Tag Archives: electronica

chaircrusher – Stars Have Fallen (Triplicate Records)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Chaircrusher has found his way back onto the main stage of the Triplicate roadhouse. He’s exhaling more beautifully bizarre and mesmerizing compositions for your listening pleasure with the same laid back yet experimental vigour that made last year’s 3Phase such a rewarding listen. Pick up Stars have Fallen right the heck now. It’s every bit as grandiose and fascinating to listen to as the heaviness of the title implies.

All tracks written & Produced by Kent Williams except for:
#1 Written by Kent Williams featuring samples (with permission) from Caroline MacKenzie
blackcirclerecords.bandcamp.com/track/some-stars-have-fallen
Mastered by Michael Southard
Artwork by Chang Terhune
www.charlesrterhune.com

Deadbeat – Kansai Botanicals (quiet details)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description: Credits:
Music by Deadbeat
Mastered by Alex at quiet details studios
Artwork by quiet details in collaboration with Scott Monteith
Design by quiet details
© quiet details 2026 all rights reserved

It gives me great joy to announce that next in the quiet details series is an artist I’ve followed for a long time and have a huge amount of love for, the irrepressible Scott Monteith, here as Deadbeat.

Since the turn of the century, Scott has been at the forefront of the electronic music world, probably known best for his fathoms-deep dub, techno and house excursions. Releases on ~scape, Wagon Repair, his own BLKRTZ, Cynosure, Echochord, Visionquest and many others cemented him as a mainstay of the scene. There’s much more too – live performances, experiments across genres and collaborations with artists such as Paul St. Hilaire, The Orb and Lee Scratch Perry, Monolake, The Mole, Om Unit, Sa Pa and many more, have shown him to be as versatile as he is talented.

So it’s an honour to welcome him to quiet details, and he’s outdone himself with the next-level incredible Kansai Botanticals

Inspired during a packed tour of Japan, in his downtime Scott explored the countryside of Kyoto and the Kansai region. While there he collected the sounds and atmospheres, and this album is their musical manifestation.

A journey of hypnosis and textural bliss – vast subs meet glittering highs, held together by lush and vivid synthetics. Scott’s huge technical skill brings all these elements together in a beautifully elegant way, creating a vibrantly chromatic world that’s mesmerising at every step.

Made as a single piece, shared on the CD version in its original form, this is Deadbeat at his deepest and most psychedelic – truly a masterpiece from this revered artist.

As Scott says:
“The autumn colors were in full bloom, and the incredible serenity and beauty of the place were beyond words. Perhaps the most breathtaking of all was visiting the former studio of Yusai Okuda, which is where a great many of the photos I’ve included in the folder for potential cover ideas were taken.

In addition to his gorgeous silk dying works, the entire place uses water in various still pools to reflect the forest around it, creating some truly Lysergic scenes. The garden behind the house is filled with a collection of ceramic sculptures of diverse sizes, which you are invited to pour water into. The water then filters through several small openings and drips into the resonant ceramic body, producing a mind-blowingly complex range of rhythms and tonalities.

Needless to say, we spent a good long time recording and documenting these little wonders, and those recordings, along with ones made walking in the forest adjacent, served as the initial source material and inspiration for this work.

If it manages to effectively convey even a portion of the spirit of that wonderful place, which so enriched our souls, I couldn’t be happier.”

Huge thanks to Scott for this stunning addition to the series.
The artwork was made as always influenced by the music and idea behind the album – originating from a photo from Scott which was then captured with analogue photography and processed here at quiet details studios.

As usual, the album is presented on the physical edition, a custom six-panel digipack with a separate fine art print too.
The CD also has a special long-form continuous mix of the album, created by the artist and representing the music in its purest form – highly recommended.

blkrtz.bandcamp.com   

微風ゾーン Bifuu_ZONE – The West (Constellation Tatsu)

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Label Description: Bifuu_ZONE, translated loosely as “a zone of gentle breeze,” is a concept drawn from Tsudio Studio’s personal vocabulary rather than a strict linguistic equivalent. While liminal spaces are often framed through unease, Bifuu_ZONE reimagines them as sites of quiet comfort, restoration, and slow transformation. The project centers on impermanence, erosion, and the subtle ways time reshapes even the most solid structures.

