Taslo Valve
Taslo Valve EP

Marco Shuttle's third album, Cobalt Desert Oasis, features a varied collection of music recorded across a two year period. Often traveling to remote destinations, Marco would come back to Berlin with field recordings, images, and other inspirations to process in his studio and turn into sound.The theme of the journey turns into a something more abstract than a travel diary, where environmental sounds blend in with modular synthesis, drum machines, effects and analog oscillators resulting in a cinematic listening experience where psychedelia, ritualism, and mysticism weave together in a sort of alien soundscape - that as the title of the album suggests, is reminiscent of a parallel utopian world.The album is rich in complex rhythmics, and more than in any of his previous work, has strong acoustic elements. Amongst other percussion instruments, Marco used the Tombak, a traditional Persian hand drum capable of reaching a very wide range of frequencies - from deep round subby toms, to high pitched sharp rimshots, throughout the record.Marco Shuttle is certainly not new to these sort of elements, but in Cobalt Desert Oasis he brings the environmental element of his sound into the forefront in a way that takes the listener into a hazy expanse where it is sometimes difficult to distinguish the machine elements from the natural - and where the music almost becomes a visual experience, which relates to Marco's own photography used throughout the cover and insert images.

5th release from the Slovanian label Luckison from the mysterious producer TRI.AL.TRIP!

Since he started producing music, Berlin-based American sound artist Jake Muir has been obsessed with sampling. His 2018 album "Lady's Mantle" was based on manipulated chunks of vintage Californian surf rock, and its follow-up, 2020's midnight symphony "The Hum Of Your Veiled Voice" was sourced from a wide variety of old records, and inspired by the work of experimental turntablists like Marina Rosenfeld, Janek Schaefer and Philip Jeck.On "Mana", Muir looks back to a misunderstood musical movement. Around 1995, a group of New York producers and DJs - including DJ Olive, DJ Spooky and Spectre - pioneered a genre-dissolving sound by unifying hip-hop techniques with ideas pulled from dub, jungle, ambient music and industrial noise. Badged "illbient", it was a short-lived genre that felt like a high-minded psychedelic cousin of the UK's trip-hop.Muir uses illbient as the springboard for "Mana", utilizing a selection of samples to inform his frothy drones and foreboding atmospheres. He ushers the material into 2021 by diverting it through his own contemporary worldview, attempting to recreate the hyperreal fantasy histories of Japanese RPGs (think "Dark Souls" and "Final Fantasy") and nod to sensual, tactile soundscapes of European industrial labels Staalplaat and Soleilmoon. The result is a magickal, sensory journey that's as physical as it is representational.If the illbient producers were encouraging a burgeoning experimental music landscape to emphasize the tactile feeling of turntablism and sample manipulation, Muir is doing the same with "Mana". Each track heaves and breathes not just with his cultural reference points, but with layered, complicated emotions. We can hear joy, sadness, desire and anguish, obscured by disintegrating noise, hallucinogenic harmonies and sub-aquatic bass. It's electronic music that's rooted not in technology, but in touch.

Two "private" tracks by the little-known mid-nineties Swiss proto-techno producer THE SECT3000 .

Better Sound 09 by the great DJ Normal 4.Expect techno, trance and breakbeat.

One EP is the first release of newborn E2-E8 Records out of London. A label to celebrate friendship and put new talents on the map.Out of Luca’s E2-E8 show on Netil Radio came the idea to launch an independent imprint with the same concept: putting good new electronic music into people’s ears, and expose people whose creative voice has hardly been heard so far. The result is a label with a clear plan, with promising talents already lined up to appear on the platform.Fittingly, the first release is a split EP between two friends.On the A side we have “Rising Sun”, from the mind of Netil Radio founder Miro Sundaymusiq. This suspended, emotive number perfectly encompasses Miro’s world, where ambient rooms and rapturous deep trance seamlessly bond together. The Pacifist Techno Version is purely for the mind, while the Non Pacifist Trance Version engages your body and translates the same emotions to the dance floor.The B side is home to two Meditations from the creative flare of Avsluta, one of the most fascinating sound artists recently appearing on London’s scene. With performances at Cafe Oto and collaborations with David Toop already on her back, we are witnessing her charting a groundbreaking path. “Meditation 03” and “Meditation 18” are part of that path – two rich and articulate works that will sit easily in many ambient sets. The Digital Bonus “Meditation 16” sees the artist playing with her voice, in a way that reminds us of Donato Dozzy and Anna Caragnano’s “Sintetizzatrice” from a few years back.Early support for this record comes from Vladimir Ivkovic, who played Meditation 18 as the opening track of one of his Noods Radio shows, and from Jane Fitz who played Rising Sun on her Rinse FM show.