Private Release

Sunday, December 26, 2021

Ekin Fil - (2017) Inflame CS

Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS044

Currently in a crucial phase of her oeuvre, Istanbul’s Ekin Fil presents the results of her first soundtrack commission with Inflame, a 30 minute collection of evocative, murky electronic cues reflecting the paranoia of Ceylan Özgün Özçelik’s psychological thriller.

Rather than her signature, reverrb-laden guitar and glossolalic vox, Ekin uses a palette of synths, electronics and drum machines to convey a tense and claustrophobic sound, where severed voices float thru minor key melodies and slow, epileptic hallucinations, sometimes prodded with skeletal electro rhythms, at other left to linger uncomfortably in crepuscular mid-air with curt resolutions.

Ekin Fil - (2017) Ghosts Inside LP

Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS042

Istanbul’s forlorn shoegaze spirit Ekin Fil returns to haunt our waking life with Ghosts Inside, the 2nd late night bloom in her fruitful relationship with San Francisco’s Helen Scarsdale Agency after Being Near [2016].

It arguably contains the most assured bedroom pop songwriting and elusive, shadow-chasing production to be found in her cultishly admired catalogue of the past decade, and, just like the work of comparable artist, Grouper, maintains an ever crucial temporal and metaphysical bridge between the original ethereal craft of Cranes, Cocteau Twins and Slowdive and the modern day for those who need it.

It would take some kind of glossolalic deciphering device to work out what Ekin is singing, but that’s really not the point, as her gauzy lilt conveys something practically, literally ineffable that transcends prosaic meaning and works with a plasmic, osmotic effect that really gets in the pores, perfusing your system with an efficacy worthy of the album’s title. In Ekin’s hand, or at her feet, an array of guitar pedals becomes her scrying diffusion prism, sublimating her sylvan piano, guitar, and vocals into something that by-passes language and deals instead in pure, yet elusive emotion.

While maybe not immediately apparent, this heavily introspective sound stems from the current socio-political upheaval Ekin and people of her generation are experiencing in Turkey right now, and we could say across the Middle East in general. It could therefore be heard as a numbing salve for “psychic distress, heartache and depression”, as the label puts it, perhaps offering a middle-distance focus that penetrates all the crap and finds a mutual, meditative point of audition and perception familiar to anyone sensitive to those issues, both within the region and far beyond. Which is probably why we’re just as rapt, here in a drizzly Manchester summer as the guys at her label in San Fran and, soon enough, other listeners across the globe.

There’s no doubt that Ghosts Inside is a masterful album, Ekin Fil’s definitive opus, no less.

Ekin Fil - (2018) Maps LP

Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS 048

Ekin Fil revels in negative ecstasy on her 4th haunting for the sympathetic ears at Helen Scarsdale Agency. Make sure to check for the Sarah Davachi-like spectre of ‘On The Move’ and the billowing glossolalia of ‘Nocturnal Arc’ for her most shivering sensations, and clock the closing number ‘At Dawn’ for a surprising new electronic angle to her sound recalling the most opiated Alessandro Cortini works

“Ekin Fil continues her quietly complex dream-pop oeuvre on Maps. For many years now, this Istanbul musician has been writing mysterious and haunting songs, rich in heavy-reverb effects and an introspective torpor. With each successive album, her songwriting has blossomed through broader instrumentation and more intricate melodic phrasing, though the somber atmospherics and ghostly manifestations remain a judicious constant. Minor-key, tear-stained notes of piano, organ, and guitar veer along elliptical orbits as a soft-whisper lilt of Ekin's voice narrates more by emotive decree than by literary couplet.

Maps addresses the distance and dislocation of the self from the bustling center of Istanbul, where Ekin FIl (neé Ekin Üzeltüzenci) had once called her home. Having spent her first winter on a relatively quiet island in the Sea of Marmara (while still in the greater metropolitan umbrella of Istanbul), Maps is "lonely, different, kind of isolated," according to Ekin, who also noted that the island had "too much silence around. There is no other choice but to concentrate, I guess." Her poetics of silence on her previous recordings had been noted as an antidote or a dream capsule of sound in response to Istanbul's cauldron of politics, culture, and philosophy that has been boiling almost since the beginning of civilization. Maps bends that maritime silence into wind-swept smudges that complement her already spacious compositions.

