Le Petit
Le Petit (2025 Repress)

For nearly 40 years, English producer Mark Van Hoen has been making challenging music that eludes easy categorization under his own name, as Locust, and in the groups Autocreation, Scala, and Drøne. While his output has skirted around the fringes of IDM, techno, trip-hop, ambient, drone, and electropop, it has mutated these genres' elements in distinctive ways, revealing a mind always questing for unprecedented sounds.This is Mark Van Hoen’s ninth album as Locust, and an instant classic.Drifting, hanging, holding. Hoping, seeking, searching. And then finding.Mark Van Hoen's ninth album as Locust is a cosmic whisper, a tender touch, where candid songwriting commingles with the afterimage of trip-hop and jungle. Across eight tracks, spectral melodies dance between languid breakbeats, and a formless murmur drifts through the ether, seeking a common thread.Layered in strata, "The First Cause" reveals itself anew with each listen. Delicate tones share space with bass weight. Drums crunch, and rhythms cascade. Voices loop and intone, bodiless. What at first seems melancholy, you may later find reoriented—toward promise.We seek solace in each other, and we seek solace in sound. Kinship isn't easy to come by. When a record offers its kind embrace to us as this one does, without reservation, we should take heed.Written, performed and produced by Mark Van Hoen© Touch Music/Fairwood Music UK Ltd℗ 2023 Mark Van Hoen under exclusive license to Mysteries of the Deepmarkvanhoen.comMastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio, NYPhotography by Grant AaronDesign by Gabriel BenzurWords by Chris Zaldua

Refracted's "In Veil" materialises as the third emission in the Titrate series. A gradual unfolding across six passages, each step a study in the dissolution of boundaries. Here, time becomes elastic - synthetic textures breathe alongside captured moments of reality, neither demanding prominence nor seeking refuge in the background. Percussion appears as memory rather than rhythm, while drones hover like fog over unknown lands.Cut to 180g vinyl and embraced by 350gsm reverse board, "In Veil" doesn't announce its presence but rather seeps into awareness

Colombian-born artist Juan Carlos Torres Alonso, aka OKRAA, presents his third sonic exploration on A Strangely Isolated Place titled, La Gran Corriente. This album marks a profound shift in Juan's creative journey, where themes of portals, the illusion of time, and the paradoxes of self-discovery converge into a powerful auditory experience.Following a transformative visit to Bogotá in May 2023, Juan underwent an introspective journey that inspired a new direction in his music. This experience, which he describes as an encounter with "an infinite current behind or inside of everything," led to a complete reimagining of his work. Abandoning previous demos, Juan embraced a liberated creative process that was both challenging and exhilarating. La Gran Corriente is characterized by its innovative production techniques, eschewing fixed grids and BPMs in favor of fluid, organic structures and combining influences from Juan’s other production alias, ‘Laudrup’. This approach not only opened up new creative possibilities but also led to numerous "happy accidents," resulting in a body of work that is as unpredictable as it is cohesive.At the heart of the album lies a poem written by Juan during production, a text that echoes the themes woven throughout the music. Translated loosely to English, the poem reflects on the nature of reality and time, with lines like "the land of oblivion is not real" and "the great current reminisces; time is an illusion." These words serve as both a guide and a reflection of the album’s deeper meaning.La Gran Corriente is a record that invites the listener to unlearn and to immerse themselves in a sonic current that is both infinite and transformative. It’s a testament to the power of creative reinvention and the relentless pursuit of deeper truths through music.Featuring artwork by Peter Skwiot Smith, La Gran Corriente is available on gatefold colored vinyl 2LP, mastered by Taylor Deupree / 12k Mastering, with full release on 30th October 2024.

Wanderwelle is the Amsterdam-based ambient duo of Phil van Dulm & Alexander Bartels who mint their Maalstrom label with Wat Gebeurde Er Met Sergeant Massuro?, a concept album based around Harry Mulisch's 1957 story of the same name (What Happened To Sergeant Massuro?). The story weaves anti-colonial concepts with the mythical and is sonically brought to life through electronics, field recordings, and acoustic instruments. The duo worked with the author's estate to ensure their musical interpretation reflected Mulisch's ideas with authenticity.

Written, recorded and produced by Matti Bye in Fårö, Sweden 2022 The recordings were made on a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano through the EMS Synthi A, recorded onto tape with Nagra IV S. Photography by Matti Bye Mastered by Giuseppe Tillieci at EnissLab, Rome“The prolific Swedish pianist and composer Matti Bye has long been associated with Northern Electronics, appearing on well-enumerated compilations and collaboration-rich works. This is the first time he presents his own full-length recording with the label.'Between Darkness and White Snow' captures Bye's elemental radiance in four vignettes. Recorded on a 1926 Steinway Grand Piano through an EMS Synthi A, 'Between Darkness and White Snow' renders the perplexity of polarity with a grave assembly of textural phenomena and lyrical figures. As ephemeral harmonic mazes wilt into subdued distortion, we are left with a tentative invitation to gaze into the pooling material of Bye's compositions.”

“Sonically, the Swedish duo SHXCXCHCXSH distort the club context they work from by rendering functionality with an exceptionally refined and idiosyncratic palette. As logophiles, they contort the little descriptive context they afford audiences by imploding language into splintered and barely comprehensible character sequences. The impression is that each is the result of mutual process-driven experiments.This is all true of '......t', their new album and debut recording for Northern Electronics. However, working at this scale, SHXCXCHCXSH play with wider parameters and explore broader functions to produce their most comprehensive and focused work to date.Across fifteen tracks, their bespoke dark matter is stacked with drone pyrotechnics, shredded vocals, and oblique, snatched sounds that eddy into frantic melodic storms. Sublime intensity is spiked with effervescent yet brooding intermissions throughout, staking '......t' as the most crucial volume of their catalogue as it gestures toward new references.”