The return of Gaussian Curve - Gigi Masin, Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk’s much-loved trio are back for the first time since their 2016 sophomore album 'The Distance', presenting two new tracks entitled 'Winter Sun' and 'Fever Dream'.

Both tracks originate from recording sessions that took place in Amsterdam in 2016 for 'The Distance'. Despite not finding a place on the final album and being left as unfinished sketches for six years, the tracks represent an important part of the Gaussian Curve story which the band felt compelled to complete. Coinciding with the decision to perform a handful of live shows in 2022, they finally revisited the sketches, mixing and arranging them with the goal of giving them the full release that they deserve.

The trio’s trademark sound hits from first moments of 'Winter Sun'; a lush slow builder with all the classic GC ingredients; Nash’s airy and spacious guitar lines interplay with Masin’s warm rhodes, underpinned by Sterk’s subtle use of electronics and the minimal rhythm of a CR-78 drum machine.

On 'Fever Dream', the trio subtly expand their palette; a gently building 303 bass line and 808 rhythm form the foundations of the piece, with Masin’s vocals adding to a slow-burning intensity. Arguably a fuller sound hinting at new areas of exploration for the trio, but unmistakably Gaussian Curve.

Graphic art by Qiu Yang, design by Steele Bonus.

STAFF COMMENTS

Matt says: Wow, "Fever Dream" - a heart-puncturing piece of electronic-soul futurism. Sultry and lascivious, cloaked in shimmering designer sonics and impossible to resist.

TRACK LISTING

Winter Sun
Fever Dream

Following the success of Curve's debut full-length Doppelgänger, which nearly hit the U.K. Top 10, the British group went in a darker, moodier direction with 1993 follow-up Cuckoo. Opener "Missing Link" is furious and aggressive, coming closer to Ministry-style industrial than the group's previous work, but other songs are slower, more atmospheric, and a bit more experimental. "Superblaster" is a bit closer to the poppiness of Doppelgänger's highlights and was released as a single.

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Missing Link
2. Crystal
3. Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus
4. All Of One
5. Unreadable Communication

Side B
1. Turkey Crossing
2. Super Blaster
3. Left Of Mother
4. Sweetest Pie
5. Cuckoo

Curve were an English alternative rock and electronic music duo from London, formed in 1990 and split in 2005. The band consisted of Toni Halliday (vocals, occasionally guitar) and Dean Garcia (bass, guitar, drums, programming). Halliday wrote the lyrics of their songs and they both contributed to songwriting. Producer Alan Moulder was a prominent collaborator who helped shape their blend of heavy beats and densely layered guitar tracks set against Halliday's vocals.

Doppelgänger is their debut studio album from 1992 and is a continuation of the musical idiom established by the group on its three earlier EPs. Doppelgänger combines elements of dance music and alternative rock with the reverb-laden and distortion-heavy stylings of shoegaze. The album reached No. 11 in the UK Albums Chart and spawned the two singles "Faît Accompli" and "Horror Head".

TRACK LISTING

Side A
1. Already Yours
2. Horror Head
3. Wish You Dead
4. Doppelgänger
5. Lillies Dying

Side B
1. Ice That Melts The Tips
2. Split Into Fractions
3. Think And Act
4. Faît Accompli
5. Sandpit

Following on from the release of her collaborative album ‘Burn’ last year, alongside Dead Can Dance’s Jules Maxwell and James Chapman from MAPS, Lisa Gerrard has now joined forces with producer and composer Marcello De Francisci for the stunning new LP ‘Exaudia’. Working alongside a team of other musicians including Bahar Shah, Astrid Williamson, Daniela Arbizzi, and Farhad Behroozi, ‘Exaudia’ looks to combine the broad and euphoric textures of De Francisci’s production with the warm and haunting vocals of Gerrard. Described as “a feminine embodiment of poetic expression”, the record plays majestically with this narrative, inviting a rich and vivid texture within each offering. Short Info: The new collaboration between Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci - "Exaudia" “Exaudia” – Definition: A king concedes audience and fulfills a wish that is petitioned.

“Exaudia” is an album inspired by the history of Spain in the 1500’s and its expulsion of Sephardic tribes throughout all of Europe and North Africa. The musical tracks for “Exaudia” were composed, performed, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered in Los Angeles and all of Lisa Gerrard’s vocals were recorded out of her personal studio in Melbourne. Longer Info: The new collaboration between Lisa Gerrard and Marcello De Francisci - "Exaudia" “Exaudia” – Definition: A king concedes audience and fulfills a wish that is petitioned. “Exaudia” is an album inspired by the history of Spain in the 1500’s and its expulsion of Sephardic tribes throughout all of Europe and North Africa. The musical tracks for “Exaudia” were composed, performed, recorded, produced, mixed and mastered in Los Angeles and all of Lisa Gerrard’s vocals were recorded out of her personal studio in Melbourne. Marcello De Francisci is a composer based in Los Angeles, California. His studies furthermore career began as a visual artist while attending fine arts at an institution founded by the famed Baroque painter Bartolome Esteban Murillo in Seville, Spain. He later furthered his education at the “Universidad Complutense” in Madrid in addition taught himself music to discover his true passion was to score soundtracks for the motion picture industry.

