avant . leftfield . post-rock . drone . experimental

WEEK STARTING 24 Nov

Genre pick of the week Cover of The Haxan Cloak - 2023 Reissue by The Haxan Cloak.

The Haxan Cloak

The Haxan Cloak - 2023 Reissue

    Archaic Devices will also release long-awaited reissues of 2009's psychedelic Observatory EP, 2011’s The Haxan Cloak LP and 2013’s Excavation LP.

    Listening to everything Bobby Krlic has recorded as a composer, songwriter and producer is a thought-provoking and exciting experience. With an impressive and ever-growing list of film and television titles to his name, the launch of Archaic Devices allows listeners to revisit his early work as The Haxan Cloak in anticipation of a third full length album that will no doubt be as innovative and metaphysically eye-opening as its predecessors

    TRACK LISTING

    SIDE A:
    RAVEN’S LAMENT
    AN ARCHAIC DEVICE

    SIDE B:
    BURNING TORCHES OF DESPAIR
    DISORDER

    SIDE C:
    THE FALL
    THE GROWING

    SIDE D:
    IN MEMORIAM
    PARTING CHANT

    Den Osynliga Manteln

    Under Gron Himmel

      Based in Malmö, Sweden, Den Osynliga Manteln (The Invisible Cloak) comprises producer duo Ola Sandberg and Fredrik Grönvall.

      They describe their intention as making albums that tell stories and make journeys through textures and soundscapes of fictional places and spaces. With one foot in the past and the other in the future, the music is created to conjure both nostalgia and activate the imagination of what’s not yet here, touching both the known and the unknown.

      If Under Grön Himmel has an apocalyptic feel, it's reflective of our tumultuous times which pulled the music into a different and darker post-pandemic territory than their stunning debut. "Insekstfolk" (CiS, August 2021).

      The title translates to "Under Green Skies" which points to the melancholy but also, the potential beauty of our doomsday. The fever dream depicts an alternate reality, a different planet, some kind of shift. A turbulent place, a fugue state, a death of sorts.

      At the same time there’s a psychedelic undertone to the record, a transformational arc spanning from the first hiss to the last. The titles of the songs align with this theme, translating roughly as "Glitter Mountains", "Purple Forest", "Movement of the Hills", "Triple Moon", "The Planet Whisperer" and "Triple Sun"

      An array of analog synthesizers and electrical organs rescued from flea markets meets tape hiss, saxophones and a hidden vibraphone. Drum kits, electric bass and guitars, the occasional vocals dubbed with an eighty year old piano and glittering bells. Under Grön Himmel has layers of dust from the distant past yet it arrives here in a polished chrome vessel from the future. It's like Neu! broke out the jazz chords and the whole album has an un-graspable quality that's hard to define. Like a benevolent psychedelic mist, it’s here to hold you at the end of times and celebrate its beauty.

      The Haxan Cloak

      Excavation - 2023 Reissue

        Archaic Devices will also release long-awaited reissues of 2009's psychedelic Observatory EP, 2011’s The Haxan Cloak LP and 2013’s Excavation LP.

        Listening to everything Bobby Krlic has recorded as a composer, songwriter and producer is a thought-provoking and exciting experience. With an impressive and ever-growing list of film and television titles to his name, the launch of Archaic Devices allows listeners to revisit his early work as The Haxan Cloak in anticipation of a third full length album that will no doubt be as innovative and metaphysically eye-opening as its predecessors

        TRACK LISTING

        SIDE A:
        CONSUMED
        EXCAVATION (PART 1)
        EXCAVATION (PART 2)

        SIDE B:
        MARA
        MISTE

        SIDE C:
        THE MIRROR REFLECTING (PART 1)
        THE MIRROR REFLECTING (PART 2)

        SIDE D:
        DIEU
        THE DROP

        The Haxan Cloak

        N/Y

          Bobby Krlic shares “N/Y,” the first new piece of solo music released as The Haxan Cloak in over a decade. Blistering and propulsive, “N/Y” draws upon the sonic hallmarks Krlic established as fundamental to The Haxan Cloak but with newfound depth drawn from the skills that he has honed over the past decade composing music for film and TV. It is accompanied by a visual also produced and directed by Krlic.

