James Thomason
Quilted Jacket EP

Moto Music goes always it's own way. There is no time, no limits, no compromise, it's just pure and honest. This time with the crazy guy and his dog, T.C.White, also known as Robert Crash! 250 copies initial press!

Carl Finlow keeps on keeping on. As the world changes around him, the veteran producer continues to do what he does best - craft top-quality electro tunes which invoke the sound's Drexciyan heyday, yet carry themselves with an assurance that is all of Finlow's own.Finlow remains a prolific producer more than a quarter of a century on from his emergence. Still averaging several records a year across a variety of aliases, recent times have seen Finlow forge particularly strong links with the Central Processing Unit label. Now, after a run of EPs for the Sheffield imprint which began with 2018's 'Projections', Finlow's Silicon Scally project offers up CPU's first drop of 2022 in the form of the 'Field Lines' LP.Silicon Scally productions have long been marked out by how they combine piston-precise beat programming with more textured synth play. 'Field Lines' runs with this formula to deliver some of Finlow's most atmospheric material to date. At once shadowy and expansive, listening to 'Field Lines' is the aural equivalent of taking a night-time drive around some futuristic metropolis.The beats cruise sleekly here. Many of these burbling machine-funk numbers hover at mid-tempo, the crisp clip of their drum programming given shape and depth by all sorts of percussive tones fizzing around at the fringes of the mix. Even when 'Field Lines' seems to set its sights on the club - the Bunker Records-aping 'Amino', for instance, or the dystopian whizz-bang of 'Static Fire' - the tracks here strut sturdily rather than giving in to full-on freakouts.However, from this sturdy base, Finlow moves outwards. Working with tones which range from rapid-fire machine-gun bass to keening, dawn chorus keyboard pads, Finlow leads us through the futurescape with the expertise of a seasoned guide. Cuts like 'Submerged' and 'Yield' are brilliantly cinematic, blooming from those reliable drum pulses into miniature masterpieces of nocturnal electronics. Elsewhere on 'Field Lines' there is a mechanical majesty to 'Inhibitor' and 'Altered Domain' which invokes the brave new worlds that Kraftwerk repeatedly conjured in their heyday.Central Processing Unit's first release of 2022 is 'Field Lines', an LP of electro-funk explorations from Carl Finlow's Silicon Scally project which will thrill regardless of whether it's experienced through headphones or out on the dancefloor.

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.

In the early 2000s, Buffle represented in Brussels the fluid and smiling face of free improv, with a psychedelic vibe. Benjamin Franklin (Lexi001, 2008), Xavier Garcia Bardon (solo in Saule, on SubRosa, 2002) and Emmanuel Gonay never lost their playful and genuine minds in the many projects they later developed (Geographique, Humus) and Lexi Disques has long been looking forward to this collaboration. This time, Xavier Garcia Bardon and Emmanuel Gonay take what it seems to be the opposite of their previous ways : thinking ahead, composing sounds by sounds in a studio, assembling them in a calculated chaos. The result is surprisingly in line with their different incarnations as well as a pure lab record. Expect delicate and meditative, time expanding composition on Aταραξία (Ataraxia), adventurous, almost epic sound exploration on Kαταστροφήαταστροφή (Catastrophè).). Aταραξία is a timeless moment of stillness in your day, 2 minutes of peace in this hectic reality. Western civilization inherited from the ancient Greeks, gods were already indifferent to humans and epicurism is more alive than ever. Aταραξία means the capacity to accept things how they are, to enjoy the now without any trouble of mind. Kαταστροφήαταστροφή is another perspective on the present times and we can all feel it now, can’t we ? But the disaster will not necessarily be depressing, it can as well be joyfully embraced if it happens anyway. This record might be for this reason the perfect cure for these days.