The saddest songs of The Durutti Column excised of rhythm and those few plunges into sorrow by Harold Budd make for apt comparisons to Maps, in addition to the drone-on classics of Grouper, Slowdive, and Sarah Davachi. “

Ekin Fil - (2019) You, Only CS

VAKNAR – VAK13

On the new dual cassette release You, Only, both piano and voice emerge with more clarity only to crawl deeper into the soft gauze of the noise floor. On “Other Others” they are joined by the vibrato of vintage organ, and on “You, Only”, they are overtaken by a collage of field recordings and glistering synth whorls. The two long tracks of the second tape (“Scar” and “Incident Light”) reveal Üzeltüzenci slipping deeper into a more esoteric and piecemeal compositional style. Her simple, textured melodies give way to abstract forms forms that stretch and refract against a horizon line of eerie silence. Ekin Fil’s penchant for burying sounds in drones reverb and self-effacing static make these gasps of open space all the more striking. These are moments of perforation and permeability - places where the thin line between nothing and something has worn away completely.

Ekin Fil - (2020) Coda LP

Helen Scarsdale Agency – HMS054

In recent years, the Turkish drone-pop composer Ekin Fil (born Ekin Üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. Since her first recordings that were published by Root Strata and Students of Decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. Once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. That compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album Coda. It’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but Ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. Just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. This subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of Coda. Her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of Grouper, Felicia Atkinson, and Harold Budd.

Ekin Fil - (2021) Feelings

A Sunken Mall – none

Turkish ambient shoegaze reductionist Ekin Fil recovers from the anxiety of 2020 with a foggy set of introverted folk and melancholy cinematic piano. RIYL Grouper, Deaf Center, William Basinski.

Following an impressive run of releases for Helen Scarsdale Agency and Students of Decay, Ekin Fil's latest album is an exercise in emotional catharsis. Her soft vocals are the album's anchor, and add a beam of optimistic humanity through the thick fog of doom. On 'Little One', he voice cuts through piano and sounds like a lost Cocteau Twins demo, while on 'Infinite Space', it's almost reduced to a ghostly whisper, struggling to be heard beneath the sound of rain.

The album's most successful moment is the title track, a collaboration with Bulgarian artist Krāllār. Here, Fil's voice is blown out into psychedelic harmonic prisms that swirl through slow-moving frozen soundscapes. The piano is still there, but re-sculpted into warped icicles - it's disarmingly beautiful.

Aidan Baker & Ekin Fil - (2020) The Dark Well CD

Torn Light Records – ART 01

"The Dark Well" contains four new compositions from the collaborative debut of Ekin Fil and Aidan Baker that spill out in a slow cascade of organ, guitar, and voice. In the works for over a year, the duo have created a soundscape saturated with swells that hum and hiss but ultimately pacify instead of crash.

Various Artists - (2018) Wound 2xLP

Carbon Records – CR239

Continuing the tradition of its milestone-marking compilations, Carbon is using the occasion of its 25th year to bring together an impressive roster of guitar-based artists. Showcasing the use of guitar in its many forms, this compilation consists of some of the most exciting new and established purveyors of Americana, psych, free-improv, rock, and experimental sounds.

Artists:

Alexander

Bill MacKay

Bill Nace

Brett Naucke

Bruce Russell

Campbell Kneale

Curanderos

Daniel Bachman

Eric Hardiman

James Plotkin

Joe+N

Jon Collin

Kryssi Battalene

Loren Connors

Michael Morley

Mike Shiflet

Morning Scales The Mountain

Rat Bastard

Rob Noyes

Ryley Walker

Tashi Dorji

Wendy Eisenberg

William Parker - (2021) Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World 10xCD

Centering Records – 1020–1029 / 1.58GB

William Parker is one of the most recorded bassists in jazz history, a celebrated, wide-ranging composer, multi-instrumentalist, bandleader, poet, essayist, and painter. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World comprises ten unissued albums written and recorded for various soloists and ensembles between 2017 and 2019 -- he doesn't always appear -- including seven for vocalists.

