Ruptured Records was founded in Beirut in 2008 by DJ Ziad Nawfal and producer Fadi Tabbal (whose music was reviewed in this column back in February 2022). Nawfal has since relocated to Canada, but the label continues to platform artists with origins in the Middle East and North Africa, leaning towards sounds that come under the (perilously oversaturated) umbrella of experimental. They’ve helped shed light on a part of the world often overlooked when it comes to histories of free improvisation, exploratory electronics and experimental composition. Ruptured seem determined to avoid exoticisation. While a lot of the label’s output carries traces of regional traditions and cultures, the artists they work with are not defined by them. Ruptured seem more interested in fostering dialogue and exchange rather than reinforcing difference. Their latest pair of tapes each step into two radically different takes on improvisation, involving (but not solely) artists with roots in the MENA region who’ve moved to Europe or North America to form new collaborations.
Marmalsana have deep experimental and improvised roots. German percussionist Burkhard Beins was a founder of the Echtzeitmusik (real-time music) movement in Berlin, an influential, genre-fluid community which sprouted up around squats in the east of the city in the 1990s and understood free-improvisation as composition in real time. Egypt-born, now Berlin-based Maurice Louca, here playing quarter tone acoustic guitar, was part of The Dwarfs Of East Agouza with Alan Bishop and Sam Shalabi. Tony Elieh was a founder of Lebanese post-rockers Scrambled Eggs, and has since moved into detailed explorations of the electric bass’ unique sonorousness. For this self-titled debut, the trio play completely acoustically with no amplification. The tracks are plucked, rattled and thrummed exercises in nuanced rhythmic and textural exploration. The juxtapositions and tensions between melodic and non-idiomatic are entrancing, peaking on ‘Alveno’, when Louca plays out a jaunty, almost folky melody on the quarter tone guitar which the other two make a throbbing, creaking soundscape around. The whole album arcs like a storm rising and falling, with all the shifting pressure and unpredictable eddies of movement and sound that suggests.
Where Marmalsana are completely acoustic, Moose Terrific, the Montreal-based duo of Egyptian-Canadian Shalabi and Tamara Filyavich, are completely electronic on second album Nude Beginnings. Their music comes from modular synth and drum machine improvisations, but they land outside where that combination usually ends up. The opening title track has cascading melodies which constantly evade predictability. ‘Fort Da’ sounds like it could soundtrack a Sega game from the 1990s. ‘Jefferson Airport’ reminds me of Shalabi’s Eid album, but transposed from oud to electronics. It’s a mood which runs into closer ‘Bloomsday’, a droning synth and shuffling beat leading to a space somewhere between Trans-Europe Express-era Kraftwerk and Sanam. Like Marmalsana, it’s music which revels in crossovers and new connections.
NandeleAlready Dead
1994 by Maputo, Mozambique-based producer Nandele imagines a writer called Vandole Ukaloyi traveling through Maputo after ceasefire in the Mozambique civil war and the country’s first democratic election. Ukaloyi witnesses a country in transition, documenting his journey using a cassette recorder – capturing enough to fill “a terabyte of hard drive of today’s technology”. Exactly where fact and fiction split in this story isn’t clear. More than anything, this tape feels like a deep investigation by Nandele into the culture that surrounds him. The first half of the tape sees him in far less beaty terrain than he’s explored before, a love letter to the hypnotic, time warping power of slow morphing synth sequences and how eerie they sound when overlayed with voices from the street and snippets of field recorded song and drums. That’s especially true of the album’s centrepiece, the long-form ‘Fofoka’, a beautifully paced meditation which feels like it could go on forever without getting stale. Things start to twist from there. Something ominous hangs in the air on ‘LeV1’. While on the final pair of tracks, beats agitate the drift to conjure a sinister utopianism. Forward propulsion colliding with a nagging dread, perhaps. The whole tape is a journey. Nandele displaying a rare grasp of the storytelling possibilities of the album format.
DJ GawadDJ Gawad Presents: Volume 1Drowned By Locals
Jordanian/Palestinian producer DJ Gawad is shrouded in anonymity, as is often the case with artists working with Drowned By Locals. But he’s confident in his craft, the self-proclaimed “best producer in the Middle East.” On debut full length DJ Gawad Presents: Volume 1 he lays down beats for a tranche of rappers from across the region. The release notes make heavy reference to Memphis Gangster rap, and while there are echoes of Three 6 Mafia in the sway of crystal clear drum machines through crumpled and smudged samples, there’s enough idiosyncrasy in vocals and productions to make this more than a homage. The pitched-up voices and chorus of car horns on ‘Lancer’ (featuring Movenwomen). The spooky interplay between voice, glassy synth tone and skittering rhythms on ‘Slyfer’ (featuring MrF13). The way the rappers, well, creep, through a queasy orchestral sample on ‘Creepin In The Night’ (featuring Rknddn & MrF13). Volume 1 may have been intended as a parody, but from it DJ Gawad makes something distinct. Overlapping his own world with the atmosphere of 1990s Memphis.
