serenitatem, the fifteenth installment of RVNG’s intergenerational FRKWYS series, joins Visible Cloaks with Yoshio Ojima and Satsuki Shibano, trailblazers of the Japanese ambient music scene in the 1980s and 90s. While the music excels on an environmental level familiar in the collective’s individual works, serenitatem reaches unseen stratums — a pure synthesis of artistic vision, technological sophistication, futurist ambition, and, occasionally, ancient polyphony.

Brock Van Wey, aka bvdub, is undoubtedly among the greatest and most prolific artists in the world, whose music directly affects the heart, soul, and human mind. His soundscapes spread in the air as if they were delicate and slow movements of the northern lights, or the wind that blows on the flowers of the trees in spring. There is something divine in bvdub's music, and Glacial Movements is more than honored to welcome another great work for the world, Ten Times the World Lied, his fifth album on the Roman label, as he nears forty overall. Ten songs impossible to describe in words, but which will breach the heart of all those who lose themselves in this sonic wonder. Completely devoid of vocals for the first time ever, Brock spins but layers upon layers of divine clouds, gradually darkening, gradually closing in - expertly mastered by the artist himself, culminating in arguably the best album he has composed for Glacial Movements to date.
Alessandro Tedeschi – label founder of Glacial Movements

…前接《平安夜》“朝筒”组合再续《后疫》
用乐音记录这次疫情世界家国氛围······
出品人：杨子江
制作：朝简 录音/混音：李杰
旋律贝司：何锋 吉它/鹰骨笛：文智勇
合成器/采样/：窦唯 李杰
录音时间：2020年3月
录音地点：北京光华路尊悦光华大厦b1录音棚
鸣谢：罗皓 倪卓良 余先生
周广斌 校友子江及团队！
《止止安》 《无疫》已同时制作完工待续后发

In 1999, on December 23 to be precise, the electronic music landscape changed forever. On that day, the now legendary Icelandic band múm released their debut album “Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK”. The thing is though, back in the day, hardly anybody realized. It was Christmas after all, people were busy with potentially more important things and didn’t pay attention to some kids selling records on Reykjavík’s high street. Little did those shoppers know.
Thankfully, those 10 tracks weren’t overlooked for long. On the contrary: the album went on to become one of the most influential building blocks of what back then was called electronica and today is considered an art form playing a crucial and important role in shaping and defining the rich electronic music culture of the 21st century. Now, 20 years after the record dropped onto planet Earth, Morr Music is re-issuing the remastered album with its original artwork, adding newly commissioned re-works: A note-for-note representation of “Smell Memory“ by Kronos Quartet (with additional drums by múm’s Samuli Kosminen), a gentle reinterpretation of “Random Summer” by acclaimed pianist and composer Hauschka and an otherworldly new version of “Ballad Of The Broken String” recorded by label mate Sóley. Additionally, four remixes produced in the early 2000s are made available for the first time ever on vinyl here.
In 1999, electronic music was in full bloom. The dance floors were thriving worldwide.Yet the concept of using electronic sounds in acoustic-based productions (or vice versa) was still in its infancy. Many producers were trying, most of them failed. The results felt often forced, fabricated, unimaginative, random and forgettable. New ideas require new mindsets after all. With “Yesterday Was Dramatic – Today Is OK”, múm established a new approach in music production. Instead of setting a fixed agenda and working with a distinct hierarchy for their sonic palette, Gyða Valtýsdóttir, Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, Gunnar Örn Tynes and Örvar Smárason let each instrument and sound source be true to itself, creating an ever-evolving universe of sonic bliss. Listening to the album in 2019 still makes every music lover’s heart jump. Combining Drill-and-Bass-inspired beat-chopping, future-informed DSP-programming, ethereal vocal work, indie rock’s boominess, folk music’s soulful brittleness and a lofty feeling for melody and arrangement, the album is a rare example of musical transcendence and remains impossible to categorize.
Many of the ideas formulated and recorded for the album quickly became an integral part of the canonical self-conception musicians around the world were and still are aspiring to. How these ideas really came about, though, is not known – the dynamics, the struggles, the qualms, the sudden realization of having achieved something which might actually stick. Maybe that is a good thing. Örvar Smárason remembers that most of the album “was recorded in a tiny, sweaty room in the summer of 1999 with carpenters banging nails around us, but sometimes we put on headphones so we couldn’t hear them.” It is a good thing they did. As is often the case with classics, all one can do is listen closely and let the magic sink in – again and again.

