Birds of Prey
Vanishing Point

On "Decades On Divided Stars" Brock Van Wey, aka bvdub, presents his first album on Affin, each of its tracks spanning his trademark Odyssean length, with a sonic and emotional density second to none.You are lost... losing your sense of time... of self. Yet finding your inner existence in its inwardly-folding galaxies. Your thoughts and emotions revolve, as planets caught in gravitational pull, before you suddenly awake, as if from a dream, unaware of how much time has passed. Only the stars will tell...

EU Stock: ✅UK Stock: ✅Kosei Fukuda presents the second half of his debut album – Ruten. In principle, the two halves, called ‘Ruten –‘ and ‘Ruten +’ are meant to represent the principle of Ying & Yang, the two elemental forces and the eternal cycle of energy. As a whole, they signify a journey from the nascent being to the eventual dissolution of everything into nothing. Yet there’s still a deeper message at play: the omnipresence of patterns. Even the incessant flow of changes is patterned. The philosophers ask what it tells us about reality. The artists offer answers, each coded in the respective artistic language.The second volume offers a different take on such explorations, moving towards more nebulous and fuzzier modes of musical imagination. It is here where Fukuda’s music begins to evince ineffable qualities, going beyond words that could definitively grasp its content. As such it seems to be asking: are patterns really there, or are we projecting them onto the world? This change of the composition style signifies a change of intellectual perspective, the second complementing the first. Drone-like sounds of the opening tracks appear alien initially, but on closer inspection they are reminiscent of this-worldly ambient sounds – just amplified many times over, stretched to a border of recognition, and rearranged for a thought-provoking auditory experience. They are impressionist vignettes where chromatic properties count for much more than any beat or harmonic structure.

Shipping from EU: ✅Shipping from UK: ❌What is the sound of feeling?In physics, we conceive of sound as waves. Vibrations, undulations, physical manifestations: heard but not seen. Borne by the body, but interpreted in the brain.Within ourselves, we perceive emotion as waves, too. Rolling in, rolling out: tidal, even. In moments of violet intensity, the depth of our feeling crashes upon us like surf, rip currents on a corporeal beach.Worlds apart, but waves in kind. For musician and composer Jo Johnson, the veil between is diaphanous indeed. What you hear is what you feel. Listen and uncover.

Shipping from EU: ✅Shipping from UK: ❌"Tides" is Joachim Spieth’s second longplayer which will be released on his own Affin imprint. The album is dividedinto 8 tracks, built by seemingly endless, sensitively interwoven surfaces and creates curves of tension between immersive, melancholic and euphoric moments. Layers of atmospheric sounds create a dense and engaging mood, flowing into a swirl of emotions. This is a re-release of the vinyl album from 2020.

Shipping from EU: ✅Shipping from UK: ❌Polish composer Olga Wojciechowska and veteran electronic producer Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner, combine on A Strangely Isolated Place to revisit a beloved Strië album - Olga’s more electronic and experimental alias.With previous releases on Serein and Time Released Sound as Strië, Olga Wojciechowska’s ‘Struktura’ was released in 2015 to a limited audience due to its physical-only format. As Olga’s work becomes increasingly more coveted, through her more recent releases on A Strangely Isolated Place (Unseen Traces & Infinite Distances), and with Struktura praised as one of her finest albums to date, the discussion to breathe new life into the album resulted in a unique pairing with Scanner, an electronic music producer and multimedia artist responsible for some of the most defining works of the genre since the early 1990s.Blurring the line between harmony and dissonance, Struktura’s original recordings paint an eerie, haunting and beautiful picture, conceptualized around abstract art, with intricacies and mystery abound. Here, Strië’s original recordings remain untouched, albeit lovingly remastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, and it is left to Scanner to provide further interpretations of Olga’s original recordings.Scanner productions can typically traverse a myriad of styles, but here, Robin took a primarily live-hardware approach to the remixes, allowing the rawness of his recordings to add story and depth. Recorded in one take, with no overdubs, the reinterpretations strip the melodies and textures to their original essence, bringing an entirely analog element to Olga’s intrinsically detailed originals.Featuring artwork by Rep Ringel and mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri, Struktura Revisited is available on Gatefold 2LP in a black/grey half-and-half vinyl, with 6x6” soft-touch heavy art card.

EU Stock: ✅UK Stock: ✅The album you are holding in your hands showcases the cast of musicians in the first edition of the Ensō Festival. Records that document or accompany actual events are not quite able to capture all of the uniquely staged experience of music happening ‘here and now’; they typically can’t substitute the extended immersion and effervescence that are among the goals of any festival worth its name. However, records can give us a glimpse into the meanings of such events, however imperfect. They can convey some of the sensations, emotions and ideas encoded in the music, however incomplete. What counts is how affectively touching they are, not how effectively truthful they appear.