The West takes its title literally, drawing inspiration from buildings and environments located west of Osaka. Each track is composed with a specific architectural space in mind, allowing tone, texture, and resonance to emerge from imagined structures rather than narrative progression. The result is a site-responsive ambient work that listens closely to stillness, weathering, and spatial openness. Saxophonist mori_de_kurasu appears on three tracks, introducing breath and human fragility into the album’s restrained sonic palette.

This perspective is deeply informed by a Japanese sensibility toward impermanence, an acceptance of loss and change not as absence, but as gentle continuation. Rather than positioning liminal space through anxiety, Bifuu_ZONE gestures toward what lingers quietly after the dream has ended.

Beyond the album itself, The West also marks a point of convergence within Tsudio Studio’s broader practice. In March, he will present an exhibition and live performance at Gallery SHUTL in Higashi-Ginza, Tokyo, centered on the idea of “post-liminal space.”

Under his primary name, Tsudio Studio has released work through Media Factory, Local Visions, and ULTRA-VYBE, with collaborations spanning Japan, Europe, and the United States. His 2022 album My Room reached #2 on Bandcamp’s global charts. The West stands as a focused ambient statement, an invitation to inhabit spaces shaped quietly by time.

Major Axis – The Space Between Worlds (Memory Archives)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

The Space Between Worlds marks the fourth release on the label, from the label’s own Major Axis. Exploring the invisible threads that connect nature’s atmospheres, the EP drifts through shifting skies, distant horizons, and spaces suspended in dusk light.

Breaks move like weather systems, textures breathe like open landscapes, and low end rolls in like a far-off tide. It’s immersive, elemental, and transportive – less a collection of tracks, more an entry point into the spaces where worlds overlap.

Major Axis – Production
Tormund – Mixing & Mastering
Lykos – Artwork

Ursula’s Cartridges – Sleep Deprivation Cities (Self-Released)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Visiting the downtown life while under the sleep deprivation.

“Funky, largely upbeat take on vaporwave aesthetics that incorporates a wide range of other styles into the mix. Incorporating elements and samples of electro funk, hip hop. Chemical Brothers-style breaks and beyond, the artist pulls some pretty interesting stuff into the vaporwave space, and it mostly works.

Things even get weird and experimental at times, still anchored to the overarching aesthetic. Slushy vibes, smeary reverb, and making everything sound like a dying VCR works across a wide variety of styles! Definitely one to check out if you appreciate the Vaporwave Extended Universe.”

-Ether Diver, OPM: Hybrid Aesthetic

Contagious Orgasm – behind closed doors (Ant-Zen)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

CONTAGIOUS ORGASM, the brainchild of hiroshi hashimoto from nagoya, japan, stands as a bold exploration of experimental sound and ambient noise. his compositions are a captivating blend of swirling psychedelia, crude samples, abandoned rhythms, and post-industrial noise, all woven into a seamless tapestry of ambient and concrete elements. this is music that demands active engagement, rewarding the listener with a hypnotic, immersive experience that is both inviting and disconcerting.

each composition is a rich vignette, balancing noise-soaked textures with exotic percussion, and gradually winding down into dreamlike interludes. CONTAGIOUS ORGASM’s work draws listeners into its nebulous darkness, offering a space for introspection, tension, and revelation. turn off the lights and let yourself be carried by this multifaceted, elegant journey through intimacy, alienation, and the blurred boundaries of perception and reality.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS, time softened and blurred. each room held a fragment of feeling – a flicker of mood, a whisper asking thirsty?, and somewhere, a reflection of longing beneath the moon under water. shadows stretched gently, revealing a soft sensitivity in everything touched, a quiet ache threading through silence. reality wavered in the glass of an inverted mirror, showing not what was, but what might have been. then came the return – subtle, weightless, yet undeniable. beneath a suspended ceiling, where thoughts drifted like dust in filtered light, he understood: some truths only reveal themselves in silence, and only BEHIND CLOSED DOORS.

composed and performed by h h. and fts. recorded and mixed at cool anatomy and yard cemetery, 2023-2024

artwork by stefan alt

this is ant-zen act475 & raubbau raub-107

The Black Dog – Loud Ambient (Dust Science Recordings)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Making this album was an absolute joy. We used Rothko’s artwork as a major influence. His use of colour fields, blending, mood and scale really helped us build an album of tracks that could stand on their own and also work together as a coherent whole across all the tones we had been working with. It was also a chance to fall back in love with our 909, 808 and 707.

