Brainstormlab.org - JFrank & TopforTom
AUDIO
NEWS
One of the effects of lockdown around the world has been a boom of new music of all genres and for this release, the unsuspecting Belfast based LEXT, known strictly for his fairly unforgiving drving techno productions, has found his way to us with this 4 track glitchcore EP. As everyone has been forced indoors and going to a club was impossible, LEXT shifted from producing 2am dancefloor bangers and took a decidedly weirder turn with Slowly Not Sudenly, which of course, we welcomed with open arms!
This semi improvised live set was performed illegally on an abandoned plane in Lisbon back in 2014, for a crowd of around 60 people entering and exiting those tight, decaying corridors, partaking on this short voyage of the music I was writing between 2012-2015, which culminated in ROTODYNE
Rotodyne was created while travelling through 6 different countries, in airports, motels, friends' studios, with a lot of field-recordings from these trips, heavily inspired by tales of crumbling kingdoms and forgotten mythological heroes.
Gear used: Elektron Monomachine SFX60+, Korg microKorg, Akai MPC Studio Black, Ableton Live, Reaktor 5
Sofía Bertomeu l Superalma Project - Universal Observer Device
As spring blooms and half the planet is in lockdown, what better time to release this work of cross-pollination. Sofia Bertomeu returns in collaboration with Superalma Project for a split EP, with each using sounds of the other. Despite the apparent difference in style, Bertomeu with her ambient narratives of human interaction - or in this case, memories of them - and Superalma's channel zapping between sci-fi beats and power chord arpeggios, there is more common ground than first meets the ear. Bridging the physical distance between the two, the common theme of interraction, not only between humans but between humans and technology, all under the watchful eye of the Universal Observer Device…
Other Format - Untitled Electronic Music
A late start to these uncertain 20s but we are making up for it with as many choice cuts by none other than Other_Format.. 25 icicles of frozen sound in various states of completion, covering a range of styles and genres to keep your mind soaring. To think these gems were recuperated from a dodgy hard drive, almost lost to the oblivion of corrupt data, gives the chills. But here they are, nameless survivors of a forgotten time, and appropriately packaged like an old document of lost formulas. Perfect listening for these strange days..
Nothing screams winter quite like some minimalist brutalism from Russia. And what better soundtrack to the cold than this little gem from the aggregate of proteins that is Amyloid. In the role of demiurge, this is sparse, hostile world building where lava-hot metal megaliths jut out from icy plains and the sun is at it's most distant, scarcely visible through the siberian winds. Perfect for welcoming the cold, and for our listeners on the southern hemisphere, something to keep you cool in the sweltering heat..
Hailing from Spain, multi talented artist Sofía Bertomeu has a full house of arts up her sleeve and she comes bearing the gift of /ON_/ . An oxymoron of conceptual intimacy where human interaction, through the distance of misunderstanding is like reaching out from across the abyss,. In vain searching for (my) satisfaction we can only get to (our) satisfaction through stuttering attempts (mine and yours) and then maybe we can get to mutually beneficial conclusion. It's a delicate affair so be cautious and NO TALKING!
For more profusion by Sofia for all tastes of sight and sound - check out her website ..
Tale Twist - Reflective Awareness
We do like a good tongue twister here in the lab sowe were very pleased to receive an EP of Brazilian Brokecore from Tale Twist. Reflective Awareness is an excercise in deconstruction on multiple levels -it starts like a game of Jenga, as recognisable rhythm flimsily tries to support the wild sounds of cascading concrete. But as the EP progresses, the allegory of deconstruction of the self becomes more evident in the tracks, weakening of the tower's foundations. By the end the tower has fallen and you realise you are now playing Mikado in the ruins of the person you had constructed. Never before has demolition made for such easy listening - but remember to wear a hard hat!
