SELECTED BY WAV (12-03-21)

WAV’s ‘FROM OUR WAVE TO YOURS’ is a various and ever-expanding selection of favourite tracks, albums, labels, artists and more, put together by the WAV team and family. You can call them charts, or staff picks, but we like to refer to them as WAVES, connecting us to you and back. We love music, we want to share what we love, but we don’t assume that sharing should be at the expense of the artists. That’s why we link all our WAVE-lists to the bandcamp pages of the artists or labels (if they have one), and that you can view our evolving selection on our WAV’s Buy Music Club Page.
If, in doing so, we can raise more awareness about properly compensating the music makers, then we consider ourselves a little closer to riding the perfect WAVE.

This is the 24/7 selection at the WAV office

‘0011001’ is the first element of this twofold work, and it features Fine Glindvad, best known as the vocalist of the group Chinah, and the Copenhagen-based American vocalist Jeuru, a familiar voice in Valentin’s catalogue. Valentin’s new works, ‘0011001’ & ‘0011000′, do not abstain from collaborations, though on this occasion the authorship and breadth of scope remain entirely his own. As Valentin himself describes the album, “This is the space between becoming a father and losing my mother. All within one year, the space between zero and one.” This is reflected in the two titles. Each is a binary representation of 0 and 1. Across the album, the space between these two thematic points is rendered in exquisitely gentle meditations on the quavering beauty that can be found herewith. “This is the infinite joy and unavoidable beauty of decay. This is from nothing to everything to nothing to everything to … This is the sound of determinations, the entity of numbers.”

Poèmes: Paul Verlaine
Voix: Rachel Sassi
Musiques: Victor De Roo
Guitares: Jente Waerzeggers
Basse: Ferre Marnef
Mix: Paulo Rietjens
Mastering: Mathieu Savenay
Pochette: Emile De Geyndt
Oeuvre: Lucien Janssen

 

Burn the Night / Bruciare la Notte: Original Recordings, 1983–1989 is the first archival collection of music by the Italian minimalist composer Tiziano Popoli. In his music, Popoli framed the Italian avant-garde and New Wave of the 80s through an architectural aesthetic distinctly detailed by a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer, Roland TR909 drum machine, and early sampling technology. These fourteen pieces represent unreleased recordings for installations, theater, and radio broadcasts, and they each beam with unusual melody, radiant color, and generative life.

As a project, Line Gate has been undergoing a slow, steady transformation, much like the longform drone works that have come to characterise it. What began as a band in 2010 and most recently surfaced as a solitary hurdy-gurdy resonance on ‘Den’ in 2017 has now flourished into ‘Apex’, Michal Vaľko’s latest album. ‘Apex’, simultaneously an album about perceiving the beauty around us, about sacredness, and a meditation on a state of timelessness and seeming non-action, is divided into two 30-minute pieces.

The gently modulating drone of the hurdy-gurdy remains present during the first piece, along with its very characteristic (almost psychedelic) resonances and overtones. However, the listener’s ear is almost immediately drawn to another sound source – the human voice.

A resonant layer of sampled voice, not dissimilar from the hurdy-gurdy, acts as an unstable, shifting sonic bed around which a gradually growing choir of voices orbits endlessly. Sibilants, consonants and vowels recited in mantra-like cycles form a non-linguistic vocal tapestry, one without explicit meaning, but imbued with huge emotional gravity and a unique enchanting quality.

 

‘Love Supreme’ is the first single from the upcoming album Voor Het Verdwijnt, En Daarna.
On both clarinet, guitar, piano and cello he goes in search of resonance by means of an intuitive
and sometimes stripped-down process of musical expression.
The memories of his father, visual artist Joris Ghekiere (1955 – 2016), form the basis of the entire album, but are expressed almost literally in this first introduction to Ghekiere’s music.

 

 

The second part of two additional EPs in Delsin’s Eevo Lute re-issue program includes a full 45 rpm cut of the Wladimir M. classic ‘Evil’. On the b-side a fresh and drum heavy interpretation of ‘Planet E’ by Skee Mask. With almost non of the original parts available Skee Mask turns Wladimir’s vocal lines up side down and transforms it into a 140 bpm breakbeat monster. Closer of the EP is the strong and emotive ‘Disappointment’ track, for first time on a vinyl single.

 

In a Word, the sixteenth installment of the intergenerational collaboration series FRKWYS, brings together postminimalist composer Daniel Lentz with vocalist and sound artist Ian William Craig for an album that embraces erosion and the fertility of the loam left behind. A document of shared transformation, Lentz’s elegant piano figures and Craig’s trembling tenor are wilted, warbled, and looped through manipulated tape machines in a real time composition that evokes a strange warmth and layered beauty.

 

 

“There are many ways to imagine the future. One might be to look back in the past to see what has similarities to what we are seeing today. Another way might be to invent and build a time machine to jettison ahead in time to get a glimpse. And, one way might be to use our natural senses to feel what the future might be like. Though all are intriguing to explore, this album is about the latter option.

We are a species of human animals and we are guided by the ways of “knowing” from feeling; by the ways of intuition, premonitions and sensing. Each one of us are born with this special tool set that tells us when the time is right, when enough is enough and when there may be more or less to it. It has been these skills that has allowed humanity to survive and flourish for thousands of years. It is also safe to say that we do not know all there is to know about this skill.

