DENG BOYU / SHENG JIE

送魂使者 Soul Sender

(Inu Wan Wan) LP $22.00

Two key figures in the Chinese underground avant-garde (Li Jianhong, Yan Jun, Torturing Nurse) recorded Soul Sender during the Qingming Festival, customarily a day to visit tombs and make offerings to the dead. Cello, RAT pedal, drums, and your pinna and eardrum make up the instrumentation. While the formants accessible in the timbral ranges of an instrument do not change, ways of performing a musical instrument always remain discoverable. Sheng (盛洁) and Deng (邓博宇) create a vibrational coalition circulating awareness of entries, exits, and unisons, finding a pulse heard spatially. That gives the chills. Just like the resonances known through bumps in curves on plots of frequency and amplitude that evidence the Higgs boson and other briefly existing subatomic particles concentrated by acceleration and detected through collision. Sheng and Deng access resonance particles.

GOTOU

Gotou

(Inu Wan Wan) LP $16.00

Named after the Taiwanese restaurant the trio frequents in Sapporo, capital of Japan’s northern island Hokkaido, Gotou is made up of Otaco Gotou, Nanae Bndy Gotou, and Chika Gotou, some of the most exciting artists from the city’s experimental music scene (Cup & Saucers, Aoi Swimming). They use the guitar-bass-drums format to create goth post-punk in homage to early 1980s groups such as Mania D and Malaria!

MIKHAIL MINERAL

Лоб

(Inu Wan Wan) LP $28.50

Mikhail Mineral modulates contingencies from the underbelly of the ouroboros of sound and music. This solo recording by a member of the Moscow ensemble Asian Women On The Telephone rotates through little instruments unimpeded by time. “Each feedback piercing with a sour blinding flash, each noise background gnawing with dry, slobberless teeth from futile attempts to connect one tech-organ to another struck annihilating, but never completely blows at the beast, great and immortal, varying its power from a barely audible whisper in an empty box to loud rumble in the mountains.”