Uzbekistani duo Orgatanatos return with Math, their third installment of broken beats and fractal phantoms. Forever deconstructing rhythms and melodies, Math takes the syncopated glitch into quasi dub territory while never truly bending to the genre. For all the harsh sounds there are as many lush pads making for a surprisingly smooth listen. As with all their albums, at a total run time of 1 hour and 10 seconds, it goes down nicely as Orgatanatos keep you on your toes with the ebb and flow of a swirling mechanical ocean.
It's been a long time coming but My Gloomy Machine has finally ended up in our neck of the woods - and hard to say we haven't been expecting him! For those of you who have heard (and seen) MGM before, UNbroken is in true cinematic style; a 1 track EP of evolving narrative noise, as it soars over mountains to reveal epic destruction, and then plunges into the depths of the airy abyss in search of the UNknown where you can see the gloomy autumn of the dying machines as they are buttered up in the sickly melodic sweetness of dying toys. And all the while Death looks on, shoe gazing through a broken window…
To celebrate our 70th (ish) release IQbit returns with an EP written with the help of algorithmically generating MIDI tool Wolfram Tones.. Included with each track are mp3 files of the origianal starting sequences in classic MIDI sound as well as a picture of the evolution. For fans of IQbit the low bpm might seem a drastic change but for friends it comes as no suprise, and despite the delegated composition, this EP is none the less, a classic IQbit affair - lush distant pads, broken breaks, aggro staccati and of course no bloody build-ups and drops!
ALX BROKEN - Reconstructed Riddims
Following a theme of mnemonic reconstructions for this release we have ALX BROKEN with an 8 track EP of crawling chaos, mechanical and relentless but not lacking a sense of humour when the occasional fragment of a recycled field recording breaks through the metal wave of the Riddims! Recurring themes feel like flashbacks, keep it cohesive and compact like you were holding a strobing sea urchin. All lovingly mastered by Ruby My Dear, so we thought it would make a perfect valentine's gift.
To kick off 2018, Other Format returns with a fractured EP of progressively evolving sounds...
A message from /o_F/
"...I wanted this process to be something of a departure from the conventional format of producing variations of the same recording as in the sense of the 'remix'. Instead of amassing a palette of samples from which to present a variety of reconfigurations, each sequential piece takes the previous track in its fully rendered state as its only sound source. There is no additional overdubbing or instrumentation of any kind throughout the recording that does not exist in the initial track. Each new part is created by various means of realtime manipulation through manually reordering, re-editing, reconstructing and re-processing. Ultimately this recording as a whole can be viewed as a single entity rather than a collection separately presented ideas. Recurring sounds act like fragments of memories constantly resurfacing, which over time become increasingly distorted, abstracted and obfuscated until we are left with an altered impression of the original event. This idea of sound-as-memory became a central focus of this recording..."
For our BSLive series we have a contribution from Freiburg based experimentalist, Aaron Karnov, which, rather than being a live recording, is more of a layered jam session of the self. Or as we see it, frozen sections of time reacting to eachother in cascades of sound crystalised on a single day. The presence of instruments and some of the percussion give an electro acoustic feell but don't let that fool you. The EP is comprised of 3 conversations that are clearly part of the same discussion and make for a tense soundtrack for any occasion whether it's a modern dance choreography or simply what you listen to as you stalk your victims in a hockey mask at night...
To buy wav files of this album and support the artist click....HERE
It will come as no surprise to our followers to know that the entity formerly known as Sytrjv travels time as well as space, which brings us to the latest_ive__ time capsule in our Hardiskeology series. Rhìpidos is a black box of cryptic messages that, unlike other Sytrjv anthologies was not compiled here in the lab but unearthed intact in the sonic state in which it froze back in 2004. Time, however, had ruined the cover beyond recognition, so we sought the most faithful representation of Sytrjv's strange script in a glorious freeze frame morph from the Ectopic video courtesy of Berlin based Art Studio Zeitguised.
