Clot Magazine

The next instalment of our Mixtape series comes by Johanna Sulkunen, a Finnish experimental vocalist, composer & improviser based in Copenhagen. A mix of minimalistic sounds combined with vocal compositions to welcome the spring season. 
For Johanna, the symbiosis of vocals and electronics have been at the centre of her career. A frequent collaborator with iconic jazz & improv musicians such as Tomasz Stanko, Axel Dörner, Koichi Makigami and originally labelled as an exciting voice on the alternative jazz scene, Sulkunen has expanded her range from jazz and alternative pop to free improvisation, electronic music and avant-garde.  Only a few months ago, Johanna release Terra, a collection of tracks where the artist invokes imaginary landscapes with her voice, electronics and a stellar ensemble. Terra also represents the second part of her trilogy with the solo project Sonority, in Terra Finnish experimental vocalist creates a global vision while being trapped in Copenhagen, and invites the listener to questio

Il Santo Bevitore is the artistic alter ego of the Italian born London-based musician, producer and sound engineer Nicola Serra, who is also known for being the founding curator of London's experimental music festival Dronica. The following mixtape is shared on the occasion of his recent debut release for Opal Tapes ‘Water and Tears’. “The mixtape includes tracks from my album as well as music from artists who inspired, either directly or indirectly, the album process”, shares Il Santo Bevitore. To have worked on the album with 11 other musicians and artists, who contributed their vocals and a variety of instruments, shows extraordinary determination to experiment with new ways of working on the recording process, while still on unstable grounds during the past two years of the pandemic. The sound on the album is heavily processed thanks to that and as a result creates an extensive depth of soundscapes, which immerse the listener into the voyage under the artist’s spell. ‘Water and Tears’ has been inspir

For our next mixtape set, duo Auf Togo will be taking us into a session of Pop, Funk & 70's Cosmic Disco, filled with hypnotic grooves and absorbing melodies. Auf Togo is the long-time collaboration between Sasa Crnobrnja and Clement Cachot-Coulom which is inspired by the Cosmic disco sounds of the late 70s/early '80s. Sasa Crnobrnja originates from the deep, disco-laced house duo of his duo alias In Flagranti (Kitsune, Phantasy, Gomma & more) and Clement Cachot-Coulom from bands The Fabulous Penetrators and Big Girls. With the Auf Togo formation, they present a sound that echoes the richness and flavour of vintage recording equipment and instruments whilst holding the edge and sharpness of modern studio techniques. The duo presents a loose, almost improvised sound that works very well within the rigid confines of house music. Psychedelic echoey guitars clash with probing synth lines and live-sounding rhythm sections and their heavy kicks and singing cowbells, their deep basslines and spare guitar licks bl

Electronic musician and sound artist Josep Kamaru, aka KMRU, takes us on our first December sonic journey. Born in Nairobi and currently based in Berlin, KMRU is a sound artist and producer whose methods include field recording, improvisation, noise, machine learning, radio art and drones. With a paramount sound and visual sensibility, his work is reminiscent of ambient masters such as Lawrence English. KMRU’s sound though is uniquely positioned between the rarely-married cultures of ambient and African music, entwining his compositions with field recordings from his native Kenya and the surrounding countries of East Africa. Self-releasing his productions, these have been received very enthusiastically by both critics and the audience. In 2020, he released three albums that showed the depth and range of his sound: Peel, an LP of hypnotic drones on the avant-garde institution Editions Mego; Opaquer, a collection of vivid and dreamlike sound sculptures; and Jar, a dreamlike cassette of found sounds and analogu

Our 35th Mixtape installment arrives from Dahjyn, a musician, producer and vocalist originally from the Pacific Northwest of the U.S and currently based in Brooklyn. Dahjyn, or Dan Jyn Suk Ahrendt is currently a resident with a monthly show at Hong Kong Community Radio and has just recently published his debut EP, The gall (Most Dismal Swamp, 2021) featuring additional remixes by Endgame, Thegn, and trngs. A new member of the swamp family, his sounds is completely akin to the label’s unique sonic aesthetics. With relentless industrial gut-punch percussion, textural power electronics, and reflective baritone verse, the album includes 5 tracks that embody a convulsive tension between an abrasive physicality and a brooding emotionality: a visceral incantation working through aggregate layers of trauma. Alongside his particular self-exploration in identity and ability to express it, he’s continually inspired by amazing electronic musicians and producers around the world pushing his boundaries and e

Our end of October Mixtape comes from Bedroom community’s Heliocrysum. With a name that evokes the Latin for sunflower but also a healing tincture, the LA-based composer/sound designer duo have just recently presented their visceral, deep and exploratory debut album "We Become Mist". Reminiscence of their name too, their sound blends overlaid orchestration and distorted lightness, simplicity washed with emotional intensity, the remembered dreams of far-off, science-fictive discoveries. Heliochrysum is Michael Deragon and Daniel Lea in which collaboration becomes a sculpted journey into new aural and imaginative cosmology. "We Become Mist" uses analogue and digital processes to mine the depths of industrial and science fictional, psychedelic soundscapes, often cinematic in tone and texture. The album has been mixed by minimal ambient beast Ben Frost and mastered by Valgeir Sigurdsson. Within the melding of the analogue and digital, there was another element mixed: the album is tinged with psilocybin technol