          ‘N/Y’ is a feeling I’ve had for a really long time,” he says of the track. “It was made with the intention of being something that I could play live only, and was just this burst of intensity that could re-contextualize anywhere I would play it in. I kept working on it and it became something that I wanted to hear regardless of the context. I made the video in the same way. Making charcoal drawings and oil paintings, then fusing these together with self-shot video of myself in my studio. It feels immediate and without compromise. It was made quickly, in a moment, with complete intention. I really hope it changes the space you’re in.”

          Krlic’s work in the early 2010’s as The Haxan Cloak bridged the then radically separated worlds of avant garde, drone, metal and electronic music. Earning critical praise from the likes of DAZED, The FADER Pitchfork, Mixmag, The Quietus, The New York Times and The Wire, among others, Krlic’s staunchly independent output brought him to the attention of such luminaries as Björk, Goldfrapp, and Father John Misty as an in-demand producer. Since 2015 he has established himself as a composer for Film, Television and Games, winning a BAFTA award for his score to the Playstation 5 flagship game, Returnal and an Ivor Novello award for his original score for Midsommar, a celebrated artistic collaboration with director Ari Aster. He returned to this collaboration this year with Beau Is Afraid. In addition to his recurring work with Aster, Krlic has flexed his compositional chops for two radically different projects this year, contributing scores to A24 and Netflix’s No.1 acclaimed dark comedy thriller Beef and Warner Bros and DC Studios’ Blue Beetle, the latter of which went on to top the box office upon release.

          The release of “N/Y” coincides with the announcement of Archaic Devices, a new label founded by Krlic that will serve as the home for his future releases as The Haxan Cloak alongside reissues of his past work under the moniker. Krlic admits that starting a record label wasn’t something that had occurred to him until he finished building his own home studio in LA and he regained the master tapes to his records from various underground labels. All of his archival releases have been remastered, with aspects of their design and presentation tightened up by Krlic to present his music exactly as he initially intended. Working with revered visual artist Christopher Leckie, Krlic has built a stark, unique identity for his newly minted label Archaic Devices that extends to a new line of merchandise, as well as new visual directions for the label’s first and forthcoming releases. 

          TRACK LISTING

          SIDE A:
          N/Y

          SIDE B:
          N/Y

          The Haxan Cloak

          Observatory - 2023 Reissue

            Archaic Devices will also release long-awaited reissues of 2009's psychedelic Observatory EP, 2011’s The Haxan Cloak LP and 2013’s Excavation LP.

            Listening to everything Bobby Krlic has recorded as a composer, songwriter and producer is a thought-provoking and exciting experience. With an impressive and ever-growing list of film and television titles to his name, the launch of Archaic Devices allows listeners to revisit his early work as The Haxan Cloak in anticipation of a third full length album that will no doubt be as innovative and metaphysically eye-opening as its predecessors. 

            TRACK LISTING

            SIDE A:
            OBSERVATORY

            SIDE B:
            HONFOUR (TEMPLE)

            Ola Sandberg

            Invisible Room

              Ola Sandberg is a Swedish producer based in Malmö — a multi-instrumentalist with a masters degree from the Royal College of Music in Stockholm and a deep love for sound. As well as sound installations, film scores and collaborations (making up one half of Den Osynliga Manteln), Ola has an ongoing solo project called Osynliga Rum, or Invisible Room, which is also the title of the first record coming out of this project. Invisible Room circles around the idea of using music making and sound as ways to explore the audible qualities of architecture, while also using architecture to explore sound, and having it guide and shape the music being made. Sandberg was influenced and inspired by, to name a few, Paul Horn's sonic experiments in both Inside the Taj Mahal and Inside the Great Pyramid, Pauline Olivero playing in a huge underground silo in Deep Listening, and Alvin Lucier's acoustic explorations in I Am Sitting in a Room.

