An august August to you. Sure the year is flying by.

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the piss superstition - getting nothing to appear on the developed film
I forget how but I came across the Ordnance, Tape Only project some time back and only gave time to it this week. It was a sound-art project that housed single-sided tapes in carefully packaged artwork shorn from maps by the label head. It's all available, along with more detailed info, at the Radio Free Midwich site. Anyway. I was reading the site again this week and the same dude is behind the Fencing Flatworm label, and he's just put out getting nothing to appear on the developed film by the piss superstition, a noisy, hiss-laden collection of tracks running at 30 minutes, released on CD-r and coming with info and poetry lovingly typed out on an A7 pamphlet. It's great. Hopefully better than I've made it sound.

Topdown Dialectic - Topdown Dialectic
Another tape of smudged, woozy electronics, this time packaged in a clear ziploc bag. It's on the newly minted /\\•Aught label and I've honestly no idea who this is, if it's anyone other than just someone making music that is. He/she/they has/have another (sold out) tape on Further Records that you can check out on Bandcamp, as well as a release on Tailings that doesn't seem to have any previews online. I actually just got lost and distracted listening to the self-titled tape again. Marvellous stuff. 

Crisis Urbana and Always Human Tapes - Human Crisis
A compilation from these two labels, with a variety of different techno sounds. 'Boo' by PBS really stands out, as does the slow drudge of Rawaat's 'Forest Brigade'. 

Laura Cannell - Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth
Brawl Records - Black Earth Remixes
This one’s a bit backward. Bass Clef and Luke Abbott (among others) did remixes of tracks from Laura Cannell’s Quick Sparrows Over The Black Earth album, and that’s how it came into my life. Delving into the package’s origins, I found the album, in which she takes fragments of music from medieval times and reworks and improvises around them, “performing on overbowed fiddle and double-barrelled recorders”. Simple melodies and structures gain beauty through repetition and development. If reworked medieval music ain’t for you, well, there are always the remixes. Bass Clef adds juddering, well, bass; Ekoplekz is all distorted scuzz and unresolved chords; Hacker Farm adds actual farm sounds - moos and grunts and cawing birdsong - over lilting recorders and plucked strings while terrifying bass hints at unseen demons. In fact, maybe it’s because of they remain closest in spirit to the originals, but the Hacker Farm versions are my favourite. For the record, the subtitle on Hacker Farm's website reads: “Hacker Farm | Broken Music for a Broken Britain.” Broken Britain. That is all.

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Ivy Barkakati - Until The End Of Time
Ivy B makes incredibly dark twisted techno and noisy drone, and also makes mixes that feature Kraftwerk and Sade and Kyle Hall. If I'm not mistaken, the artwork for this one is a still from the superb Double Indemnity. 

Juju & Jordash 'Ambient' jam at Freerotation 2014
Juju & Jordash played Freerotation a few weeks back, and this is their ambient set from the chillout room or tent or whatever it was. It’s all live - this is not a DJ set - and it’s stunning. Think of the wistful sounds in tracks like ‘Loosey Goosey’ and even Jordan’s own ‘Crybaby’, then imagine them in a beat-free environment. Heavenly. They play Dekmantel today (with Move D as Magic Mountain High) and tomorrow. I'm not going to Dekmantel. Boo. 

Cooking With Palms Trax 004
Palms Trax goes in on BCR for his 'Cooking With Palms Trax' show. Two hours of great music - starting with new stuff that’s pretty out there (Lee Gamble, Jahiliyya Fields) before moving into sultry house grooves. He seems like a lovely lad too - "Sorry for putting you through anything you didn't like," he intones, while playing a gorgeous track from Max D. I don’t really know any of the second half, old stuff, and then he plays the aforementioned ‘Loosey Goosey’. Belter.

Juno Plus Podcast 92: F#X
I wasn't sure what to expect from this mix, I figured something like difficult techno, barrages of difficult noise and sound. Instead we were presented with a weird take on warm-up - somewhere between ambient and club-ready. Haunting, distorted bass noises, slow, rumbling electro and a host of other eerily affecting sounds. 

FACT MIX 453: IKONIKA
Ikonika’s great. We knew that already. I’ve probably said it before but her album Aerotropolis was one of my favourites of last year (I own it on vinyl and CD, though the latter was mainly purchased for the additional Japanese bonus track and accompanying cat sticker). This mix was as energising as about seven coffees - it retains her signature silky textures but bangs hard at the same time. Then it closes out with some Copeland, a new Ikonika track and some hazy, echoey Tre Songz. Wonderful. 

JOY ORBISON X TTT X HINGE FINGER
Not gonna lie, the Joy O EM didn’t do much for me. This mix was shared by @fr_edaduring the week though, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. It’s not new, in fact it dates back to late 2011, more than a year before tracks like '&Fate' would even surface. Maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much - half the tracks that were fresh and new then are comforting and familiar now, bringing a smile to my weary face. ‘Ellipsis’ particularly.

D. Hansen - RE:WANDA
D. Hansen has uploaded this edited selection of sounds recorded by WANDA GROUP, field recordings and sonic experiments and the like. “You will like it probably,” he says, ominously.

Reckonwrong's Recreational Dream
I haven’t had a chance to listen to this fully BUT it’s got some unreleased Minor Science and a few unreleased tracls from Reckonwrong himself. Not to conflate the two but Minor Science was on Debonair’s show on NTS yesterday and he announced a forthcoming mix on Blowing Up The Workshop, so that’s something about which to get excited. 

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Gonna flip the tables here - I'm off to Copenhagen tomorrow. What should I listen to on my flights?

All the best,

Aidan