Houndstooth Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Given their obsession with maths, geometry and clandestine soundscapes, you'd expect this debut album from Manchester-based studio boffins Synkro and Indigo to be a murky, otherworldly affair. That it is isn't much of a surprise, though it's hard not to be impressed by the depth of material on offer. This self titled set effortlessly struts between cranky, angular techno ("3dOS", "Hex Ad"), sparse African rhythms ("Smoke Circle"), Skam-ish IDM ("Fooled Edge"), slo-mo industrial drone ("Channel Drift"), and post-dubstep rhythms ("Navigate", the dubwise "Rocendal"). Throughout, there's a claustrophobic air of intense paranoia that's hard to ignore. Impressive stuff.

Review: Those in the know know that Abul Mogard is a false identity. Whoever the entity behind Mogard is, we now know that Mogard has teamed up with CoH (Ivan Pavlov) following a chance meeting between the pair at a Slovenian festival in 2019. These two titans of drone-ambient now see the fruits of their labour unleashed to the private: gigadrones such as 'Find And Hold' are stratospheric joys, droning on and on through ambiences that change ever so subtly over time - these aren't just loops.

Review: We live in a vastly different world to the one Aisha Devi presented her last album to. The critically acclaimed DNA Feelings was a dark, ethereal, world-making record, the kind of thing that lures you deeper into incredibly original soundscapes that feel born from theatre as much as rave culture. Five years on, the follow up Death Is Home arrives and picks up where its predecessor left off, opening on the menacing, tense and eerie 'Not Defined By The Visible'. Release information puts this as her most personal record to date, and while we'll have to take that as gospel it's certainly - and remarkably - even more explorative than ever. Tracks like 'Unborn Yet Alive' marry weird choral, twisted art rock, euphoric electronica, and more. 'Lick Your Wounds' is a synthesised opera looking for a new Terminator movie (and hopefully a good one), while 'Azoth Eyes' leaves us in completely unfamiliar territory, closing out with impact that's hard to compare.

Review: Houndstooth has come a very long way since it launched as the nightclub fabric's sister label aimed at less up front electronic tones. Over the years, it has widened its remit, meaning the roster now includes artists so far removed from where the imprint originally came from you'd struggle to believe the back story, establishing itself among the most varied and exploratory UK labels today.
Enter US experimental artist Katie Gately to prove our point. Fawn is a trip, to say the least. Themed around childhood and what comes next, it audibly reflects the tantrums, the wonder, the rebellion, and the growth that we endure from those earliest years through to teenagehood. And it does this through noisy art rock and avant-garde pop. A real creative triumph everyone should hear.

Review: Fabric's offshoot label, Houndstooth, has reached the dizzy heights of a century of releases. Fittingly, they're marking the occasion with a new album from Marquis Hawkes, which is also his first since hyped 2016 debut full-length Social Housing. It's an attractive and punchy affair full of good-time grooves, joyous house workouts, bumpin', Chicago-influenced fare and the kind of luscious, loved-up, garage-influenced deep house goodness that sounds like aural sunshine. While there are a couple of woozier downtempo moments, for the most part it's a deliciously floor-friendly affair, with Hawkes serving up seriously listenable cuts that work both at home and in the club. We actually think it's better than Social Housing, and that was pretty darn tasty.

Notes: Following her debut album Penelope One for Optimo Music, antipodean vocalist, musician and soundscaper Penelope Trappes presents sophomore longplayer Penelope Two, for Houndstooth. Elements from multiple sources are subsumed by Trappes' sonic presence; one hears Badalamenti and Julee Cruise's work for Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Galazie 500 and Slowdive's dreampop, the schorched comedowns of early Primal Scream, Tuxedomoon and Colin Newman's dark melancholia, plus contemporaries like Grouper, Tropic Of Cancer and Sky H1. A deeply melodic, with her intimate, maternally-tender voice floating in the middle of each three dimensional, womb-like sonic space. Originally from Byron Bay Australia before moving to New York, meeting partner Stephen and developing experimental electronic projects Locke and Priscilla Sharp, prior to their best-know incarnation - The Golden Filter.

Review: ***B-STOCK: Creasing to corner of outer sleeve but otherwise in excellent condition***


Under the Special Request alias, Paul Woolford has released some stellar music this year. Astonishingly, "Offworld" is his third album of 2019; it could well be the best, too. It explores different sonic territory too, drawing heavily on electro, futurist Detroit techno, Boards of Canada style IDM and the slick 1980s productions of Jam and Lewis. The result is a stunningly beautiful, spacey and far-sighted set that contains some of Woolford's most emotion-rich work to date - and that's saying something. It also finishes in stunning style with an impeccable remix/re-make of the Grid's "Floatation" that sounds like the best early 90s Orb remix you've never heard.

Notes: 'Untold' is an experimental electronic LP from multi-disciplinary artist and author Sophia Loizou. Depicting a series of speculative sonic landscapes; animals, ocean waves and weather systems are abstracted into eco-centric cyber-dreams creating powerful ambient compositions that invite us to see the Earth through the eyes of others.
Untold is not about the natural or the technological but the relationships between the two; sonic textures, breaks and melodies are shaped by the dynamics of a lion's roar or the rhythm of a dolphin's echolocation emissions."I didn't want to make it human-centric," explains Sophia."I wanted to remove my compositional and structural domination, to find ways to make it about the symbiosis of systems I see in the world."

Untold is part of a much bigger multi-disciplinary project that also includes a collection of poems with accompanying audio, artworks, an AV show and a lecture performance.

Multidisciplinary artist and doctoral researcher Sophia Loizou's debut poetic collection 'Untold: A Tellurian Memorandum' imagines a series of speculative sentient landscapes. The six works envision different aspects of entangled Earthly relationships; from the aqueous roots of biotic life and non-human systems of perpetual growth, to biologically enhanced futures where multiple forms of life collide, connect and share their material qualities. "I wanted to portray an open and empathic multiform future,' explains Sophia. 'a world that celebrates the vibrant, messy and multifaceted beauty of non-human forces and forms."

The book is accompanied by a 30-minute speculative sonic landscape in which sounds from living systems, field recordings from human, animal and technological origins meet - producing wild and unpredictable results.

'A Tellurian Memorandum' is part of a much bigger multi-disciplinary project that also includes the LP 'Untold', artworks, an AV show and a lecture performance.