The music is not limited to jazz: There are excursions into classical, soul, free improv, blues, global sounds, and more. Blue Limelight features vocalist Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez fronting a piano quartet with two drummers, chamber strings, and oboe. The music ranges from crystalline ballads ("Listen,") to bumping R&B ("Cosmic Funk"), gospelized soul ("A Great Day to Be Dead"), and syncopated jazz recitatives (Recall"). Child of Sound contains 14 songs for piano performed solo by Eri Yamamoto. They showcase Parker's love of simple melody.

"Baldwin," the opening track on The Majesty of Jah, features James Baldwin's disembodied voice alongside Jalalu Kalvert Nelson's muted trumpet and sonic effects. Ellen Christi lends her voice to the strolling jazz-cum-reggae of the title track to the vanguard scatting in "Freedom" and the provocative spiritual drift of "Sun Song."

The experimental fourth disc Cheops is performed by vocalist Kyoko Kitamura and a group consisting of vibes, tuba, soprano sax, drums, and bass. It ranges across classical, world, and freely improvised terrain. Harlem Speaks, fronted by Fay Victor, engages bop, swing, and blues with Parker and Hamid Drake as her accompanists. Mexico consists of four long vanguard works, performed by an international ensemble of artists/activists fronted by Mexican vocalist Jean Carla Rodea.

Seven of its songs are titled for Italian directors, reflecting Parker's long obsession with cinema and film composition, extending the medium he exercised on his contemporary score for Alphaville did. The final two discs are instrumental. They include The Fastest Train wherein Parker and trio play dozens of wind, reed, and percussion instruments between them in spacious improvisational pieces. Manzanar comprises abstract folk suites played by string quartets, with reeds, winds, and percussion. Parker plays ethnic flutes and a khaen mouth organ, while saxophonist Daniel Carter guests on the provocative closing suite "Being Native."

Two enclosed booklets contain liner notes from Parker, interview fragments and beautiful art, as well as lyrics. Each disc is unique, intimate, revelatory. Migration of Silence Into and Out of the Tone World offers proof that Parker's vast, edifying sound universe seeks nothing less than to decode the world with beauty, inspiration, revolutionary lyricism, and spiritual aspiration, without pretension or artifice

Worth - (2019) Black Medicine CS

Wonderland Media, LLC – WM012

Worth - (2020) Heroin Vampires CDr

Nefarious Activities – NF43

The Offset: Spectacles - (2020) 2010-02-02 燥眠夜 Zoomin' Night 2xCS

Rose Mansion Analog – RMA-008

Compressed, self contained, and brazenly unique, each song by the Offset: Spectacles hits like a short, sharp shock. Percussive guitar and organ scrape at the surface of the left eardrum, and the bass hits like a combination of a synthesizer and a bongo. Get ready to be hectored by the ghosts of Cantonese poets and the Kowloon King. Sure as you can draw a straight line from The Offsets’ birthplace in Hong Kong to the site of their self-imposed exile in Beijing, there’s a connection between their music and the Velvet Underground, just somewhere along the 24 hour train ride things got muddled. Oscillator solos are reinterpreted for guitar, Bo Diddley blues get played drum-less, with only phantom rhythm for company. Songs like “Bodies’ Descendents” and “Snags” may bring to mind the endless empty highway, but the only possibility here is a brief sprint on an overpass above the midnight lights of a rotting port. Today, no escape is possible from a(ny) city, so the Offsets simply claim ownership, pushing back against at the neon signs, TV’s, and computers with a seductive spectacle of their own.

