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.

Composer, clarinetist, singer & spiritual jazz soothsayer Angel Bat Dawid descended on Chicago's jazz & improvised music scene just a few years ago. In very short time, the potency, prowess, spirit & charisma of her cosmic musical proselytizing has taken her from relatively unknown improviser to borderline ubiquitous performer in Chicago's avant-garde. On any given night you can find Angel adding aura to ensembles led by Ben LaMar Gay, or Damon Locks, or Jaimie Branch, or Matthew Lux, or even, on a Summer night in 2018, onstage doing a woodwind duo with Roscoe Mitchell. For her recorded debut on International Anthem, The Oracle, we've chosen to release a batch of tracks that Angel created entirely alone – performing, overdubbing & mixing all instruments & voices by her self – recorded using only her cell phone in various locations, from London UK to Cape Town RSA, but primarily from her residency in the attic of the historic Radcliffe Hunter mansion in Bronzeville, Southside, Chicago.

Guruguru Brain is a record label based in Tokyo, Japan.
Guruguru Brainはアジアの音楽シーンを世界に広める事を目的としたレコードレーベルです。デモ音源随時受け付けています！

Desire Marea, best known as one half of South African performance art duo FAKA, has released their debut album, Desire.
Featuring contributions from South African artists Sanele Ngubane, Pasja Sneijder, Nonku Phiri, Hlasko, Simon Wolfson, Gabriel Wolfson, and Gyre, the project is described as “an intricate inquiry into various themes including loss, displacement, and the terrifying manifestations of love in the contemporary world.”
The album follows two EPs from Desire Marea made alongside Fela Gucci as FAKA, Bottoms Revenge and Amaqhawe. The duo have also collaborated with American fashion brand Telfar on two compositions staged at the Serpentine Pavilion in London and at New York Fashion Week, before going on to soundtrack Versace’s S/S Menswear fashion show last year.
Desire is out now, via Izimakade Records.
Cover art shot by the queer visual activist Sir Zanele Muholi.

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.

One of his acclaimed works is his Space age pop concept album Doopee Time (1995), which followed members Suzi Kim and Caroline Novac of the fictitious Japanese vocal duo "Doopees". It was recorded with Yumiko Ohno of Buffalo Daughter, drummer Chica Ogawa, and credited simply as Doopees. In it, he blended elements of Space Age exotica with steel drums, electronics, and tributes to Sun Ra, Chopin, the Beach Boys, and Phil Spector.

Jaimie Breezy Branch is an American jazz trumpeter and composer.

The much anticipated debut album by Giant Swan, the brainchild of Robin Stewart & Harry Wright; an acerbic marriage of energised, aggressive dance music, quaking bass and hypnotic electronic noise. Across a table of machines and pedals, incorporating abused guitar and liberal vocal manipulation, Giant Swan create a cross-breed of hypnotic bass, industrial percussion and disorientating energy delivered with telepathic intricacy. With strong ties to Bristol's deep musical heritage, Giant Swan are a maelstrom of potential energy, bleeding between several sonic movements that both obliterate and invigorate. Building on a foundation of rhythmic tension and frenzied improvisation, no two performances are the same as the duo re-build and destroy their twisted vision of techno-not-techno. Steadily assembling an arsenal of heavy hitting releases on Howling Owl (2015), FuckPunk (2016), Timedance (2017), Mannequin (2018) and most recently Whities (2018), their recorded output has been sculpted and refined into consummate snapshots of the unrivalled, ecstatic energy they fire from the stage through raw improvisation. Relentless touring of DIY circuits as well as festival stealing performances at the likes of Unsound and Atonal has seen their reputation take flight as an unstoppable force in live electronic music.

