Blues Lawyer – All In Good Time
Chance Encounters Salary Return Policy Crystal Ball Late Bloomer Someone Else Elusive Eden I Won’t Nowhere To Go Make Up Wrong Time Understood Scenic Route
OUR NEXT 4 RELEASES OUT JUNE 25TH
Dark Entries is proud to release ‘Commerce’, the third EP from San Francisco-based trio INHALT, German for “content”. The group was founded in 2009, and for the purposes of this recording are Matia Simovich, Philip Winiger and Steven Campodonico. INHALT’s core operative strategy is of sonic fidelity and integrity rather than nostalgia. Their first release was a split 12″ on World Unknown in 2011 followed by two EPs on Dark Entries, a remix EP on Emotional Especial and a Part Time Punks Session on Cleopatra.
‘Commerce’ is a close examination of the self destructive tendency of the ego in relation to the allure of negativity and mass tragedy. The EP details the psychopathy of relentless thirst mandated by neo-liberalism and traverses through the adoption of social and economic technologies that strengthen domination vis a vis self enslavement to disempowerment. Employing the best of both modern and vintage techniques, the four songs on the EP utilize dense production, big snares, and powerful German vocals from Philip. INHALT are informed by the brooding soundtracks of John Carpenter as much as the vastness and sheen of Trevor Horn, and set out to explore the borders between the vocal-driven pop song and the expansive dancefloor 12″ arrangement. The record was produced over four years at the bands own Black Sun Loft recording studio and Different Fur Studios. Paul Lavigne mastered the EP in London, England at Kontrast Mastering and George Horn handled the vinyl EQ curve at Fantasy Studios, Berkeley. Each EP is housed in a specially designed jacket by Leo Merz and includes a lyric sheet with English translations.
Colin Potter is a sound engineer and musician currently based in London. He has worked within the fields of electronic and experimental music for over 35 years, collaborating with the likes of Current 93, The Hafler Trio, Organum, Andrew Chalk, and most notably as a key part of Nurse With Wound alongside Steven Stapleton. He started the esteemed ICR (Integrated Circuit Recordings) label in 1981 releasing a clutch of wonderful home recordings of his own, over half a dozen small run cassette only releases.
‘The Where House?’ was recorded in 1981 at IC Studio, a converted wash house in Sutton on the Forest in North Yorkshire. The album was self-released on cassette that same year via ICR. This expanded double LP edition features all 13 tracks from the original tape on vinyl for the first time plus 4 bonus tracks. ‘The Where House?’ is a prime example of early UK post-punk/industrial electronic music. “Combining dub, electro, and krautrock rhythms with psychedelic, kosmische noise in multiple mutations ranging from almost pop-wise songcraft to horizon-scanning motorik flights,” says Boomkat. Most of the damage was done by Colin using guitars, synths, sequencers, drum machines, percussion, and modified toy keyboards with fairly primitive 4-track recording equipment. He was assisted on some of the tracks by Stephan Jadd-Parry (guitar, percussions), Jon Caffery (guitar, bass, e-bow, percussion) and Nick Jackson (synth). All songs have been remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The record is sleeved in a replica of the original cassette artwork by Jonathan Coleclough. Every copy includes a double sided postcard insert with notes from Colin.
Dark Entries is honored to re-issue one of the greatest and most overlooked albums of the 1970s. “Time Actor” was the result of a collaboration between legendary Crazy World & Kingdom Come visionary Arthur Brown and German synthesizer and ambient genius Klaus Schulze, recording under the pseudonym of his alter-ego Richard Wahnfried. “Richard” is the name of Klaus’ son born in 1979, and the first name of the German composer Wagner. “Wahnfried” is the name of Richard Wagner’s house, from the German “wähnen Frieden fand” (that his search and hopes will find
peace). The album was a unique fusion of Brown’s eccentric musical vision and Schulze’s mastery of synthesis. The album was originally released in 1979 on the German Innovative Communication label. Time Actor stands out amongst Schulze’s massive catalog as a masterwork of avant garde new age. Schulze helms the project on electronics, and guests include Michael Shrieve on percussion, Vincent Crane on keyboards, and vocalist Arthur Brown, who sings – or should we say, speaks – on top of it all. Schulze describes the Wahnfried project in the liner notes as “the collective pseudonym of an idea: Time-Electronic, an experiment between avantgarde and muzak: Utility-music for sound-covered environment, in which a new generation grows up: Richard Wahnfried is this generation: Music between genius and nonsense: New ideas transported by an old medium to your ear.”
