After nearly two decades of releasing on other people's labels, Icelandic producer Aðalsteinn Guðmundsson aka Yagya now launches his own new Small Plastic Animals imprint with a brand new album, Old Dreams and Memories.
This album marks another subtle move away from the icy dub techno sounds he has dealt in before, hence the need for a new label. It follows full lengths such as Stars and Dust and Sleepygirls, both on Delsin, as well as 2019's Stormur on A Strangely Isolated Place, and plenty of vital work as part of the Thule Musik collective. This acclaimed album specialist is known for his mastery of atmosphere, melody and mood and ability to create soothing and escapist soundtracks that make for utterly mindful experiences.
The new record still has a slowly propulsive rhythm underpinning every track, but they are only a small part of the overall picture. Some of the tracks are brought to life with vocals by Natsuko Yanagimoto and poems by Michizō Tachihara, while others are rich with naturalistic found sounds and saxophone by Óskar Guðjónsson.
Opener For The First Time has spoken words snippets that bring a real sense of intimacy to the sombre dub, 'Mountain Story' has gorgeous strings performed by Pablo Hopenhayn, who also appears on 'Reminiscent' with more solemn playing that brings a real melancholic beauty to the track. 'Memories of Old Dreams' is a beautiful ambient passage of spoken word that soothe the soul, 'Light And Shadow' is orchestral dub techno with a wandering lead that drifts like a cloud and 'Wandering In The Fog' has the sound of flowing water, gently lilting trumpets disappearing into thin air as soft drums roll on below. 'Rainbow And Human' pairs more whispered vocals with muffled crowd noises and yawning synths that bring the joy of a new day and the three closing tracks offer exquisite piano playing, warm but somehow also frosty dub landscapes 'Beauty In Loneliness' and a forlorn, violin-laced closer with 'Overflowing Darkness.'
Old Dreams and Memories is a rich symphony of luxurious sound, with transportive rhythms and hugely evocative layers of melody, the human voice and cinematic sampling all showing a further evolution in the art of this standalone producer.

After the 2020 release of Old Dreams And Memories, Icelandic dub techno linchpin Yagya returns for a second release on his emergent label, Small Plastic Animals. This latest venture marks a new chapter in the artist’s accomplished career, having released on Delsin, Subwax BCN and A Strangely Isolated Place as well as forming a core part of the Thule collective alongside his partner in Sanasol, Thor. As those associations ably point out, the music Yagya crafts is spacious and atmospheric, using the techno tradition as a vessel for meditative as well as emotional exploration and experimenting with sound design according to a specific, patiently cultivated style.
Always Maybe Tomorrow finds Yagya ruminating on the behavioural energy of environments as viewed from afar – the man-made electricity of urban expanses and the interconnected flora and fauna of ecosystems. Looking to his chosen tools as a means to express these ideas, he employed a non-linear approach to each of the four tracks on this EP, choosing to create musical systems in constant flux rather than composing each piece in a conventional left-to-right narrative. Yagya’s trademark voluminous chords and vast pads ebb and flow through filters controlled by LFOs and randomness, creating their own micro-incidents and macro evolution as though holding a mirror up to the environments the initial inspiration was drawn from.

Known to many for his infamous ambient dub techno album, ‘Rigning’, Yagya’s landmark release took us deep amongst the rain-drenched forest. The beautiful, slowly shuffling atmospheric masterpiece set a blueprint for the notorious style we now know him best for. Fast forward ten years, and the gently falling rain from Rigning has now intensified. Yagya has shifted to something with more energy, a more defined groove, and a growing euphoric state: Stormur.
Stormur, sees Yagya continue to evolve his sound into the pure techno realm. His unique palette still identifiable, but the focus now on the swirling hypnotism, the delicate tonal progressions, whispering vocals, and the underlying current that transports you. From the forest floor to the soaring treetops, the dense whirlpools of mist, and the breathtaking landscapes are now seen from above.
Confident in its simplicity and efficiency, Stormur is focused on the subtle flow and progression between tracks akin to a full DJ set, transporting you from one chapter to the next. Each track taking its cue from the previous. The tonal shifts are minimal, resulting in a trance-like state throughout the ten movements, best absorbed in one sitting, with guest vocalist Hatis Noir providing an angelic voice amongst the shifting patterns, swirling synthesizers and driving grooves.

A carefully assembled and curated sound sculptures for a limited event and performance at Detroit's Elixir event during movement, festival, detroit, mi. usa. 05/29/2022
These 2 albums feature over 2 hours of live reworks, exclusive new material from forthcoming vinyl releases, remixes and redesigns all dubbed to infinity using a wide array of vintage analog circuits; on that note, we'll let the music do the talking....
timeless.
sonic.
art.

