Kontra Music Sweden Schallplatten & CDs

Review: Sweden's Kontra Musik for the last five years has been consistently releasing quality modern techno. This new one, The Dance, is a collaboration recorded live at Inkonst in Malmo, Sweden, with Mullaert doing live electronics along with Ulf Eriksson's record playing. Tracks on this vinyl release are obviously minus Mallaert's jamming, although we'd highly recommend listening to the CD release as well. Highlights on here are the driving minimalist funk of Villa Abo's "A Different Lick", the sleek yet relentless "Boly Ascend" by Kondens and of course the Dettmann influenced "M. Headroom" by Porn Sword Tobacco and SVN.

Review: Think you heard all there is when it comes to techno made from Roland analogue gear? Well Andreas Tilliander has other ideas! Well regarded for his musical endeavours as Mokira with numerous albums on labels such as Kontra, Raster Noton, Type and Mille Plateux, Tilliander is a fan of aliases and unveils a new one in TM404 with illuminating results on this eponymous album. Tilliander presents eight polyrhythmic productions apparently recorded live in one take without any post arrangement using a combination of Roland gear, including the TB-303, TR-606, TR-7-07, TR-808 and MC-202 drum machine. Track titles are amusing literal, displaying what combination of each model Tilliander used and the name itself is an in joke for Roland nerds. Strangely meditative and possibly one of the most unique albums released so far this year.

Review: Kontra-Musik first allowed Andreas Tilliander the space to explore his love of Roland gear as TM404 back in 2012, issuing an album's worth of material from the highly-decorated Swede as well as a Morphosis Korg Response 12" from Rabih Beaini. Having returned to the TM404 project intermittently since then, Tilliander and Kontra-Musik realign for a second album project entitled Acidub. Fans of those whacky track titles from the first TM404 set will be disappointed to see Tilliander has opted for more traditional names for the eight cuts featured here, but that's a minor quibble as Acidub finds Tilliander guiding his chosen vessels through a most immersive array of moods, weighing in heavy with that Scando-techno melancholy but adding an extra strong dose of dub to the broth.

Review: In all honesty, this latest compilation by Sweden's ever-impressive Kontra Musik caught us by surprise! Before we tell you how much we love this release, it's important to mention that we saw them as a label releasing disparate slices of quality techno, but hadn't predicted their unity as manifested by this get-together of artists. The opener "Weggeputscht" by The Durian Brothers is almost enough to invest the money in this release, a slow-burning tribal nodder with a deep bassline, but the rest of the material by the likes of TM404 or Jason Fine is also pure gold. Our favourites are: the 3D-layered techo of Fishermen on "Black Haze", Frak's bumpy "666", and Silent Servant's remix of "Time Track" by Mokira. Very warmly recommended.