This month for the BSLive series we have some Indian themed live excerpts from a 2015 hardware jam session by our golden oldies IQbit and JFrank. All the machines were at the MIDI mercy of the Radel Taalmala Digi 100 Plus, an electronic tabla machine made to recreate trditional tabla rhythms.In the words of the instruction manual.. "An LED will blink eight times per mantra in Ati-vilambit, four times in Vilambit, twice in Madhyam and once in Drut laya.The tempo can be changed from Drut to Ati vilambit or from Ati vilambit to Drut without stopping the theka, in steps of one Matra per minute." Nuff said.
Kicking off 2017 with some low temperatures we have Nearfield hailing from eastern Europe with a re-edit of his G5 release. The photo of frozen flowers on the cover are in line with the style: warm pads melting through ice cold beats like the Soviet architecture that breaks through the primieval forests of Belarus. Among known tracks are some new numbers and re-edits including remixes by another cold climate cutter Askaira Indishle and Ogrvne, another artist from the Clean Error roster.
To end the year we have the return of Uzbek duo Orgatanatos with more mythical tales from ultradimensionial plains. If their previous album flΛwrex_Sc!nt was about an AI finding ways to deal wth boredom, Vedmed is about a galaxy-plowing space bear and his genetically modified cat and their epic battle against the Crucians... The difference in scale between the 2 albums is palpable - before it was information flitting between neurons and electrons of a computerised brain, now the scale is cluster-vast and the time is deeper, slowing everything down to a galactic crunch! As is custom the album is an hour long and has a plenty offlavours to choose from.. Enjoy!
Other Format - EVP Recordings Volume I
This Halloween we have a very special release - very in tune with the "current mood".. /o_F/ returns with EVP Recordings - Volume I. As the story goes, around the mid 90s, Other Format's cousin founded an amateur paranormal research society as something of a hobby - being there little to do and plenty of haunted locations in the west country - and being a sound enthusiast began building ghost boxes and recording Electronic Voice Phenomena in supposedly haunted locations. The project took on a life of it's own when the material collected started to defy rational and technical explanations. The album is a constructed work of cinematic soundscapes and tense electronics based on and containing a selection of these recordings and accompanied by a collection of original field notes. For more information read "a message from /o_F/" in the info doc. As suggested by the author, we advise listening alone in the dead of night...
As we skip through genres and styles of electronic music this August brings Oregon Vortex with a very specific sub genre of Italic synth exploration. Unlike other brands of the ongoing retrowave scene, that tend to give the glorious old a modern glow, INVICTUS feels like it is out of a timewarp; a limbo somewhere between a roguelike dungeon and the recesses of a Vatican library. Bitter riffs take us further into the occult practices of heretics with themes from games we could have played and movies we might have seen.
For some of our followers OTHER_FORMAT will be a new name but the eraliest contribution dates back to 2009, collaborating with XZICD under the probably more familiar name CUT_REPEAT. For our more die hard followers, this marks the end of a long wait. Plenty of o_F music has been briefly glimpsed in the outback of the interweb, to then disappear never to be heard again. Now all those rare long lost specimens will get their own Hardiskeology series. Being a gentleman of criteria, o_F's releases come across as concept albums or studies. Starting with OPERATOR, that comes across as a workout in FM synthesis, in a relentless set of 8. The cover design by o_F says everything about the approach without giving away the mood. Also featured is a remix of another modfreak we all know and love - XZICD, which didn't make it in time for BSL_051.
Insisting in our numerological intent at 61 we happen upon Nick R 61 with Bessonnizza. A lullaby to accompany those last moments awake to the gates of sleep and beyond.. But all dreams and nightmares come to an end when broken by the the morning. Music that watches you while you sleep - best listened to in a comfortable bed or a padded cell..