TRACK LISTING

1. When The Light Of Morning Comes
2. Until We Meet Again
3. Fallen
4. Exaudia
5. Stories Of Love, Triumph & Misfortunes
6. Stay With Me
7. Exaudia Reprise

The Line Is A Curve is about letting go. The core of the record is that the pressures we face do not always have to be heavy burdens, but can be reframed; the more pressure a person is under, the greater the possibility for release.

The album plays like a chronicle of pressures - the mind-numbing pursuit of a comfortable life, the eternal striving for more, the pressures of the city, the country, the times. The pressures of maintaining relationships, of battling illness, addiction, poor mental health, the vacuous life of our online selves. As we move through these chronicles though, the mood brightens. The musicality becomes more expansive as the lyrical horizon broadens and we glimpse coastlines, high streets, scrap yards, train stations in the rain; the entire album begins to let go. We encounter the contributions of artists who I love and admire, guest vocalists and instrumentalists, and so we defeat the sense of isolation felt in the opening track with a sense of deeply connected community. More Pressure, the penultimate song, is the essence of the whole album and the epiphany that leads to Grace, which is a prayer, a surrendering; ‘Please move me, please move through me, please unscrew me, please loosen me up.’ But once we get to the end of Grace, and the album, we loop back to the start – to ‘Kiss off the day with a mute mouth. Pass the commute like I can die faster than you.’ Because no matter how much a person grapples with, realises, deeply understands, about life and their place in it, we still wake up in the morning back to square one. Life isn’t solved the minute you figure something out about it. It’s a daily operation to increase your resilience, cultivate a deeper acceptance, let go of what’s chasing you and lean in to the pressures. It’s cyclical, as I believe all things are. And instead of trying to fight the cycles, this album asks us to surrender to them. To let go.

These general themes, of acceptance, resilience, surrender are also about where I’m at in my personal life, in my journey towards a greater acceptance of myself as an artist and as a human being. Being more honest with the world and my community about who I am and letting go of some heavy heavy shame, which is a glorious thing.

This album has a beautiful heart, there is so much love running through it and I can’t wait for people to experience it.

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: This newest outing from Kae Tempest absolutely shines with everything that made their 2019 LP 'Books Of Traps And Lessons' such a standout hit. It's fiery, wonderfully written and superbly modern, imbued with rippling arps and grooving synths that weren't really at the forefront of the decidedly less upbeat aforementioned offering. It's a wonderful turn in the road for this eminently talented musician.

TRACK LISTING

1. Priority Boredom
2. I Saw Light (feat. Grian Chatten)
3. Nothing To Prove
4. No Prizes (feat. Lianne La Havas)
5. Salt Coast
6. Don't You Ever
7. These Are The Days
8. Smoking (feat. Confucius MC)
9. Water In The Rain (feat. Assia)
10. Move
11. More Pressure (feat. Kevin Abstract)
12. Grace

Dead Can Dance members Lisa Gerrard and Jules Maxwell have teamed up under a new guise with James Chapman (MAPS) to create a studio album, titled ‘Burn’. The record began its journey more than seven years ago, when Lisa met Irish theatre composer Jules Maxwell before working together for the first time. ‘Burn’ is set for release on 7th May 2021 via Atlantic Curve. Speaking about the origins of the album, Lisa Gerrard explains, “It is with great pleasure that I share this collaboration with Jules Maxwell. Jules and I began our creative journey with Dead Can Dance. We realised that we could connect through improvisation and that musical exploration continues to evolve with this present work.”

Although this record is a new release, its beginnings go all the way back to 2012 during that year’s Dead Can Dance world tour. Originally brought in as a live keyboard player, Jules Maxwell helped create a new song with Lisa Gerrard called ‘Rising Of The Moon’, which was performed as the final encore of each show. By the time the tour finished in Chile in 2013, a strong affinity had begun to develop between the two of them and further opportunities to collaborate with each other resulted over subsequent years. In 2015, when Maxwell was asked to submit songs for the Bulgarian choir The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voices (Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares), he approached Gerrard to co-write material and travelled to Australia to work with her in her home studio. The pair came away with four new songs for that release, as well as the building blocks for this new venture together. Jules describes the introduction to James Chapman. "About a year later, over dinner in Sofia after a concert by the Bulgarian women, my publisher suggested to me that I work with James Chapman on completing the BURN songs. James had established a sound with his band MAPS, which also had big horizons at its core, and it seemed like an intriguing proposition to me."

With Chapman joining the duo as producer, ideas began to be generated freely and over time a distinct sound for their work began to emerge. Their focus was to create a sound that was both euphoric and compelling, more inventive than what they had worked on separately in the past. From gentle beginnings, each track builds and intensifies, creating a hypnotic experience to listen to from start to finish.