It’s called Home, and for a myriad of reasons… from my attempts to examine and re-examine what ‘home’ means, living 7,000 miles from my own, in a place that goes out of its way to remind you every time you leave the house that where you are is not your home… to really what ‘home’ means philosophically I guess, how much of it derives its meaning intrinsically, how much of it is manufactured, and really what it means to ‘be home’… to the fact that my return to Echospace is really a return home for so many reasons I could never even attempt to outline here.
This issue of what home means, and what it means to be home, is one I’ve grappled with for years upon years of self-imposed exile in China, isolated from everyone and everything that I would associate with what at least would best encroach on a standard definition of ‘home’… it’s hard to describe until you experience it yourself, like most things, I guess.
The album is a bit hard to describe… while it obviously has many qualities that my work always contains, there’s just something about it that is nothing like anything else I’ve made… I really don’t know how to describe it… from the way it sounds, to the way it feels, there is just something about it that’s unlike anything else I’ve made. It’s by far my most hypnotic work, and really possibly my most powerful, but in a quieter way than I think most would expect when I use a word like that, as I’m generally known for being pretty overboard.
It’s pretty massive… a double CD, all of my own work, with one CD containing (some) beats, and one beatless, but it’s dramatically different from White Clouds Drift On and On, much darker, much more hypnotic, and more somber in some ways, while in some ways going to new heights of emotion that even White Clouds couldn’t reach, or really anything I’ve made before.
I really am honestly perplexed with this fascination in recent years with seeing what artists look like. Who cares?
As with anything, I don’t really know how or why it came out the way it did, I just listened to my heart and went with what it said… but (just like White Clouds) it was made from beginning to end completely from scratch purely for Echospace, and more importantly, was the first time I sat down to try to face this issue of ‘home’ head-on… a lot of my music touches on it, as it’s such a massive part of my daily life, but this is the only time I’ve ever really tried to face it head-on, in all its beautiful, horrible, exhilarating, terrifying glory. Though it couldn’t really be much more different from my last Echospace album, it shares a similarity, in that it could have only been made for Echospace. No one else in the world could bring out what it brought out in me. As always, I just hope someone can feel what I feel.

Mastered By – Alexandre Lehmann
Photography By – Alexander Kopatz
Written By, Producer – Ludvig Cimbrelius

At the center of us is a focal point of consciousness
Perfectly still, yet vibrant with life
This is our natural state
Ever at peace, yet ever expanding
Ever at peace
In knowing that being can never cease to be
Thus there is no death
Only eternal life
Ever expanding
In knowing that eternity is never done
We are in continuous motion towards what lies beyond
Across endless new horizons
~ Ludvig Cimbrelius 2015 ~

Their submerged "scuba" sound, presented in dark tone colors and reverberating to infinity, is now instantly identifiable as one of the 'soundmarks' of Berlin club culture. Just as importantly, it is still a palpable aftershock of a pre-millenial genre explosion that saw deep dub, shimmering post-rock, abstract hip-hop and art-damaged noise all drinking from the same well of inspiration. For proof of Porter Ricks' enduring legacy, look no further than the fact that "dub techno" is now a stylistic movement that has expanded far beyond the confines of Berlin and the Basic Channel / Chain Reaction label alliance (where Mellwig's mastering skills also played a starring role). Lurid traces of PR's aesthetic can now be found in the work of producers like Andy Stott and Miles Whittaker, showing the potential for the duo's unique 'aquatic' techniques to be applied to a variety of different musical contexts. Their new LP on Tresor, Anguilla Electrica, may be their first full-length release in seventeen full years, but it radiates with confidence and with a clarity and intensity rarely seen in a world so oversaturated with communications noise. It's made clear at once that it's a continuation of a sonic ideal rather than a tribute to what has already been achieved: the duo is not idly sitting back while their newer acolytes do their talking for them.

Recorded at Le Poisson Rouge, Bleecer Street, New York City, on 6 February 2010, during the Unsound Festival.
This is a limited edition 2xLP gatefold vinyl package includes a complimentary CD version of the album in a stamped paper envelope. The tracklist and track times of the vinyl and CD versions are identical.

Boomkat Product Review:
NON Worldwide co-founder Nkisi rolls out an instant modern classic with ‘7 Directions’ for UIQ. A masterful debut album informed by African Cosmology and Congolese rhythms, it’s aesthetically comparable with music ranging from Æ’s ‘Incunabula’ to The Connection Machine’s ‘Painless’, Lee Gamble hyperprisms and William Bennett’s Cut Hands, but ultimately it’s peerless in the (hyper)modern field...
Specifically referencing the writings of Kongo scholar Dr Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki Fu-Kiau and the African Cosmology of the Bantu-Kongo, ‘7 Directions’ is offered as a gateway to hallucinatory mindstates via aerobic mysticism. Ultimately it is focussed on the idea that rhythm has the capacity to modulate and experiment with conditions of perception, and to disrupt predetermined expectations, and does so in the belief that new movements of energy can determine collective behaviour and generate new possibilities for knowledge production and dissemination - perhaps even supposing rhythm’s potential for premonitory pattern recognition.
We fully concur with Nkisi’s notions about dance music’s potential for transferring and conveying energy, both negative/ecstatic, abstract/intuitive, so it’s a rare pleasure to hear her limn those ideas so beautifully, effectively and open-endedly thru ‘7 Directions’. In each part she inimitably unlocks and retunes the body’s rhythmic anticipation with breathless batteries of incredible polyrhythms that arguably make the majority of Western dance styles sound like rote line dance music for folk with little imagination in their bones.
In each direction Nkisi’s drums writhe and rattle in a simultaneously ancient/futuristic style - ancient because they explicitly reference percussive traditions way older than Western civilization, and futuristic because they’ve never been presented in this way before, alloyed with cosmic synth pads that draw lines from Detroit to the Lowlands and back to source, way out in the cosmos. But rather than closed systems for study and analysis, Nkisi’s trax feel like living, bristling organisms or virulent systems that only become activated with user participation, where those ideas can begin to take root, grow and mutate via kinesis.
Even if you don’t dance in public and save ’7 Directions’ for your living room/bedroom/holosphere, listeners will get the best out of this album by putting something in themselves, by shutting their eyes and dancing with it.