Michael Zerang Assyrian Caesarean LP

Chicago-based percussionist Michael Zerang presents his first solo recording after a long career as an exploratory musician and composer. Recorded and mixed by Matt Bordin in the woods at (the new) Outside Inside Studio, the album features a range of approaches to percussion that Zerang has developed over the years, including the use of vibrating drumhead surfaces, expressive friction passages, multiple timbre percussion, and straight up trap-set drumming - all infused with a rich sense of melodic, rhythmic and textural innovation.

Zerang has performed and recorded with some of the most adventurous artists of his era, including a fourteen-year stint with The Peter Brotzmann Chicago Tentet, Joe McPhee’s Survival Unit III, and an extended collaboration with drummer and percussionist Hamid Drake. Frequent collaborators also include cellist Fred Lonberg-Holm, pianist and synthesist Jim Baker, bassist Kent Kessler, trumpeter Axel Dorner, along with an ever-widening pool of international improvisors. He also recently began performing with the experimental Middle-Eastern super group Karkhana - with Mazen Kerbaj, Sharif Sehnaoui, Maurice Louca, Tony Elieh, Sam Shalabi and Umut Çağlar.

link

Deadsmoke - Mountain Legacy

link

Mountain Legacy is an album exploring something fundamental to humanity: ISOLATION 
The illusion of silence, which is a natural non-existing concept, is perfectly described by synthetized sounds and noises of the newly acquired band member Claudio Rocchetti (In Zaire). These sounds are missing on the first self-titled release of Deadsmoke, so now the old tracks have been enriched and new ones have been composed providing a consistent psych-disturbed synthetized sound. Six brand new tracks featuring deep guitar fuzz and growling bass take the listener on a journey through the woods, alternating lightly groovy rhythms with sludge-doom cadences.

Geodetic - Broken Consonance

The low thrust of a grainy claustrophobic man-made environment, heavy lights, rising atmosphere and human indecision. This is the world we live in, this is the constriction we go through every day, carelessly wading our lives through a bullshit narrative that still needs to be told. Here at the Maple Death HQ we need an OST that can discern the living from the dead, furthering ourselves from oblivion for just one extra day: Geodetic’s debut ‘Broken Consonance’ is our soundtrack today.

Formed in late 2016, Geodetic is the electronic duo of Claudio Rocchetti and Jukka Reverberi. Industrial, techno, cassette culture, avant-garde fascination are all part of their sonic palette. They’ve been trading sounds via the complicated interwebz from their homes in Bolzano and Reggio Emilia, working relentlessly at night, headphones on, baby monitors dialed in at the 1, saturation monitors dialed in at the 10. You always have to cave in somewhere.

‘Broken Consonance’ opens with ‘I’, a pulsating steady cosmic serpentine hi-hat hissing away almost recalling early Boards Of Canada until saturated hand-claps lead us into 4 track Green Velvet era. ‘II’ moves effortlessly, a slow steady leftfield train of celestial paranoia; ‘III’ and ‘IV’ move from industrial frenzy to meditative landscapes, incorporating the Italian tradition and dark eleganza of 80’s synth cassette pioneers Daniele Ciullini, La Maison and power-electronics king Maurizio Bianchi; ‘VI’ is a pure EDM industrial banger, ripping apart on an Ike Yard-ish circular pattern spreading shards of white noise on broken euro beats. Communal dissonance, endearing infinite dreams.

link

CINDY LEE – MALENKOST

Describing a world of beauty, escape, sorrow, loss and catharsis usually needs a strong leap of faith and when it comes to music such a feat is almost impossible, modern day consumption is pulling us by the throats and we don’t have time to surrender, we don’t have time to let the fog, the mystery, the universal shine seek into our eyes and creep into our minds. There are exceptions, Cindy Lee is one of them, a rare all-in lifer, flickering candle.

Maple Death is beyond honored to team up with Superior Viaduct in presenting Cindy Lee’s Malenkost, the first LP in a series of reissues (plus forthcoming new music) dedicated to one of our most cherished artists of the last decade. For the insiders, we can only use an analogy to describe the feeling CL’s music conveys: pull out your Swell Maps Lp’s, forget the genre, listen to the exact moment, the exact sequence when Blenheim Shots turns into Raining In My Room. Those 30 seconds, that is what we are talking about, that sensation, that abandoned bliss. Patrick Flegel aka Cindy Lee has been turning in those sequences for the best part of the last decade, from his years as singer/guitarist in Canadian cult band Women, to his brief stint as Androgynous Mind, everything has been building up to this moment. For the past 4 years Cindy Lee has been meticulously crafting her pure universe of no wave, doo-wop, noise, Matsumoto visions and psychedelic shimmer untouched and unaffected by external hands. Music so far has been released and carefully dispatched via CL’s own label and website CCQSK Enterprises, selling out as quickly as people could connect and fine-tune their souls.

link

Sensations' Fix - Vision´s Fugitives

link

In Zaire - Visions of the Age to Come

In Zaire are closing the chapter opened in 2013 with their critically acclaimed debut full-length „White Sun Black Sun“.
This time, the fever-dance takes on new environments, new worlds, new visions. „Visions Of The Age To Come“ is the aptly named follow-ups name that is to be released on Sound Of Cobra Records this spring.

Packing eight tracks of sprawling all-ends-open psych workouts with a definite rock edge to them, their visions have sharpened to a determined longing into the unknown that is most aware of the preceding waypoints the band has travelled through so far.

At the heart of it all is still the underlying hum of the universe and its infinite vibrations - this is boldly stated with „Hermes Dance“, the albums literal opening track. It functions as a foreboding vision showcasing the essentials of the band: rhythm as key to a broad palette of ever-shifting atmospheres and emotions. As soon as this new chapter is opened, we see In Zaire reaping what they’ve sown in the past with a plethora of high-energy riffs and freewheeling outbursts that communicate with each other in a way that brings the ever so apparent dichotomous dance of chaos and form, of focus and blur to the surface of things.

Where its predecessor was bred in much more blurred musical hotbeds, „Visions Of The Age To Come“ is an expressive kaleidoscope of projections (or perceptions?) coming into focus, and in doing so presenting a rich dialogue with the inner and the outer realities we all have to balance. Through the course of the record we get confronted with sonorous entities constantly trying to work with themselves in order to transform, to find new shapes and to eventually pinpoint the reason of their longing.
Culminating in what is arguably the records key track, „The Seven Sermons Of The Dead“ sees the band leading their newfound approach to the edge with an intense marriage of their rock roots with the outer planes they constantly flirt with - the entrancing main riff moves like a snake in a dizzying journey, which finds its destination in the closing title track.
The intensity lifts, the curtains fall, an ending giving birth to a new beginning - In Zaire’s age to come is a promising one.

credits

link

Lorenzo Senni - Persona - Warp records

Lorenzo Senni will release ‘Persona’ on 11 November, his debut EP on Warp. Listen to a new track ‘Win In The Flat World’ below.

‘Persona’ is a fresh insight into Lorenzo Senni’s lucid take on '90's hard trance and its links to EDM and contemporary dancehall. At the core of ‘Persona’ is a raver's disciplined restraint from alcohol or drugs at it's core – reflected in the artwork by Ed Atkins which a CGI depiction of Senni's own “Rave Voyeur”. 

Following this weekend’s show for Red Bull Music Academy Montreal, Lorenzo will play a debut NYC show this Thursday in support of the EP.

link1

link2