A Clairvoyant is a person who claims to have a supernatural ability to perceive events in the future or beyond normal sensory contact. 100 years around 1920, a person with such abilities that could summon, speak to the decease and spirits were in high demand due to post World War I battle casualties, the Spanish Flu virus pandemic of 1918, the social and civil unrest and many more events that made uncertainty the norm. Ironically, the we were doomed to repeat some of these events and what we’re experiencing today. The general impression of Clairvoyant was that of a conductor of faux hope, scam artist that preys on grief and desperation or someone that believes in their natural ability a bit too much! In many cases, this might have credit, but also, it was this person, with this way of supposedly channeling the beyond that gave people hope, optimism, resolve and much needed closure.

The album plays in the way of a metaphysical séance and should be listened to in a darkened, candle lit room. A silent space, free of outside noise, chatter or talking and other visual distractions. The album should be listened in full – from beginning to end”.

– Jeff Mills

 

A 38 minutes exorcism, dionysac sexyness fueled with romanticism, made of mechanical incantations mixed with spectral vocals of forgotten imaginary tribes, words from a physicist (Incomprehensible Image), and mystical breathings… To remind you that music is demanding your soul and body, fully.

The summer breeze has gradually turned into a cold wind and the trees showcase their typical variegated color palette; autumn has clearly arrived in all its golden glory, a transition exemplary for Spill Gold’s work. The Amsterdam duo’s music is every bit as colorful and moving as its seasonal counterpart, where one moment a cold and stormy wind swarms the air and other times calm and stillness prevail.
On Highway Hypnosis, their first album on vinyl, Spill Gold masterfully juxtaposes darkness and light, playfulness and control, enhancing the transcendental character of the material at hand. Based on strong pop structures, the songwriting here traverses a world of Krautrock and cosmic influences at once catchy and alienating, opening the possibility for catharsis.
They’re a wonderful addition to the versatile nature of Knekelhuis. And they’re crazy good live as well.
Beautifully designed sleeve / innersleeve by Jacob Hoving. Mastered by Wouter Brandenburg.

 

The first volume in a two-part collection of pirate radio adverts & idents, taken from recordings of London stations between 1984 & 1993.

Many thanks to Wayne Anthony, Simon Reynolds, Stephen Hebditch & The Pirate Radio Archive.

 

 

An anthology set of the group that launched the On-U Sound label with the first album and single, New Age Steppers were a collective with an evolving line-up, built around the driving forces of Ari Up (The Slits) and producer Adrian Sherwood. Their records featured contributions from several singers and players from the UK post-punk vanguard such as the Pop Group, The Raincoats and The Flying Lizards; colliding with established movers from the reggae world such as Bim Sherman, Style Scott and George Oban. Contains the following discs: New Age Steppers (1981), Action Battlefield (1981), Foundation Steppers (1983), Love Forever (2012), Avant Gardening (a new compilations of rare dubs, version excursions and unreleased tracks from the vault) plus 32 page book containing photos, ephemera and a new sleevenotes by Oli Warwick that trace the history of the group via conversations with Adrian Sherwood and other contributors.

 

Cardinal & Nun returns to L.I.E.S. now with his debut lp, 8 songs of full on rotten stripped back, fuzzed out, synth punk mayhem. Straight to the head beautifully thrashing anthems, Cardinal & Nun goes in with catchy basslines, dissonant guitar chop ups, and vocals that creep from the shadows throughout the affair. Don’t gas out though, there are some somber cuts on the b-side’s “Whats Goin On Tonite?”, “Pandemonium” and “Day After Day”. A true gem in the French scene, now get in the pit and jack.

 

Recording an album about the feelings of two prisoners waiting on death row. As a statement against capital punishment.
It was (and even still is nowadays) a delicate and ambitious plan.
Bernard Szajner did it, in 1980, after watching an Amnesty International documentary.

And stakes were high: at that point in his life Szajner has spent the majority of the 70’s doing light and visuals for bands as Magma, Gong, Pink Floyd and The Who. In the meantime he created his own instrument, the ‘Syringe’, aka the first laser harp, and made his debut as a musician under the Z moniker with ‘Visions of Dune’.

When listening to ‘Some Deaths Take Forever’ in 2020 it’s hard to believe it was recorded already four decades ago: the melancholic piano theme and the metallic synth riffs of opener ‘Welcome to Death Row’ set the tone for a mind blowing audio journey which at one moment echoes the vibe of early 80’s gloom funk and derailed krautrock drenching into pulsating proto Detroit techno and on the other hand sounds like the blueprint for a futuristic electronic
music scene in the years to come.

The influence and the impact of ‘Some Deaths Take Forever’ is also still vibrating: Carl Craig mentioned it as his all time favorite album in Future Mag, the signature sound of Oneohtrix Point Never feels almost like a not so hidden tribute and the killer sci fi electronics of tracks ‘Ressurector’ or ‘A Kind Of Freedom’ resonates through the discography of Air and Daft Punk, to name a few.

Excerpt liner notes John ‘Inzane’ Olson:

Szajner’s album here sounds different with each listen, a new unnoticed corner blaring aloud to be (re)discovered within any of the ten tracks: strongest mark of a classic if there was any.
So buckle in, spray yourself with this electric insecticide and let your shadowy sentence ring out with a “loud clanging noise that turned out be an electronic gavel.”

Excerpt liner notes Karel Beer (producer):

Now 40 years later when listening to “Some Deaths…” in spite of the uncompromising subject matter and knowing that the written word is his most influential source of inspiration I am struck by the unexpected references that can be heard on the tracks. There’s Shaft, Jeff Beck, Morricone, Weather Report and even Timmy Thomas. A truly eclectic bunch that somehow makes sense of an era. It’s almost as if Szajner is applying these accidental or
intentional influences just as an artist would use inks, oils or found forms to a canvas.