Downliners Sekt – Music For Those in a Captured Audience. (Electronic Explorations mix)
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“After the critically acclaimed release of ‘Hello Lonely, Hold the Nation’ last May and done with the production of ‘We Make Hits Not The Public’ which is ready to be released by the end of October, this proposition from Rob Booth gave us the opportunity to rearrange some of this material and also start working on new ideas.
This mix is a true reflection of what we are developing now for the final chapter of the trilogy of 12″ EPs started this year with disboot records.
What you’re about to hear is all original downliners sekt music coming from two weeks of hardcore live jamming with our own material although here and then you may found some very obvious references from the likes of Boards of Canada, Rhythm and Sound, Kemal & Rob Data, My Bloody Valentine, Massive Attack, Murcof, Biosphere, Jamie Lidell and Preston Parker.
This will give you some hints on what to expect both on new releases to come and also on live performances.”
For more information: http://www.dsekt.com
[01] – LV & Okmalumkoolkat – ZHARP – [Forthcoming 'Hyperdub']
[02] – FaltyDL – Because You – [Planet Mu]
[03] – Model 500 – OFI – [R&S Records]
[04] – Tessela – Thames Child – [unsigned]
[05] – Tessela – Acid Test – [unsigned]
[06] – Two Fingers – Fools Rhythm – [Ninja Tune 'XX' 20th b'day]
[07] – Synthamesk – Refuge – [exclusive to EE]
[08] – Karsten Pflum – Nemo Loon part III – [Ad Noiseam]
[09] – Access To Arasaka – setvector – [Tympanik Audio]
[10] – Commix – Be True (Burial Remix) – [Metalheadz]
[11] – Deformer – Diabolical – [Mindtrick Records]
[12] – Eats Tapes – Run Generator – [Tigerbeat]
[13] – The Gaslamp Killer – Carpool Dummy ft. Mophono – [Forthcoming 'Brainfeeder']
[14] – Ghost Mutt – Sasquatch (CocoBryce Remix) – [Lowriders]
[15] – DJ Rashad – Teknitianz – [Planet Mu]
[16] – Slugabed – DonkyStomp – [Forthcoming 'Donky Pitch']
[17] – Bracket – Unrequited – RIP – [Brackout]
[18] – Broken Note – Aporia – [Forthcoming 'Ad Noiseam']
[19] – Piece of Shh.. – Diablo Riddim (Hektagon’s Shuffle) – [Svetlana Industries]
[20] – Elgato -Tonight – [Hessle Audio]
[21] – ASC – The Glow – [Pushing Red - Dub]
[22] – Dam Mantle – Broken Slumber – [Growing records]
[23] – ASC – Advent – [Pushing Red - Dub]
[24] – Indigo – Zero Point ft Poppy Roberts -[Forthcoming 'On The Edge']
Mix ….. Downliners Sekt – (Sorry, no tracklist)
Final Track ….
[25] – James Blake – I Only Know (What I Know Now) – [R&S]
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Boomkat product review for:
downliners sekt – Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation
Four immense groove deconstructions from the shadowy cast of Downliners Sekt landing somewhere between Autechre, Rhythm & Sound and T++. It’s fair to say we’re a little intrigued with this record, not least because of the willfull lack of information attached to it, but also because the production is so shockingly precise and complex.
First up ‘U Gumbu’ starts out sounding like Autechre’s ‘Pro Radii’ mixed with the sort of funk and soul displacment of James Blake’s ‘Air & Lack Therof’ before lapsing into a crackling dub groove almost worthy of Rhythm & Sound’s ‘Distance’. Next ‘Dirty Meinz’ calls for the T++ comparison with mechanically shifted post-garage techno styles swamped in psyche-tumbled static while acousmatic voices croon from the ether.
Meanwhile ‘Inside Maverick’s’ takes a different route with distant bomb-drop bass implosions and shivering organic jazz percussion sinking slowly into a tense and ominous K-hole. Applying the finishing touch, ‘Negative Green’ finds a graceful tension between ultra compressed bass weight and wide-open dub space threaded with ethereal jazz signatures reminding of Biosphere’s ‘Dropsonde’ set mutated to the nth degree and spliced with vocal glossolalia worthy of Burial.