While working on music for several other projects, the “Rothko” project got renamed Loud Ambient because it did not really sit right with the My Brutal Life series. We often talked about what people make of The Black Dog and whether they think we only make ambient music. We do not. Over the last year or so, one of us would be working on something and someone else would say, “That is a Loud Ambient track.” The name stuck. We liked the funny side of it.

With Loud Ambient, everything just fell into place creatively. Surprisingly for us, the tracklisting never changed, just small tweaks here and there. That rarely happens. It marks a first for us as a band. All the stars aligned and the confidence in this album is the strongest we have ever had.

Loud Ambient was made to dance to, something we have not done in a while. We welcome the return to the dance floor with both hands. Will you join us?

Chloroforms – Lay Low And Be Held (Triplicate Records)

Posted by John Lithium on

Label Description:

Immediately, the industrial beats of the opening track ‘Rattle Can Paint Job’ tell you all you need to know about Chloroforms’ Triplicate debut ‘Lay Low and Be Held’. 1. The beats and fire and will consistently catch you off guard. 2. You’re gonna be taking in a genre, or subgenre at least that’s not immediately clear, but you’ll notice it’s seldom heard on our label. 3. You’re about to have a good time. Time to make it happen!

~~~~~~~~~~~~
INTERVIEW
~~~~~~~~~~~~
George Ernst, Triplicate Records: OK before I ask anything else, please, can you give some context to the mysterious MC referring to you by name on ‘Sonar for Sore Eyes’?

Michael Marchant aka Chloroforms: Yes. I like to collect audio snippets of things I hear out in the world and recontextualize them to besmirch my name. Ha! This was the first time I’ve used one from my collection. I’d be super curious if someone could place where this was taken from! We’d probably have an annoying amount of things in common.

GE: What IS heat vision? Or was that a Jeopardy answer?

MM: That is MY question, sir! WHAT IS HEAT VISION?! A question that randomly popped into my head while trying to name the project file for this song. Instead of making myself a separate note so I could go look up what heat vision was later, I named the song “What is Heat Vision?” as a reminder. Which reminds me…According to Wikipedia, heat vision is ‘the fictional ability to burn objects with one’s gaze’. Perfect.

GE: Was MX-80 a reference to the noise-rock band from Indiana?

MM: You know, it wasn’t; but my noise-rock band, IfIHadAHiFi, has played quite a few shows in Bloomington. And I really like the MX-80 album Out of the Tunnel. When I was making the track “MX-80” I was trying to make it sound like the musical equivalent of an old dot matrix printer shaking itself off of a desk. I named it after the Epson MX-80 which would be an incredibly bitchin’ instrument in the hands of the right noise-rock band.

GE: Can you tell us a little about both the name of your project Chloroforms’, and the inspiration behind the album title?

MM: I’m going to show my age here, but Colorforms were a toy from my childhood that were these little vinyl clings in the shape of cartoon characters that you could stick to smooth surfaces. That was BIG entertainment to a small child at the time, but life goes on and I had fully forgotten they existed.

Then one day not too long ago I see them for sale out in the world, the first time since I was a child. I instantly recognize their iconic logo, but my brain reads it as CHLOROFORMS. Instant band name. FONT FACT, the font that I used for the free_refills_or_die EP is the closest to the Colorforms logo I could find.

As far as the album title goes, Lay Low and Be Held is two things to me. First, it’s a play on the phrase “lo and behold”. Second, it’s just a nice thing to aspire to.

GE: Your honest opinion on kangaroos: give it to me please. I’ll know if
you try to lie.

MM: I love these questions. I am strongly in favor of kangaroos. Especially YouTube videos of kangaroos who are keeping it real. One long night after a show in Louisville, Kentucky my bandmates and I watched a video titled ‘Kangaroo Shoved Through Fence During Tussle at Canberra Nature Reserve’ approximately 135 times and almost died from laughter.
Link to the good stuff:
youtu.be/N7M6lhzYOow?si=rAjq4gzSz2tsNJ6m

GE: What was your favourite track to work on? I really love Maximum
Capacity Dry Spell.