              Invisible room was created and recorded in St John’s Church in Malmö during March of 2021 using a modular, analog synthesiser, speakers and microphones. Building on the premise that the essence of a room, the space it holds, is invisible but audible — the music was created with the purpose of exploring and activating the sonic aspects of the room, aiming for a non hierarchical relationship between room and sound. Many nights were spent alone in this church and over eight hours of music was created and recorded.


              Various Artists

              Allen Ginsberg’s Fall Of America II

                Various artists musically interpret poems from "The Fall of America: Poems of these States1965-1971" on this second volume, covers the years 1965- 1971

                Musical interpretations of Ginsbergs poems are performed by Ai Weiwei, Philip Glass, Thurston Moore With Saul Williams, Anne Waldman, Miho Hatori, Jack Dangers, Devendra Banhart, Kai Campos & Cj Mirra, and more.

                Various Artists

                Searchlight Moonbeam

                  Searchlight Moonbeam is the new narrative compilation from Time Is Away (Jack Rollo and Elaine Tierney) whose eponymous monthly NTS Radio shows, tinctured fusions of fugitive sounds and reverie-inducing archival speech, have won them an ardent following. It follows from the London-based duo’s Ballads, a remarkable driftwerk released on A Colourful Storm in 2022.

                  Searchlight Moonbeam is an autumnal dreamscape, intimate and vespertine, pensive and irresolute. An imagined community where differences drop off and resonances emerge – between Maher Shalal Hash Baz affiliates Kasumi Trio, Taiwanese score composer Chen Ming Chang whose ‘Rainwater’ (written for Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 1986 film Dust In The Wind) is exquisitely heartbroken, and the plangent improvisations of self-taught French pianist Delphine Dora.

                  Revelations are frequent: the bedsit isolationism of Bo Harwood and John Cassavetes’ ‘No One Around to Hear It’ (from The Killing of a Chinese Bookie); the narked minimalism of Klang (an early 2000s band formed by ex-Elastica guitarist and featuring prize-winning experimental novelist Isabel Waidner on bass); the etude-grooves and echoic wobble of below-the-radar French avant-gardists Omertà ; the beautiful, plaintively dubby ‘Is It You?’ by Slapp Happy; a psych-tinged reimagining of PiL’s ‘Poptones’ by Simon Fisher Turner (one half of Deux Filles, and here, recording for él as The King of Luxembourg) that's as perverse as the cover of Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats.

                  Searchlight Moonbeam is the musical analog of an Italo Calvino novel or a medieval fable. Associative, intuitive, borderless. Emotional and mysterious. Endowed with the tactility of Braille. A private language that is both unknowable and understood. It is a record of the seasons, for the seasons.

                  2023 marks the tenth anniversary of Time Is Away’s first broadcast. Featuring an evocative essay by writer Jeremy Atherton Lin and disarming cover art by Penny Davenport, Searchlight Moonbeam showcases Rollo and Tierney’s still-unrivalled talent for gloaming melodies, disques du crépuscule and ensorcelled storytelling. 

                  TRACK LISTING

                  1. Bo Harwood & John Cassavetes - No One Around To Hear It 03:48
                  2. Chen Ming Chang - Rainwater
                  3. Bhairavi Raman & Nanthesh Sivarajah - Bittersweet Reflections
                  4. The King Of Luxembourg - Poptones
                  5. Slapp Happy - Is It You
                  6. O.G. Jigg - Jesus Is My Jam
                  7. Klang - As It Is
                  8. Scala - Fuser
                  9. Soft Location - Let The Moon Get Into It
                  10. Gyeongsu - YZOBEL (feat. CROCHE)
                  11. Omertà - Moments In Love
                  12. Kasumi Trio - Cabbage Butterfly
                  13. Un - Fast Money Blues
                  14. Delphine Dora - V
                  15. Harry Plunket-Greene - The Hurdy-Gurdy Man


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