This newly re-mastered reissue expands the original 60 minutes of music across a double LP to help with playback and distortion experienced on original pressings. We’ve added a bonus track in the form of a Cosmic 12-minute extended remix by Italian producer and DJ Maurizio Delvecchio from 1983. All songs have been remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Housed in a gatefold jacket with original album artwork featuring a surreal painting by German artist Peter Nagel plus lyrics and notes. “I wish you plenty of TIME” – Klaus Schulze
Miss Kittin & The Hacker are the Electro duo of Caroline Hervé and Michel Amato from Grenoble, France. The pair met during the early 90s at a rave and soon after bought turntables and began DJing. In 1996, they started writing music heavily influenced by 1980s synthpop and post-punk bands like Fad Gadget, DAF, Liaisons Dangeuresues, and Yazoo, as well as Italo Disco. Bored by the techno scene at the time, they set out out to lighten the serious tone and bring a campy sexiness to the dour musical landscape. Upon hearing their demos DJ Hell signed them to his Munich-based International DJ Gigolo label and released their first 2 EPs in 1998 and 1999. Their debut album ”First Album” was released in 2001 followed by . in ?.
“Lost Tracks Vol. 2” contains 4 previously unreleased demos recorded between 1997 and 1999. The duo fused 80’s European New Wave/Italo Disco with 90’s Detroit Electro acts like Le Car and Dopplereffekt. By utilizing verse-chorus structures, they playfully shook up the loop based hard techno and electro that was popular at the time. Their studio set up at the time was a Korg MS-20, Roland SH-101, TR-606, TR-808, Siel DK80, and Boss DR-660 drum machine. The songs are direct, spontaneous, seemingly improvised in places. Miss Kittin sings about falling in love in the new millennium, snuff movies and controlling the unknown trip to death, all in her cheekily derisive French accent. All songs have been transferred from the original DAT tapes by the band and remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. The vinyl comes housed in a glossy jacket featuring a black and white photo of the duo taken in 1996. Each LP includes a postcard with liner notes from Miss Kittin and The Hacker designed by Eloise Leigh. As Miss Kittin says of these demos, “We were naive, innocent, adventurous and we didn’t expect anything in return”
OUR NEXT 2 RELEASES OUT MAY 21ST
Dark Entries and Sacred Bones team up to release the early discography of UK synth-punk and Deathrock label Outer Himmalayan Records. Between 1979 and 1982, Nick Blinko and Martin Cooper’s Outer Himmalayan Records released 7-inches by three short-lived bands – The Magits, Soft Drinks, and S-Haters – who would nonetheless cast a massive shadow on the UK’s burgeoning post-punk/anarcho punk scene. Outer Himmalayan Presents collects all of the music found on those original records, along with rare and unreleased tracks by all three bands. It’s a snapshot of a period of frenzied creativity by some of the UK’s most thrilling experimental punks.
Before Blinko went on to found the essential anarcho band Rudimentary Peni, whose storied body of work also appeared on Outer Himmalayan, he and label co-founder Cooper were The Magits. The lone release by the minimal synth-and-vocals duo, Fully Coherent, was the inaugural release on Outer Himmalayan — and, in fact, Blinko and Cooper’s impetus for starting the label. The four tracks on Fully Coherent are short, sharp bursts, comprising a total of four minutes. Here, they’re presented alongside the five-and-a-half minute “A Pawn in the Game,” a song that sees Blinko and Cooper get truly weird with the extra space the longer runtime afforded them.
The next release on Outer Himmalayan was S-Haters’ Death of a Vampire 7″, which the quartet quickly followed with Stories as Cold as the Irish Sea. The band was recognizably a deathrock act, their gothic punk in the same lineage as Joy Division and PIL’s Metal Box, but it showed the same sonic adventurousness that characterized the rest of Outer Himalayan’s output. “1980,” an oddity taken from the rare Another Bouquet on the Grave of Free Enterprise cassette comp, shows the most experimental flourish, with dueling male/female vocals and a prominent acoustic guitar.