Ryan HooperUnfold Only In The NowEustress Tapes
Ryan Hooper, who also records as Heavy Cloud, has an attention to the miniscule that brings to mind the late Steve Roden on Unfold Only In The Now. Rustling paper, empty broadcast static, moving water and the phasing of simple loops. But the way Hooper arranges and places sounds is much more handmade, carrying a distinctly wabi-sabi quality that revels in intrusions, imperfections and odd disfiguration. ‘Origami With Headphone Spill’ is a literal documentation of what the title describes. Over creasing paper, music creeps in, far off and slightly out of whack. ‘Anatomy Of Melancholy’ is a scumbled microloop that gradually changes shape with poignant effect. Closer ‘Aerus Delay’ is fifteen minutes of what sounds like a gushing river, but could also be aircon. As your ears focus, a world of movement and intrigue appears across the frequency spectrum in this superficially static scene. Hooper revels in lowkey sounds and lowkey emotions. Holding on to them and maximising their peculiar poignancy.
IN THE SUNDawnChinabot
IN THE SUN’s Dawn is unabashedly uppercase music. Its pounding, taiko inspired drums and sidewinding electronics delivered in total caps. The project has been organised by producer TIDEPOOL since 2011. The line up is fluid, but tenor saxophonist Kim Pueru is a regular contributor, and features prominently here. This new tape is described as an epic poem, inspired by the mountainous landscapes and traditional music from TIDEPOOL’s childhood in rural Japan. There’s not an ounce of sentimentality or nostalgia on Dawn though. It rolls, jolts and mutates exactly as one would expect of music which aims to evoke the collision of tradition and modernity, nature and the city. The first drum hits on opener ‘Collapse’ pound like they’re being fired from a cannon into a reverberant canyon. ‘Twilight’’s rolling beats and tense heroic themes evoke the final boss battle to end all final boss battles. Even the comparatively mellow title track, with its woozy sax, is animated by rolling piano, wooshes of robotic synthesis and volcanic tension. The album carries something of the vibrant dissolving of genre boundaries you’d hear in 1990s Haruomi Hosono or on the first Susumu Yokota album, but exploded into a vast panorama. A radiant evocation of the precipice between awe and overwhelm.
AyrtbhSynthetic Weather ReporterAloe
Ayrtbh is Shanghai-based musician, artist and software writer Wang Changcun. The two tracks on Synthetic Weather Reporter were made using ‘homemade’ Max For Live devices. A-side, ‘Synthetic Weather Report’, is a turbulent tapestry where slithers of icy tones thaw into drizzling high frequencies and fierce, mantra-like buzzes. There’s a refreshing lack of pretension, the textures he generates are on the cusp of being familiar without explicitly evoking anything specific. He doesn’t over-egg the potential harshness of digital audio, nor try to reconcile it into prettiness. Wang instead focuses on the immersive, world-evoking possibilities of sound. In other words, the tape is abstract and exploratory but doesn’t get distracted by signposting the fact. The B-side, ‘Er’, wields vocal snippets to create an undulating web of phonemes. It crosses similar ground to Jan Jelinek’s recent explorations of voice and language, but goes more microscopic. The sounds Wang uses and the way they’re placed take an unusual presence in the space you’re listening, whether through headphones or speakers. Like a high definition, richly textured overlay on your surroundings.
WidgetWidgetPeach
London-based Widget includes members of Big Joanie, Junodef, All Cats Are Beautiful and, perhaps most relevant to this column, Hi! Capybaras, whose debut tape I reviewed earlier this year. Widget’s debut EP feels like an evolution of the sounds emanating in the mid-2010s from the community around east London’s Power Lunches venue, which spawned bands such as Shopping and Ravioli Me Away (indeed, at least some of the members of Widget were around that “scene”). Widget delves into the disco and funk inspirations of bands like Liquid Liquid or ESG, but the quintet’s slinky basslines, lush synthetic orchestrations and group backing vocals lean further into the soulful warmth and colour post punk often tried to discard. It makes the weird undercurrent to their songs all the more bamboozling. On ‘Uncle Buck’, references to the 1989 film are disrupted by the line “Fortune favours the brave… And the independently wealthy!” These pivots from the playful to the cutting shape the album. “Getting used to the precipice” on ‘Beetlemouth 96’. Loneliness in the hustle conveyed via phantasmic internet celebrities on ‘Myspace Tom Again’. The elasticated web of unpredictable connections and poignancies evokes Mark E. Smith if he’d attempted to piece together late-capitalist alienation through a mythos of millennial cultural references. The fact it’s so joyful to listen to only makes it more disorientating. Dance songs for when reality is gentrifying around you.