MM: Thank you! I was 100% happy with everything on this album so it’s difficult to choose a favorite. “Maximum Capacity” has a great groove and was the quickest thing I wrote for the album. Satisfying when that happens. “Cadaver Chiropractic” was written in 5/4 which is strange and proggy and took the longest to get right, so that sticks out. “Hide the Smoke” was an exercise in subtlety which is not always where my brain leads me. “The Proud Parer” might be the winner (for today) since it was my attempt to write a Chloroforms version of “I Wanna Dance
with Somebody (Who Loves Me)”. I think I nailed it.

~~~~~~~~~~~~
REVIEW
~~~~~~~~~~~~

Chloroforms: ‘Lay Low and Be Held’. A fascinating project from Milwaukee that we couldn’t be more excited to share with you! With dark titles like ‘Mugger’s Lullaby’, ‘Cemetery Symmetry’, and ‘Cadaver Chiropractic’, no one has tricked you. You’re going to be diving head first into some extremely danceable murk. Let’s analyze!

As soon as the industrial beats of ‘Rattle Can Paint Job’ blast out from the periphery and into the forefront, you know you’re in for something engaging, something you’ve not heard before. Hardcore, relentless pounding, interspersed with light-speed wooshing and a bassline that perfectly flirts with fuzz without leaving it feeling overbearing.

There’s also a paranoid bent to several of the songs on show here, the first bearing such baggage is the fraught yet funky ‘What is Heat Vision’. Alienated fear-beats or funk-laden bop. You be the judge. But really it’s both, and manages to pull these vibes off in a spectacularly grandiose manner. ‘Mugger’s Lullaby’ on the other hand, tricks you. You think you’re in for a straightforward stripped down macho-sounding THUNK-THUNK beat, then half way through, the gentleman responsible for this record, whose first name I know but will henceforth be referred to as ‘Mr. Chloroforms’, swipes the floor away, and you’re left in a void of ultra-fast IDM. It’s a trip that comes out of nowhere and pulls off a perfect bait and switch!

‘Lay Low’ on the other hand offers a lighter collection of melodies and textures than the opening trio. That’s not to say it’s some breezy intermission. The tambourine jangle works beautifully with a series of warbling synths, and I mean, hey! (extreme Ron Howard Voice) ‘That’s partially the name of the record!’. We segue neatly then, into the equally brief, yet decidedly more Lynchian-static-laden eccentricity of the aforementioned ‘Cadaver Chiropractic’, which to be fair does indeed give the old bones a good thorough shake. As does the similarly darkly titled ‘Cemetery Symmetry’, which offers a bag full of beat-treats, and Mr. Chloroforms’ isn’t shy about switching things up on a dime, creating a blistering, disorienting, but undeniably appealing effect. This three-minute microcosm of an industrial mixtape is done when he damn well says so, ok?

Then we have ‘MX-80’. At several points this track feels like it’s pursuing you. You know? No? Just me? Ok… moving on.
‘Hide the Smoke’ conjures the misty atmosphere in your mind that the title promises. Whirring disembodied wind-enveloped synths haunt the mix, while a stark and sparingly-riffed-on bit of percussion rumbles away in the dark. It’s effective and fun, even if it’s not meant to be. Meanwhile ‘Route Driver, Asleep at the Wheel’ feels so hyper-charged with dark static that it might combust at any second. Here the drums pound with greater grit and otherworldly malaise than ever, and coalesce to make a murky and melodically fascinating piece of music, increasingly frantic until the half-point switch up, the delightfully batshit-ramifications of which, you need to hear and draw your own conclusions. (But if they’re not positive, you’re wrong.)

‘Maximum Capacity Dry Spell’ Starts as a ultra-focused, borderline synth-wavey bop, and for the most part maintains its slick composure in the face of equally slick percussive flourishes. The rubbery, cool-as-shit bassline compliments the arrangement perfectly and cements MCDS as a highlight. Similarly fun, yet decided more off-kilter is the mysterious ‘Sonar for Sore Eyes’, a relentless slammer, soaked in spooky vibrations and prefixed by an equally unnerving recording of a woman referring to Mr. Chloroforms by his government name. What does it all mean? Well keep reading to find out, hopefully. Otherwise, it just slaps!

Equally slapworthy is the final, ‘The Proud Parer’. A fun pun, and a decidedly chill way to end a record. While ‘Lay Low and Be Held’ can at times feel like a mission statement akin to ‘make cool weird music and set yourself apart from the herd’ (stop me if I’m way off), the music is utterly unpretentious. Borrowing its studious delights from sources across the electronic spectrum, with some good industrial rock thrown in for good measure, the album ends as it started: with a fabulous piece of music that puts you in a lively mood. That was all I ever wanted. I want that for you too, dear reader. 


Written and Produced by Michael Marchant
Artwork by Michael Marchant
Mastered by Michael Southard