Enter a world of post-IDM, ambient and reggaeton, with a progression of deep synths, reverb, and percussion whose rhythms are born from the southern hemisphere. This is the world of DJ Python, a.k.a. New York based producer Brian Piñeyro, who also sometimes goes by Dj Wey, Deejay Xanax, and Luis. Making his Dekmantel debut with an extended EP of contemporary electronica, fashioned in his cult unique style, Python brings his deep-reggaeton style to the Dutch imprint.
With his first LP Dulce Compañia released in 2017, Python extended his cult status in the electronic music sphere with motives of ambient, and tropicale, all the time keeping his music deeply rooted in classic underground dance music. Along with a Breaking Through feature on Resident Advisor, an almost legendary appearance on Boiler Room — in which he ignited the room in Santiago with bellowing reverbs —, extensive touring, and a residency at New York’s Nowadays (healthy programmed by the team behind Mister Saturday Night), Python has dutifully snaked his way in today’s cult artist category. Making his next step with this six-tracker on Dekmantel, Python aggrandises his prestigious drum sequencing, merging the world’s of drone-driven electronica, cerebral synths, and steely out-of-this-dimension-dancehall.
The EP’s pening track 'Lampara' snakes and twists, like a rugged 90s London broken-beat, electronic exploration, evoking nostalgic feelings a la Boards de Canada. The retro aesthetic flows through with second track 'Tímbrame', where the tropical reggaeton percussion floats through wafty, deep synth melodies and chimes, like a vibey, emotive, come-down, get-down, post-party dancefloor filler. 'Cuando' steps up a gear, as the digital percussive rhythms go into overdrive, while 'Espero' goes all Gaussian, by offering a transportive, meditative expression. 'Be Si To' pulses into full Phython territory, chops-and-cuts-and-slices across a sleuth of Warping, proto-drones. The record’s final track 'pq cq' is a singular question mark about darkness, feeling, and trans-dimensional thinking, as the track shifts in-between kicks that feel one and the same between past, present, and the dub.

EMEGO 259
Caterina Barbieri is an Italian composer who explores themes related to machine intelligence and object oriented perception in sound through a focus on minimalism.
Following 2017’s acclaimed 2LP “Patterns of Consciousness”, “Ecstatic Computation” is the new full-length LP by Caterina Barbieri. The album revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.
Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed
in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.

After its own death
0 - 7:48:544 Cloudmouth
7:48:544 - 8:19:489 blue room
8:17:503 - 11:27:011 Night-walking
11:27:011 -16:41:254 Funer al song
16:41:254 - 26:00:991 Thirteen (version)
26:00:991 - 28:39:125 Crying jar
28:39:125 - 29:29:394 Entry
29:29:394 - 37:33:056 Walking in a spiral towards the house
37:30:846 - end Weightless
Walking in a spiral towards the house
0 - 3:14:509 Night-walking
3:14:509 - 8:37:153 Funeral song
8:37:153 - 12:59:510 Thirteen
12:59:510 - end Walking in a spiral towards the house
“Crying Jar” features Michael Morley, Gabie Strong, and Christopher Reid Martin.
Thanks to Matt, Marcel, Sergio, Fridaymilk, Jefre, and to Kassian.
Organizational support from ZDB/Tremor, Unsound, Barbican, and the Goethe institute.
For Aihna.
credits
released February 8, 2019

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms – how even the quietest creative act ripples outward in unforeseen ways, a whisper with no fixed meaning. Her latest work pursues this notion in a more literal and lasting fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour, in impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities. She describes it as “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?” The answer gradually revealed itself: “With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.”
In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower & The Vessel. The album’s 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s “L'enfant et les sortilèges” (“a scary opera for kids”), Debussy’s “La Mer” (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and “melody with doubt”). There’s certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.
Although much of Atkinson’s past discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, The Flower & The Vessel ventures farther into silence, absence, and voiceless wilderness. Among her sources of inspiration were “women who wonder, dream, and create vacant spaces in their art,” as well as Ikebana flower arrangements, which reflect her own relationship with listening: “structure combined with everyday noises, selecting them to make a sparse music bouquet.” Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene.

Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson’s synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, “Des Pierres,” is one of the album’s few pieces tracked in a proper studio (Music Unit in Montreuil, France) but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower & The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Atkinson’s voice flickers like a flame, framed by slabs of shadowy feedback. Her process may be personal is but its impact ripples to the edges of existence: “How does the act of creation connect us, not only to history, but to the cosmic? It’s a process of taking, and then giving back. It makes us belong to the world.”

Composed after moving from San Francisco to New England, juneunit's debut album serves as an exploration of liminal spaces neither here nor there - but never straying from its foundation. These tracks exist in a grey area between ambient soundscapes reminiscent of the natural beauty that penetrates New England and phantasms of the electronic music scene of the Bay Area. A catharsis sculpted in sound, this album is at once ethereal and pensive; hopeful and melancholic; celestial and grounded.
While juneunit shares that unreleased albums she’s made in the past center on a narrative concept, this debut is, at its simplest, a stripped-down baring of her transient soul. The entire collection is exploratory in nature, with reverberating tones that reflect the presence of empty or unfamiliar spaces.
There’s a distinct evolution through the track progression. She starts by making room on “olun,” with an ambient calling out to her surroundings. It’s 2 minutes in before we hear a beat, as she begins to find footing in a foreign place. “enwm” is the beginning of a catharsis, an exorcism of frustration through dense, deep synth tones that feel tense, but also relieving, and it's not long before the music opens up. Side A’s “xyo” is where the scene is dressed for us - we’re spinning in a dark, foggy nightclub — this is a comfort zone.
While Side A plays melancholic in its vast use of soundscapes, parts of Side B glimmer and become lighter and more layered, a reflection of a deeper understanding or periods of meditation. “wlkhm,” for example, unfolds effervescently — almost heavenly. And we end on a hopeful note, with Side B’s “cyclp” as a shining punctuation. It’s in bouncing, distant drumbeats and ethereal synths that we can feel juneunit's emotional release is complete.