Lisa Pulsatilla, Vivian LiThe Unseen Society Of MicrocreaturesSound As Language
Montreal-based duo Vivian Li and Lisa Pulsatilla took inspiration from library music for The Unseen Society of Microcreatures. Each track comes with a description of what it could convey. Opener ‘Trailhead’ is “an incoming train, confident and steady, bringing in eclectic energy”. The forty second ‘Thebelljar’ simply says “nod your head gently”. The longest track lasts five minutes but the majority are under three. Concision never leads to a sense of incompleteness, however. Perhaps referring to the album’s title, each track is a self-contained, colourful scene. In isolation they might feel like textural fragments, but something different happens when you hear them play in sequence. Using archaic electric organs, FM synths and drum machines, Li and Pulsatilla’s sequence of episodic miniatures accumulate into a bewitching whole. A flow state which finds something richer beneath the tropes of functional stock music. A reflection, perhaps, that libraries are not only a disjointed archive, but spaces for contemplation, exploration and reflection.
George Rayner-Law, StonecirclesamplerResearch and Development 1: Field Annihilation // Technoise Cuts Through Stonecircle Ambient Grimeindustrial coast
George Rayner-Law’s side of this split is made from tapes and field recordings. Those materials aren’t unusual in the cassette underground, but his process is. To paraphrase, he layers loops on top of each other and blasts them through effects, then repeats the process with the output. Rayner-Law’s music is field recording as catalyst rather than benign documentation, forcing a screaming abyss instead of dwelling in pastorals. ‘Cicadas’ encapsulates the process. Maybe there are some insects in here, but they’re well past recognisability and we’re left with a ranting vortex. The intensity is fiendish, but the energy with which he batters sounds thrills rather than alienates. At a time when the world is actually burning, it makes lot of sense as a way of processing one’s audio archive. The sonic equivalent of cutting up your postcard collection then torching the pieces to feel the flames. Stonecirclesampler’s side is just as saturated but sears more than scolds. For all the overloaded bandwidth this music generates through contorted beats and violently mangled electronics, its effect encourages a way of listening I’d normally associate with minimalist composers. Stonecirclesampler’s tracks sound like they’re being smelted, they bludgeon you, but beneath these mangled edifices are transfixing patterns of subtle variation.
Santa Cecilia, SemionautaTell Me To SinStrange Therapy
From the tentative piano twinkles and shudder of bass notes opening ‘Down Here Praying’, Santa Cecilia and Semionauta’s Tell Me To Sin evokes cursed realms and fraught headspaces. It’s gothic, as much in the literary as the musical sense, imbued with romance and drama but transmitted from a land of gloomy foreboding. The album apparently explores “suffering, death, sexual energy and the transcendence of pain”. That manifests as a seething, portentous type of heaviness creeping across every track. Ominous electronics and eerie orchestrations are perfectly at one with Santa Cecilia’s voice as she teeters between angelic and possessed. It culminates brilliantly on ‘Nero’, ferrous beats heralding the moment the vocals finally snap into snarling, feral catharsis. The whole thing could be overwrought or melodramatic, but the pair evade the trap with expert control of tension and atmosphere.
Thought LeadershipAce Of SwordsDarkly Inclined Tapes
There’s something about Thought Leadership’s Ace Of Swords that keeps bringing me back. Partly it’s the intriguing distance between the tape’s artwork and the music. Mostly it’s because these instrumentals, think a lo fi, slightly more noodly Durutti Column playing over unashamedly rigid drum machine rhythms, are genuinely transfixing in the slightly lopsided little micro-universes they build. On ‘XV’, booming beats provide a stumbling rhythm for the guitar to elegantly glide, twist and dance over. ‘XVII’ is a lulling shuffle, an ocean breeze painted in gloomy nocturnal colours. There are a couple of tapes this year, from Sanctuary Of Praise and Frunk 29, which are, broadly, riding around a similar space to Thought Leadership. In quite different ways reclaiming something escapist from sounds that, through the years, have accumulated a lot of baggage and slipped into mundanity. Imagine if Stockport was situated somewhere along the Pacific Coast Highway rather than the M60, and you’ll have some idea of the coordinates to the post-industrial, sunburnt dream space opened up here.