The final Outer Himmalayan release before it became strictly a Rudimentary Peni label was Soft Drinks’ Popstars in Their Pyjamas 7″. Popstars ended up being the tongue-in-cheek synth-punk trio’s only release before their breakup, though they would also record “Dangers of Drink,” for the Bouquet of Barbed Wire comp and included here, as well as the one-off track “Misconception,” previously unreleased but now available exclusively on Outer Himmalayan Presents.
All songs have been mastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios. Cover artwork features a collage by Eloise Leigh and each copy includes a 20-page zine featuring liner notes and ephemera associated with the original pressings plus never before seen photos.
Lena Platonos is a Greek musician, pianist and music composer. She was one of the pioneers in the Greek electronic music scene of the 1980s, and she remains active today. Lena was born on the island of Crete and grew up in Athens. She began learning how to play the piano at the age of two and became a professional pianist before turning eighteen. Soon afterwards, she received a scholarship to study in Vienna and Berlin, where she was exposed to jazz, rock, and Middle Eastern music. She returned to Greece in the late 70’s and began working with the Hellenic Broadcasting Corporation. She released three collaborative albums between 1981 and 1983, but it was her “triptych” of solo albums, Sun Masks (1984), Gallop (1985), and Lepidoptera (1986) that would lead many to call her the “Greek Laurie Anderson” or “mother of Greek electronica”.
Released in 1986, Lepidoptera was Lena’s third solo album, which was inspired by a scientific book on butterflies she found in a trashcan one day. The Latin genus and species names were mysterious and paralleled the changes in Lena’s personal life. “My concern in this work is transformation as a metaphor, or transcendence as an existential condition,” says Lena. Compositions follow minimalistic motifs and carefully-staged soundscapes. Vocals are processed through electronic filters, and at times plays a central role. Lena’s surrealistic verses are delivered in a direct fashion, touching on themes of metamorphosis, rebirth, love, and alienation. At times, she expresses tenderness; at others, a childlike innocence.
All songs have been remastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. The jacket is an exact replica of the 1986 edition, featuring an original collage by Lena and photography by Spyros Stateris. Each copy includes a two-sided 11”x11” insert with lyrics, photos and liner notes by Lena, with English translations by Stathis Gourgouris.
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Dark Entries is proud to present the debut album of contemporary British band Linea Aspera. Linea Aspera is the London duo of Ryan Ambridge (Synths/Programming) and Alison Lewis (Vocals/Synths). They began the project in November 2011, technically drawing inspiration from electronic music from the early 1980s. Within the duo, Alison writes and performs all vocal elements, while Ryan is responsible for the writing and performing of the electronics, as well as recording and mixing of the final recordings.
For their debut album they utilized small, simple analog synthesizer set up: Roland SH-09, Roland Juno 6, Vermona DRM MKiii, Korg Poly 800 and Analogue Solutions Semblance. Linea Aspera’s sound includes clear influences from early electronic body music, classic synth-pop and, in some instances, industrial and noise. Lyrically the band incorporates the sciences of osteology, neuroscience, and anthropology weaving a new medical language around themes of desire, despair and renewal. Linea Aspera serve up an icebox of dark doom riding on Alison’s powerful vocals with a soft but sharp touch. All songs have been mastered for vinyl by George Horn at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley. Each LP is housed in a specially designed jacket by Dovile Shurpo and includes a full sized insert of all lyrics.
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disco-funk and hi-NRG Patrick Cowley – MaleboxRelease Date: November 12, 2022Format: Vinyl/CD/Digital If You Feel ItFloatingLove & Passion Low Down Dirty Rhythm feat. Jeanie TracyLove Me HotA
(think: ‘bathhouse E2-E4’) Forbidden Overture – Turned OnRelease Date: November 4, 2022 Strictly ForbiddenPrimal Overture The master sleuths at Dark Entries bring us Forbidden Overture,