Since around 2009, every 8th release here on brainstorm has been a Nukua release. And rounding nicely off at cat. number 60 Nukua is back with his 5th solo release on BSL and 10th in total - hence EP.10. A slightly different flavour of unfamilar nostalgia from what one might expect.. Already the old photo on the cover, for those in the know, is a world away from the usual dark environments and clinically lit genetic mutations - the music on the other hand, though certainly lighter than usual, is not so far from the Nukua we knowand yet something is different, something has changed. And that change is described in EP.10 so subtly that it feels like nothing has changed at all.
Interactive banners made in Processing by MEZE, Set Controls RALP, JFrank
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Also: recently recovered live footage and recordings of long gone live events and jam sessions have been found are periodically being uploaded onto our youtube and soundcloud channels - we are unsure by who.. http://www.youtube.com/user/brainstormlab http://soundcloud.com/brainstormlab
ARCHIVE
LEXT
Slowly Not Suddenly
Free Download. Belfast techno producer LEXT takes a turn for the weird during lockdown
XZICD
Transmission Live Set
Free Download. XZICD drops a live set that became BSL_058 release Rotodyne
Sofía Bertomeu l Superalma Project
Universal Observer Device
Free Download. Sofia Bertomeu and Superalma Project engage in cross pollination in the age of social distancing
Other_Format
Untitled Electronic Music
Free Download. 25 icicles of frozen sound saved from oblivion by none other than Other Format
Amyloid
Demiurge #3
Free Download. Demiurge Amyloid builds a world of minimalist brutalism for us to embrace the cold.
Sofía Bertomeu
/ON_/
Free Download. An oxymoron of conceptual intimacy from artist Sofía Bertomeu.
Tale Twist
Reflective Awareness
Free Download. Deconstructing existentialism with Broke core from Brazil.
Orgatanatos
Math
Free Download. Uzbekistani duo's third installment of broken beats and fractal phantoms
My Gloomy Machine
Unbroken
Free Download. My Gloomy Machine's broken sounds tell an UNbroken story
IQbit
Epiphanique
Free Download. IQbit EP using algorithmically generating MIDI tool - wolfram tones.
ALX BROKEN
Reconstructed Riddims
Free Download. 8 track EP of crawing chaos by French glitchcore artist ALX BROKEN
Other_Format
SNVL
Free Download. /O_F/ returns with an EP that progresses through the distorted lense of memory
Aaron Karnov
Semantics
Free Download. Electro acoustic conversations courtesy of Aaron Karnov
Sytrjv
Rhìpidos
Free Download. Time capsule of cryptic messages from Sytrjv unearthed for the Hardiskeology series
IQbit & JFrank
Radel Faqirs
Free Download. IQbit & JFrank Indian themed hardware jam session - BSLive_160115
Nearfield
G5
Free Download.Nearfield breaks through ice cold beats with warm tones...
Orgatanatos
Vedmed
Free Download. Another hour long ultradimensional epic from Uzbek duo Orgatanatos.
Other_Format
EVP Recordings - Volume I
Free Download. Halloween Special! Spooky sounds from the haunted west country courtesy of /o_F/.
Oregon Vortex
INVICTUS
Free Download.Italian Occult Electro with Oregon Vortex - INVICTUS EP.
Other_Format
OPERATOR
Free Download. /o_F/ for the Hardiskeology sries with an all FM oriented EP from the archives
Nick R 61
Bessonnizza
Free Download. Nick R 61 for music that watches you while you sleep...
Nukua
EP.10
Free Download. Nukua returns with a slightly different flavour of unfamiliar nostalgia
IQBIT
Hello Mahadev
Free Download. IQbit returns with more sonic tales of nomadic spirituality
XZICD
ROTODYNE
Free Download. XZICD from the depths with his new album - ROTODYNE
Orgatanatos
flΛwrex_Sc!nt
Free Download. Crisp sounds and thrashing cuts by Uzbek duo Orgatanatos
AO-DD
EP 1
Free Download. Debut for Norrköping duo on brainstormlab introduce their special brand of Cut n Lotto
Sytrjv
Lateral Latency
Free Download. Unearthed artifacts from the ethereal entity that is Sytrjv.