We’re really, really into this 12″ and any fans of hi-calibre, beats-driven electronica should pay it their full attention without fail. Highest recommendation.
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Latest Release:
Downliners sekt – We make hits, not the public EP
‘We make hits not the public’ will be available worldwide from independent record stores and online retailers on
12″ vinyl in October 2010. Digital version to be downloaded directly from the band’s website dsektdot]com.
dboot[013] 12″ vinyl / mp3 release
‘We make hits, not the public’ is the second episode of Downliners sekt’s trilogy with barcelonan bass music label Disboot Records in co-production with the band’s own label dsekt[dot]com.
The deeply mysterious bass-tronauts continues their subsonic adventures, taking their craft to a new level of refinement. Haunting pads swell into lo-fi chopped melodies, crashing against persistent rhythms and coherent structures to create a near sonic shipwreck. Emotionally engaging and at calculated times claustrophobically dense, “wmhntp” is the middle ground between two extremes, one of excess and the other of minimal precision.
This, their sixth official release, is the second installment of a trilogy started a few months ago with the critically acclaimed ‘Hello lonely, hold the nation’ EP which since its release in May 2010 has received wide spread support. From radio bass evangelists like
Mary Anne Hobbs and
Rob Booth (both of them have commissioned exclusive mixes for their respective shows); to prestigious record stores like Sounds of the Universe and Boomkat (receiving category of single of the week on both places); having being reviewed by The Wire, Resident Advisor, Playground and many others magazines and webzines. The record has also received massive support from different artists around the world, among them The Bug (King Midas Sound), Kid Kameleon, François K and Hollywood movie director Darren Aranofsky.
…………………
“look sport, the next time you decide to cut a record just remember: everything has to pass trough me. I make the hits, not the public. I tell the dj’s what to play”
(from the movie ‘The harder they come’)
…………………
Some reviews and people talking about 'Hello Lonely, Hold the Nation':
"grosse déception"
(some guy on a message board)
"best production I've heard in ages"
(Rob Booth)
"this is really exquisite, I absolutely love it
Negative green it has been going down a STORM with my listeners."
(Mary Anne Hobbs)
"This release is one of the most interesting/beguiling/fascinating things I've heard in a long long time. Best elements of James Blake, Flying Lotus, DJ Spooky and Rhythm and Sound all rolled into one in a way I haven't ever heard before"
(Kid Kameleon)
"Respect!"
(Kevin 'The Bug' Martin)
"This Barcelona group's beats have a unique way of slurping forward from one pattern to the next, as if encased in a biological sac while a miasma hangs around them like the dim, grim light from a deep-sea creature. The slurp, thought, helps hold their beats together however uneven they might be, so unlike most of latterday Autechre - who they at times resemble beneath the slippery surfaces - this movement feels like actual dancing of a sort. DJs might balk at the 5/4 signature of "Negative Green", but the subterranean scrabbling of " Dirty Meinz" and the Burial-in-delirium feel of "U Gumbu" have a very real bodily appeal that's hard to stop getting under your skin."
(Joe Muggs @ The Wire)
"The final track on Downliners Sekt's fourth EP features a vocal sample about how bass frequencies can heal the mind, followed by the return of an ear-splitting percussive pattern. There's something to be said for the disconcerting unease of "spooky" electronic music by the likes of Demdike Stare and Focus Group, but Montreal's Downliners Sekt take this aesthetic idea to a more mechanistic place, building tracks from hunks of industrial detritus and splinters of discarded steel, beats that sound like they could be composed of both factory machinery and the flinty click of malfunctioning lighters. The industrial symphony of "Dirty Meinz" suddenly sidelining itself in favour of a vocal breakdown is like some bizarro Disney movie where the machines come to life and playfully scare the shit out of unsuspecting people. Their fourth release, Hello Lonely, Hold the Nation, is the first to be picked up by an outside label. But it's by no means a compromise. Beginning with near formlessness, "U Gumbu" sets forth a torturously deliberate beat that lurches over what sounds like a crackling fire pit. (They give us flames instead of basslines, but even those are maddeningly inconsistent.) Later, on "Inside Maverick's" it sounds like the flames overtook the hardware somewhere in between songs as blackened, hollowed-out beats sound off resignedly, carrying with them the intrinsic heat of the flames without any of that brilliant light that usually goes along with them. Indeed, this EP deals in various shades of darkness, starting with complete black and progressing until the final track wherein the elements finally come together to form something that sounds vaguely like a dubstep track. The assembly-line beats coalesce into something familiar, with streaks of light emerging in between the cracking facade like water trickling through imperceptibly fractured rock."