With Lisa remaining in Australia, Jules adding his keys and percussion from France, and James bringing new light to the sound from England, the three were literally worlds apart, but those worlds fused in the music. Recently, Jules Maxwell also released his debut solo album ‘Songs From The Cultural Backwater’, Lisa Gerrard received a Grammy nomination and returned to Dead Can Dance to release the group’s critically praised ninth studio full-length ‘Dionysus’, and James Chapman released MAPS 4th full-length album ‘Colours. Reflect. Time. Loss’. Stylistically, the new album ‘Burn’ is a diverse mix of electronica, alternative, cinematic soundscape and world music with hints of early Vangelis. Accumulatively, this is a stunning departure for all three of them.

TRACK LISTING

SIDE A
1. Heleali (The Sea Will Rise)
2. Noyalain (Burn)
3. Deshta (Forever)
4. Aldavyeem (A Time To Dance)

SIDE B
1. Orion (The Weary Huntsman)
2. Keson (Until My Strength Returns)
3. Do So Yol (Gather The Wind)

LIKE TRAINS return with their razor-sharp new record KOMPROMAT. The Leeds band’s first studio album in eight years deals with knotted themes of information; how we consume it, and how we can possibly make any sense of it in an age of constant bombardment. It digs beneath populism’s rise, from the divide and conquer tactics that caused Brexit in the UK, to the ascent of Trump in America and the subsequent reign of lies and misinformation, to discover the grubby hands that have engineered it all.

I LIKE TRAINS - made up of Martin (vocals/guitar), Alistair Bowis (bass), Guy Bannister (guitar/synths), Simon Fogal (drums) and Ian Jarrold (guitar) - have never shied away from confronting the possibility of humanity’s collapse, of course. Early records, like the towering, Godspeed-influenced Progress Reform (Fierce Panda, 2006) and Elegies to Lessons Learnt (Beggars Banquet, 2007) took tales of tragic characters and events from history and applied them to the modern day, while He Who Saw The Deep (2010) looked uneasily ahead to the climate change battle we stand on the precipice of losing. Previous album The Shallows (2012) focused on how the internet and smart technology is re-wiring the human mind and affecting our concentration spans.

KOMPROMAT simultaneously sounds like none of those records, yet also contains DNA from all of them. The group have gone back to go forwards in some ways, returning to some of the primary influences that caused them to first form back in 2004: Joy Division, The Birthday Party, Gang of Four, Television and The Velvet Underground. It marks a welcome return for a band who remain a singular presence away from the ebb and flow of UK guitar music fashion; a band in their own orbit, working to their own distinctive style.

TRACK LISTING

1. A Steady Hand
2. Desire Is A Mess
3. Dig In
4. PRISM
5. Patience Is A Virtue
6. A Man Of Conviction
7. New Geography
8. The Truth
9. Eyes To The Left (feat. Anika)

Described, variously, as “dusky and mysterious, cosmetic and up-for-it”, “Industrial techno disco,” and “like a Japanese express train”, Curve’s second album Cuckoo is more sophisticated, more seductive, less serrated, even squelchy in places than their debut, Doppelganger. A mature, fluent, and literary album, it hit the Top 30 on release in 1993. Cuckoo takes the listener from the established hallmarks and runs with them - over the horizon - to many new and rich areas of pop melodrama. Delicate and gorgeous moments sit easily with their simultaneously cool and incendiary sound. A more personal album, it is nonetheless metallic, unforgiving, LOUD, clear. As with Doppelganger the album was produced by the band with Flood and Steve Osborne, and it was mixed by Alan Moulder. It is home to the lead tracks from singles ‘Blackerthreetracker’ EP and ‘Superblaster’ and is regarded by the band as their best piece of work.

TRACK LISTING

Disc: 1 (2CD Version)
1. Missing Link
2. Crystal
3. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
4. All Of One
5. Unreadable Communication
6. Turkey Crossing
7. Superblaster
8. Left Of Mother
9. Sweetest Pie
10. Cuckoo

Disc: 2 (2CD Version)
1. Missing Link (Single Version)
2. On The Wheel
3. Triumph
4. Superblaster (Remix)
5. Low And Behold
6. Nothing Without Me
7. Missing Link (Screaming Bird Mix)
8. Rising (Headspace Mix)
9. Half The Time (Honey Tongue Mix)
10. Rising (Original Version)
11. Half The Time (Original Version)

Vinyl
1. Missing Link
2. Crystal
3. Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
4. All Of One
5. Unreadable Communication
6. Turkey Crossing
7. Superblaster
8. Left Of Mother
9. Sweetest Pie
10. Cuckoo

Blank Tapes bring us the debut album release from Bass Clef, aka Ralf Cumbers. Having spent years refining and distilling his sound, Ralph finally locked himself in his tiny studio in Hackney. Eight months later he emerged with a clutch of demos that contained some of the freshest, most dazzling beats that the label's posse had heard in years. Opting out of the race for the latest sequencer / processor / sound card that drives much IDM, Ralph is somewhat of a connoisseur of vintage analogue equipment. Utilising just an old four track cassette recorder, a drum machine, a sampler, an ye olde synth and valve compressor, Ralph has conceived a striking and original debut. Think of the viral dub spaces of Mad Professor, the DIY intimacy of Third Eye Foundation or the brain-teasing beat programming of Afx, all with live interventions on trombone, theremin and cowbells (always a good combination!) and you're nearly there.