Music From Memory Holland Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Vancouver based artist Yu Su serves up a debut album on Music Form Memory here that is released in collaboration with Chinese label bie Records and follows on from the well received EP 'Roll With The Punches' from 2019. The record is named after the most heavily silted river in the world but boast glistening tracks and melodic electronica. Some pieces are s trident and club ready bliss-outs, while others and slow and dubby rivers of liquid sound. A weird and wonderful series of sound sources delta the record from oriental strings to wooden percussion, mystic voices and water effects, all making this a spell binding listen.

Review: Having introduced Spanish ambient pioneer Suso Saiz to a wider audience via last year's superb Odisea retrospective, Music From Memory has scored a new album from the long-serving musician and composer. Rainworks was recorded over a two-month period in early 2016, and sees Saiz evocatively joining the dots between Jonny Nash style guitar-led ambience, gently undulating, piano-driven mood pieces, evocative collages of found sounds and field recordings (see opener "From Memory & The Sky"), and ghostly, effects-laden ambient. He also finds time to pay tribute to Steve Reich style American minimalism on the cyclical brilliance of "They Don't Love Each Other".

Review: Back in 2017, Damon G Roddick - yep, Dam-Funk himself - unveiled a new project on Music From Memory, Garrett. Since then, he's delivered two albums of evocative, melodious and, by his standards, melancholic synthesizer music that add a picturesque, almost Balearic tinge to his usually forthright synth-funk sound. Here he presents what he says is the third and final installment in the trilogy, once again painting colourful, emotive musical pictures with little more than a bank of vintage synths and a couple of drum machines. As you'd expect, it's as on-point, entertaining and enjoyable as its predecessors, delivering the kind of attractive, sofa-friendly synth sounds that are guaranteed to put smiles on stressed and miserable faces.

Review: Following on from their compilation EP of last year, Music From Memory return with another six tracks from Dutch musician Hubertus Baars aka Richenel. A somewhat illustrious figure in Dutch pop history with his flamboyant appearance, La Diferencia is a repackaged version of the original cassette release. It's a zeitgeist of the heady punk and squatter scene of Amsterdam in 1982, set against a backdrop of drugs and social unrest. It reflects a unique mix of punk aesthetics, with a synthesized bedroom funkiness. As well as having one of the more exceptional male voices to come out of the country, Richenel would go on to become a successful recording artist in the Netherlands before moving to Spain later in his career.

Review: Music From Memory's latest must-check reissue is a fresh pressing of an obscure 1985 album by Musica Esporadica, a six-piece collective whose members included regular label contributor Suso Saiz. It's a hugely atmospheric affair from start to finish, with bubbly drum machine grooves and Afro-influenced hand percussion rhythms being overlaid with languid synthesizer melodies, atmospheric chords, distant guitar sounds and aural textures so warming you could probably use them as a duvet. There are naturally nods towards ambient, new age and Steve Reich style minimalism (see "I Forgot The Shirts") as well as the occasional operatic vocals and the most Balearic of sounds: fretless bass.

Review: Music From Memory are spending some time exploring the world of music created for dance and performance. There's a common interest in experimentation between the mediums, but not at the cost of musicality, which comes here with a distinct 80s veneer. Gerard Stokkink has a thread of drama and poise about the vivid synthscapes of "Yellow Turtles" while the self-titled track from Ivory Playground calls to mind the delicate fingerpicking guitar you might expect to hear from Alexis Georgopoulos & Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. Atlantis Transit Project have a heavier tribal lilt to the percussion on "Bird Perspective", and Ramuntcho Matta's "Zoique III" holds a mirror up to the freaky disco drum work of Jan Schulte and Niklas Wandt.

Review: Once again, Music From Memory has dug deep for inspiration. Very few will have come across the original 1987 pressing of Ich Traume So Leise, a long-forgotten collaborative album that brought together trumpet player Heinz Becker, songwriter Karl-Heinz Stegmann, and poet Isabel Zeumer. Predictably, though, the tracks which the Dutch label has chosen to reissue are exceptionally good. "Mein Tanzlied", for example, features Becker's meandering trumpet lines and Zeumer's eyebrow-raising spoken word vocals seemingly drifting over an intoxicatingly funky, mid-80s dancefloor groove, while "Dir" is a seriously atmospheric chunk of beatless jazz poetry. Flip for the Balearic electro-funk of "Der Schnupfen" and the languid, new age ambience of "Abends".

Review: Don't let the "Coldwave" tag fool you: this EP from Dutch archival imprint Music From Memory is every bit as glassy-eyed and loved-up as the rest of their left-of-centre, Balearic-minded catalogue. German drummer and composer Curt Cress first released "Dschung Tek" in 1992, layering his own dense tribal drums across a tropical, ambient house and dream house influenced backing track on the brilliant "Long Version", before stripping it back to a loved-up, Ibiza-friendly house cut on the "No Live Drums" version. Both mixes can be found on this reissue, alongside a trio of similarly percussive, tropical-minded cuts from the artist's 1983 LP, "Avanti". All three are ace and almost as good as the more floor-focused title track.