Having just lately celebrated 13 years of the label with a 4 x LP compilation and UK tour, Diagonal Information has shared particulars of three new releases to launch 2025.
Russell Haswell will launch a brand new album, Deep Time, on 18 April 2025. This new album is his sixth outing for the label and like all works by Haswell, Deep Time explores and ponders a wide range of themes. Haswell’s long-held preoccupation with minute-by-minute geopolitical developments picks up the place his earlier Diagonal album, Actuality Remedy, left off. Pre-order the album HERE.
An amalgam of influences, from European Free Improvised Music (Rungled Irridium), Detroit & Birmingham Techno (Deep Time, Atropine), Dutch Gabber (Satellite tv for pc Killer) and 70s and 80s Science Fiction Soundtracks (Worldwide Globalisation), the tracks have been honed within the wake of failed assassination makes an attempt, crypto-currency meltdowns and feverish hypothesis surrounding ground-to-space warfare.
The album’s essential musing nonetheless is the incomprehensible scale of time and ”a mirrored image on the present state of the nation and of the world. Specifically, how we measure and file our Earth’s historical past and past – from mere nanoseconds to the universe’s urged 13.8 billion years of existence.
All of it comes all the way down to geology. Haswell’s latest journeys to rock formations the Hebrides, the place two adjoining rock varieties had been laid naked offered the artist with a chance to glean the central tenets of this new album.
Shared monitor, Unconformity, derives its identify from 18th century geologist James Hutton’s views on the immense age of the earth. At websites akin to Siccar Level, he was capable of present how rock formations assist us to trace the age of our planet. A graphical illustration of this idea options within the typography used for the album’s sleeve design which was devised by MuirMcNeil, who has beforehand labored with Manufacturing unit Information / The Hacienda, Juan Atkins, Durutti Column and extra, with its actions focussed on exploring systematic strategies in design for visible communication. Hearken to Unconformity HERE.
Subsequent, Scott Gordon will launch a brand new album, Metals, on 7 February 2025. On the coronary heart of Scotland-based producer, composer and instrument maker Scott Gordon’s Metals is his custom-made, self-built SPI (Spinning Plate Instrument), an instrument he constructed from industrial scrap steel bars, that are hung from a big vertical wood body, the steel struck by mechanical beaters pushed by small motors. The bars spin when performed (manually or by MIDI) emitting warmly resonating drifts of sound, sympathetic tones that resemble digital sources, and tintinnabulations in an electroacoustic lineage with Harry Bertoia’s architectural sound sculptures. The SPI will not be tuned or minimize to scales, so every set is a research in pitch, rhythm and texture by way of sudden objects and devices.
Working throughout experimental music, AV tasks & sound objects, however impressed to construct the SPI and started recording Metals after experiments recording steel, automotive springs, pipes, and sheets, Gordon describes the SPI as being like ”an enormous vertical glockenspiel.” Earlier to this launch, he has launched on Editions Mego as one half of Oto Hiax, a collaborative venture with Mark Clifford of Seefeel (Warp Information), in addition to a collection of EPs and an album beneath his Loops Hang-out alias by way of the Black Acre imprint. Hear to guide monitor, And Away II HERE.
Metals is his first launch on Diagonal, becoming a member of their clutch of insurgent digital music innovators with this two-part album. It operates in a close to binary: the primary 4 items on Aspect A, titled And Away I-IIII, settle as introspective works, whereas the second suite of tracks on Aspect B, titled Tilts I-IV extol extra extroverted types of electroacoustic music.
A relative newcomer and one to look at for his effervescent energies, with earlier releases together with tracks on Gerd Janson’s iconic Working Again label, and the ‘zoom rave bangers’ of 2020 album Pentagon Palette on Rising Bin Information, Jonus Eric will launch a brand new EP on 24 January 2025. Diode inaugurates the Australian upstart into the Diagonal roster with six tracks of gloriously lumpen funk and off-kilter membership punk that sound as if it was excavated from a Nineteen Eighties DAT tape of demos by pre-techno post-punks with drum machines and fundamental synths. Hearken to shared monitor, Form Shift HERE.
5 of the six tracks on Diode started as authentic demos laid down in 2020, after Eric self-imposed a closely restrictive deadline to complete new materials in lower than per week, a course of designed to foster spontaneity and seize the enjoyment and impulse of constructing music, undermining any tendencies to overthink manufacturing.
Calling to thoughts Todd Terry, Theo Parrish, Virgo 4, but additionally Legowelt, NHK, and Ceephax Acid Crew, scrambled with inspirations from industrial-leaning digital post-punk like Suburban Lawns and Severed Heads, these skeletal works have been then used as the muse for the completed tracks on Diode, which have been prolonged, rearranged, remixed, and expanded. The sixth, the newly shared lead monitor, Shapeshift, is a gnarled and rumbling heads-down lo-fi banger, the album’s large hitter, a monitor that Eric thought he’d deleted, however discovered once more after an HD was rescued. ”I made the mixes sound soiled with overdrive and varied distortions,” Eric says. ”Like they may have been immediately pulled off of a DIY electro-punk cassette, found 30 years after the very fact in a file retailer discount bin.”
Directly like basic lo-fi home music (Darkwhirl), with slobbering of acid rave components (Tripwire), uncooked industrial digital punk (Polarity) and occasional palettes from early laptop sport music (Crimewave), Jonus Eric’s Diode EP is awkwardly pumping, totally charming, and good – a great new class member for the now teenage Diagonal Information following the label’s latest thirteenth birthday celebrations.
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