionistic use of the instrument on Sigh, combining it with electronic textures and subtle beats. The album will be one of two full-lengths on Other People in the first part of this year—the Russian producer Vtgnike will release an album called Dubna through the imprint around the same time.