Wince - (2019) Shame CD

White Centipede Noise – WCN035

Jeph Jerman - (2019) Arcane Facture CD

White Centipede Noise – WCN038

Star - (2020) Last Vestige Of Malehood CS

White Centipede Noise – WCN051

Kjostad - (2020) Red Iron Knife CD

White Centipede Noise – WCN054

Altar Of Flies - (2020) Work Ethics CD

White Centipede Noise – WCN060

Paranoid Time - (2016) Rat Life CS

White Centipede Noise – none

Savage Gospel - (2020) ST CD

	White Centipede Noise – WCN053

White Centipede Noise – WCN053

Aaron Dilloway /Jeph Jerman - (2021) Casual Collisions CD

White Centipede Noise – WCN063

Casual Collisions is a collaborative album by two of the most prominent voices in experimental sound, Aaron Dilloway and Jeph Jerman. Recorded in 2013 and originally self-released on CDR by Jerman in a small edition, New Forces and White Centipede Noise are pleased to make these recordings widely available for the first time. Across four tracks the unique voices of these artists meld seamlessly together. Jerman’s tactile, physical sounds are wrapped up in Dilloway’s magnetic wizardry. Damaged electronics and hissing tapes form the canvas on which objects crunch, grind, and clatter. Temporality blurs as field recordings, loops, and live acoustic sounds meld together in sonic alchemy.

Two masters in perfect sync. Remastered by BJ Nilsen, packaged in a full color 6-panel digipack.

Sewer Election - (2020) Blizzard Amplification 2xCD

White Centipede Noise – WCN050

"Originally released as a private edition 6 cassettes box, instantly sold out * Sewer Election at their finest. Double-CD reissue of the six-tape-box. Improvised harsh electronics & feedback. Recorded & mixed at Studio Malign early 2020. "Sewer Election is a name to be held in the highest regard. While initially hooking audiences on one of the most hard-hitting takes on harsh noise available, he also proved to be the master of an unsettling and emotive tape music style which has come to be widely imitated. Naturally, the moments when these two concepts converge are considered to be nothing short of utter perfection. “Blizzard Amplification” is no different in quality from past releases, but focuses on a third speed at which Johansson can dominantly take the wheel. The tracks which encompass these two discs are some of the most chaotic sounds you could imagine being wrangled, an unrelenting blast of energy which can only properly be compared to the most revered recordings of the 90s. Although sourced from improvisations, Sewer Election’s signature control and consideration are present throughout every moment. High-pitched oscillating tones and feedback ride along the crust of a more familiar static and rumble, all while coming across as fully intentional. The compositional strength of these recordings is unexpected given their categorically raw nature; you’d think amongst hours of material there would be unwanted sounds or lacking moments, but there just aren’t. Instead, you find a slab of harsh noise crafted by someone who has lived deep within the appreciation and practice of such for decades. This is essential listening for any fan of Dan’s work, a clear example of getting the goddamn job done." Deutsche Asphalt

Arv & Miljö - (2012) Göteborg CS

Arv & Miljö Self-released – none

Arv & Miljö - (2018) Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid LP

Omlott – MLR023

The 7 compositions on Svensk Sommar I Stilla Frid further explores the home- brewed, on-thin-ice ambient hinted at on a few recent Arv & Miljö recordings. Mainly inspired by Anna Själv Tredje and perhaps the lesser sides of Ralph Lundsten and such, this is the Gothenburgian outsider synth album no one certainly ever asked for.

Arv & Miljö - (2016) ST CS

Team Boro Tapes – none

Arv & Miljö - (2020) Raelianerna CS

Arv & Miljö Self-released – none

Arv & Miljö - (2020) Element CDr

Förfall – 06

Saturday, December 25, 2021

Arv & Miljö - (2020) Himmelsvind LP

Discreet Music – 01

Arv & Miljö / LR - (2012) Påsk CS

Joy De Vivre – JDV015

Loke Rahbek ( Damien Dubrovnick, War, Posh Isolation) + Matthias Andersson (Heinz Hopf, Kallarbanen, Release the Bats).

A collaboration as a result of the Utmarken / Posh Isolation connection. Sources was provided by both acts, everything was mixed and finalized in Gothenburg in July 2011, although most of the material is older. The recordings are framed with field recordings from an Easter mass in a church in the Netherlands. Modern Scandinavian industrial tones.