Alva Noto + Ryuichi Sakamoto Ensemble Modern
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Mark Fell (SND/Sensate Focus) and Gábor Lázár's scintillating and innovative debut collaboration marked The Death of Rave's 10th release, and is now back on clear vinyl.»The Neurobiology of Moral Decision Making« explores a radical re-calibration of conventional meter and tone in modern electronic music, probing specific aspects of Max/MSP software with the potential to acutely challenge our perception of time and space.It’s a maximalist, future-shocking play of tension-and-resolution created from minimalist elements, featuring Lázár's calligraphic, torso-morphing chromo-notes punctuated by Fell's signature Linn drum cracks at ostensibly obtuse, yet deeply funked-up junctures across ten tracks in 50 minutes.They range from precision-tooled 2-minute scrambles to swaggering showpieces, culminating in what has become a meme for Mark Fell albums with the uncannily emotive closing statement - a 12 minute masterstroke consolidating all the album’s ideas in one breathless, beguiling arrangement.If music can be considered a catalyst for social change, what are the implications of this mutant record? Considered in terms of the dancefloor, it mirrors the muscle-memory re-programming impact of OG hardcore & jungle or Chicago footwork - think of scattered bodies attempting to synch with new, accelerated and “irregular” rhythms - offering a freedom of expression and interpretation that's typically scarce in most grid-locked musics. Likewise, the inversion of melodic convention in favour of warped, dynamic contours and visceral, psycho-acoustic timbre offers a sharpened grammar of emotional expression and sensation that doesn’t wilt to ordinary sentiment.Yorkshire-based Mark Fell is among the world’s leading sound artists and sonic thinkers. Owner of an illustrious and influential catalog of releases spanning early works in the SND duo thru to more recent solo work under his own name and Sensate Focus, and collaboration with DJ Sprinkles, Errorsmith and Sandro Mussida.Gábor Lázár hails from Budapest, Hungary. In 2014 he presented his debut album, ‘I.L.S.’ via Lorenzo Senni’s Presto!? followed by ‘EP16’ for The Death Of Rave. He has previously shared a split tape release with Russell Haswell presented work at Karlsruhe’s ZKM and undertook a residency at Stockholm’s EMS.

After this long period of pandemic and staying at home, these tracks represent a glimmer on which to look out and have the hope of soon returning all together to party.

A much needed repress of DJ ESP & Hoschi's The Mad Scientists EP on Minnesota imprint Communique has finally arrived. DJ ESP aka label chief Woody McBride, legend of the Midwest scene, takes over the first side with the droning and mental energy of '4 Days In The Laboratory' followed by one more cerebral cut in the form of 'New Body' which will have you trancing out under the strobe lights. Over on the flip, Hoschi's contribution is the high-octane peak time acid thriller that is the title track.

Living Room (faitiche 28) is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much praised Hotel Nota, his debut for Faitiche. The French musician and producer transforms the layering of different times into a free-flowing pulse that sounds both nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical.Poirier takes music seriously as a time-based art – not just in the sense of duration, but also in the way time is refracted into autobiographical experience, historical dimensions and stages of evolution. By immersing and reflecting himself in these different layers, he creates a succession of new balances between various tempos, iterations and developments.Poirier’s music emerges from a continual questioning and reformulation of his own oeuvre and thus of his own past, drawing on an ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” he explains: “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.”Originally a drummer, Poirier connects his various sources almost without a clearly identifiable beat. He prefers an organic pulse, mutable like the human sense of time and its fluidity. The aquatic feel of certain tracks on Living Room is no coincidence: among other devices, he uses a waterproof loudspeaker and a hydrophone to play back and rerecord tracks in the bathtub.Drawing on a sample collection assembled by his father, also a musician, the human voice enters Poirier’s music for the first time. But it remains free of overly unambiguous signifiers. Besides its link to time, the fascinating thing about music is that it has meaning without needing to be decoded. Living Room goes back to the private but universal origin of human experience: “I liked the idea that a possible quest for a musician could be echoing the first encounter we had with language, in a prenatal state: its prosody, melody and tones, without being cluttered with meaning.”