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

Matana Roberts returns with the fourth chapter of her extraordinary Coin Coin series - a project that has deservedly garnered the highest praise and widespread critical acclaim for it's fierce aesthetic originality and unflinching narrative power. The first three Coin Coin albums, issued from 2011-2015, charted diverse pathways of modern/avant composition - Roberts calls it "panoramic sound quilting" - and ranged sequentially from large band to sextet to solo, unified by Roberts' archival and often deeply personal research into legacies of the American slave trade and ancestries of American identity/experience. Roberts also emphasizes non-male subjects and thematises these other-gendered stories with a range of vocal and verbal techniques: singspeak, submerged glossolalic recitation, guttural cathartic howl, operatic voice, gentle lullaby, group chant, and the recuperation of various American folk traditionals and spirituals, whether surfacing in fragmentary fashion or as unabridged set-pieces. The root of this vocality comes from her dedication to the legacy of her main chosen instrument, the alto saxophone. On Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis, Roberts convened a new band, with New Yorkers Hannah Marcus (guitars, fiddle, accordion) and percussionist Ryan Sawyer (Thurston Moore, Nate Wooley, Cass McCombs) joined by Montréal bassist Nicolas Caloia (Ratchet Orchestra) and Montréal-Cairo composer/improviser Sam Shalabi (Land Of Kush, Dwarfs Of East Agouza) on guitar and oud, along with prolific trombonist Steve Swell and vibraphonist Ryan White as special guests. Memphis unspools as a continuous work of 21st century liberation music, oscillating between meditative incantatory explorations, raucous melodic themes, and unbridled free-improv suites, quoting archly and ecstatically from various folk traditions along the way. Led by Roberts' conduction and unique graphic score practice, her consummate saxophone and clarinet playing, and punctuated by her singing and speaking various texts generated from her own historical research and diaristic writings, Coin Coin Chapter Four is a glorious and spellbinding new installment in this projected twelve-part Gesamtkunstwerk. Says Roberts: "As an arts adventurer dealing w/ the medium of sound and it's many contradictions I am most interested in endurance, perseverance, migration, liberation, libation, improvisation and the many layers of cognitive dissonance therein as it relates to my birth country's history. I speak memory, I sing an American survival through horn, song, sadness, a sometimes gladness. I stand on the backs of many people, from so many different walks of life and difference, that never had a chance to express themselves as expressively as I have been given the privilege. In these sonic renderings, I celebrate the me, I celebrate the we, in all that it is now, and all that is yet to come or will be... Thanks for listening."

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.

“This album is about being black, being trans, and being African on foreign land. It's about the tension, splitting, mania, psychosis, and depression that work like a symphony of Bop It!s to keep me alive. It’s cyclical. It's meant to be played in bed, and then at the club, and then walking down the street, and then back in bed. It’s also about making jokes with yourself to hide what’s meant to be kept for just you. Maya Angelou says to keep a room in your heart just for god. My room is full of rage, questions, confusion, and pain - I’m trying to get it clean and pristine, baby!”
YATTA is an interdisciplinary artist, digipoet, and musician. They use incantations born of loop pedal drones, channeled screams, and improvised poetry to explore connections between psychosis, prayer, and presence.
Written/Arranged/Produced: YATTA || Vocals on “Blues”: Ize || Vocals on “Rollin”: Eartheater, Ize || Arrangement/Production on “I Will Definitely Feel Good”: Felicita || Guitar on “Cowboys”: Dion Mackinzie, Eva Lawitts || Guitar on “Francis”: Watergh0st || Harp on “Sullivan Place”: YATTA || Wisdom on “Galaxies”: Kaafoe Zoker
Engineers: Ize Gonzalez, Guy Mann, Eva Lawitts || Mixed: Rachika Samarth and Izzy Barreiro || Mastered: Joni Juden
Recorded at Clocktower Radio, Wonderpark Studios, and in Bed.
Photography: Richard R Ross || Artwork & Cassette Design: YATTA & Geng

Nūr is Dua Saleh’s proper debut, and the first five tracks from their extensive vault with Psymun: it’s a spellbinding 20-minute ride that bends to its own impulses. Nūr arrived at the top of 2019 delivering the first-quarter surprise no one anticipated until it was served as frigid as the outside world. This EP harbors a pulsating intimacy, a firmly-rooted sense of self, and a smile that turns to a snarl on command. Psymun’s uncanny wizardry allows Dua to lay bare and free over sounds that unwind their subtleties like quiet revelations.

Heavy ambient comfort blankets from Malibu; the new moniker for DJ Lostboi, whose string of self-released enigmas 2017-2019 found cult acclaim with the likes of Julianna Barwick among many others.
Bringing a gorgeous pop-ambient sound sensitivity and directness to the current groundswell of ambient music in the air right now, Malibu’s ‘One Life’ is set to touch susceptible souls with its supine, spine-playing qualities.
Strongly reminiscent of Celer and indeed even Julianna Barwick’s style of plainchant, Malibu doesn’t f#ck about when it comes to heart aching composition, stirring up the sweetest, forlorn feels between her windswept intro ‘Nana (Like A Star Made For Me)’, the wistful string figures of ‘Tilting On Windmills’, her Enya-esque mini-epic ‘Camargue’, and the cinematic sweep of ‘One Life.’