(Andrew Ryce @ Resident Advisor)
"I’d never heard of this individual (individuals?) before, but rest assured that I will be watching vigilantly for future Downliners Sekt releases. This is the sort of strange music that mostly defies categorization. The best way to describe this EP is that it has the bleak, jagged sensibility of Burial, with The Ghosts of Electronic Music Past drifting feverishly through its veins – indecipherable, androgynous vocals, film samples whose timbre and placement hearken back to hip hop and early jungle – but where Burial’s music is raw, unpolished and deeply emotive, these tunes are polished, intentional and altogether quite inhuman-sounding. In that respect I was reminded by all four of them of the second track on Sigha’s Rawww EP, “Hold Your Heart Up To The Light”- an almost arrhythmic amalgam of ghostly, angular sounds. Though most assuredly not for the dancefloor, “Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation” is an EP of absolutely fascinating music, and this is one thoroughly impressed music nerd"
(ultraesthetic)
"Quite possibly the strangest rhythmical construction I've heard all year, and there's been some weird shit come out recently (see Autechre above), found on a recommendation from my friend M. Over nearly seven minutes, the track unfolds - beginning in media res, with digital claps puncturing the air, giving way, with some difficulty, to an awkwardly jumping bass - and systematically deconstructs itself, always holding its elements in suspension and flux, as if afraid to pin down a single note. It feels like the very definition of artificial life, a misty atmosphere where every surface and texture is grey and glinting, synthetic and disturbing to the touch. Different sections of the track - the grey-white bursts of trebly static, the slowly ebbing digital skank underneath and, somewhere distant, the persistent dry clicks of the kick - have, as in Holger Czukay's Canaxis songs, or Lee Perry's dub productions, different textures, as if captured via a variety of media. It extracts and reintroduces not just individual rhythmic elements - making an already lopsided bop squelch, dissolve and frequently mutate - but whole atmospheres, mists of synth and shifts of production that seem to change the shape of the whole landscape"
(the end times talking about Dirty Meinz)
"We knew of the mysterious band who put out “The Saltire Wave” –but not who was directing the project or where they came from- and who had a sound that was both familiar and refreshing at once. Downliners Sekt seemed to have on their to-do list, as a priority: to dismantle post-rock, pick up the pieces and reassemble them by programming a new mechanism, and to transform the smooth, slippery drums close to jazz, blurring the ambience with pedal effects, and pairing the result with cold electronica to pollute the musical landscape. Fast forward to now – the blinding “Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation” – and we have learned more about them, and also that they have a plan. We know that D-Sekt is a trio based in Spain and France –watch out France, a nation rich in post-rock from Ulan Bator to Programme– who have studied the style’s potential evolutionary avenues with this maxi-single that sounds like the same group but ten years in the future, who are radically renewed but without denying their roots. Firstly, their sound has changed - there’s more micro-electronica and dub in the mechanism– and secondly, they are getting more attention from a potential audience that until now they had been disconnected from. To grow, you have to improve and be persistent. As happens in an eclipse, there are times when the necessary elements line up in an auspicious manner. The four cuts on “Hello Lonely, Hold The Nation” –available on vinyl or download here – reduce the rock texture and increase the abstract crunch, the clicks’n’cuts and the stealthy dub, IDM and ambient strokes. The end is particularly magical, when “Negative Green” ends with vocal sparks of modified pitch a la Burial, and in this instance, D-Sekt have assimilated their influences without imitating them, to enrich their own language. This is clear on the rest of the EP: they don’t give up their tranquillity of character, their emotional intensity or the downtempo rhythm drawn from the best of dubstep –the Hessle Audio school– and ambient –i.e. 12k– to record the type of music that right now any fan of Mogwai circa “Rock Action” would be proud to give their name to. If everything goes according to plan, they say they’d like to release two more 12” cuts this year through the Barcelona based label, Disboot. There is no getting away now: we want them"
(Javier Blánquez @ playground)