With a selection of dark and deep cuts, the rising electronic music producer MINOS is presenting our next mixtape. The London-based, Italian/Colombian electro producer fuses complex synth-work with powerful harmonies. MINOS is a classically trained pianist, however her love for the dancefloor has naturally guided her into electronic production. Her musical training feeds directly into her synth work, which is also underpinned by intricate grooves and an overall love of sound design; and her upbringing in Dubai and Tokyo has instilled a deep interest in the futuristic, which shows up in her music, along with an appreciation for diverse and multicultural sounds. Her music is also Inspired by a sense of apocalyptic chaos and confusion, Minos’ knack for rich harmonies and killer grooves becomes her main emotional weapon. She makes no exceptions deploying complex and evocative synth-work for optimum dancefloor effect. Where her music combines a passion for dancefloor dwelling with meticulous sound design and

Huma is the alias of Barcelona based experimental musician Andrés Satué. who is bringing our next mixtape instalment, following the release of his new EP Se van sus naves. We recently featured Huma ahead is release titled Emergence (Hedonic Reversal, 2021), a release that was an experiment in the irregular rhythmic, textural or physical qualities of sounds engaging with one another. In it, the chaotic nature of these sounds colliding allows for the emergence of atypical rhythms, ones in which preconceived notions of a linear structure are supplanted in favour of melodies and patterns borne from the dissonant sound.
 The new release Se van sus naves is a production of experiments with different creative processes and tools such as granular synthesis or extreme sampling created halfway between Eva and Emergence. Continuing with the exploration of the idea of singularity and exponential growth in which Eva was inspired, Se van sus naves proposes an abstract and delicate universe, closer to ambient but without l

Dalhous, the music project of Marc Dall and Alex Ander formed in Edinburgh, are bringing our next mixtape instalment, with a mix that will particularly please those with cinematographic inclinations. Dalhous have just returned after a 5-year hiatus with a long-awaited follow up to 2016's House Number 44, presenting the second volume of The Composite Moods Collection: Point Blank Range released on Denovali Records earlier this year. 
 This mixtape is a collection of some of the records Dalhous have been re-listening to recently. They like to make mixes in the same way they make records where entire tracks are used as raw material. The cinematographic influence comes across immediately: There are a lot of cues from film and game soundtracks, from classic FPS games like Wolfenstein 3D and Half-Life through to a library cue from David Cronenberg's Shivers, to direct audio rip from the opening of Abell Ferrera's The King of New York by Joe Delia.

 Tracklist: Concierto for Violin OP. 8# Autumn by Antonio Vivaldi

Our new mixtape comes from the Norwegian transcendent artist Kjetil Jerve and producer Stian Balducci with a recording specially crafter for CLOT Mag and getting inspiration from their more recent album. Tokyo Tapes: Piano Recycle, released on Dugnad Records in April 2021, is an epic archival collection fusing ambient, drone and experimentalist textures. Performed with a live emotion in mind, this aspect of the collection adds to the innovative spontaneity and the duo’s dynamic musicianship. Jerve is an artist known for his genre-defying curiosity, adventures transcending dogma and style and has been running the Oslo-based label Dugnad rec since 2016. He has been an important figure in the next wave of Norwegian jazz musicians, and likewise, Balducci, although coming from strictly electronic musicianship, has moved towards extended jazz and improvised genres. The clear jazz influences are felt moving throughout the 18 track album, in which classicism and electricity combine, crafted through fuzzy textures

The next mixtape instalment comes from the hand of one of the sound artists we have long followed and admired. Jana Winderen is contributing to the series with a mix inspired by one of her recent compositions, the track "Listener" which appears in the VA compilation Colliding Wind by Concentric Records. Jana Winderen is an artist and field recordist that has dedicated a big part of her life recording and revealing sounds from the most remote sources – oceans, glaciers, ice cavities. A multifaceted artist, her impressive amount of work expands from installations, performances, exhibitions, recording releases, field trips. Her practice pays particular attention to audio environments and to creatures which are hard for humans to access, both physically and aurally – deep under water, inside ice or in frequency ranges inaudible to the human ear. With a background in Marine Biology and also in Fine Arts, she gives life to her compositions listening over and over and, slowly collaging things together, more like

Our next mixtape instalment comes from Sara Berts, an Italian composer and sound artist. Sara’s work is saturated with elements from the natural world blending with electronics. She defines her music as a meeting ground, a place of active exchange between two bandwidths of reality, the visible world and its allusive aliveness of another order of being. And following this premises she has prepared this mixtape, a flow and exchange without an intention. I just start playing and listening, inside and outside; and, as for this mix, things start shaping up bit by bit. Sara is publishing soon her debut EP in Gang of Ducks Ayni self-described the record as a gift from the plants and for the plants. Field recordings flowing through the whole record come from the Peruvian Amazon forest, where she spent 3 months in 2019 while seeking personal healing. All the other sounds come from the Buchla Easel and were recorded in Italy during the suspended time of the 2020 strict lockdown. As she puts it, two different times a

This new mixtape comes from Kosei Fukuda, the Japanese producer and sound artist, who shares his time between Tokyo and Berlin and who has prepared a deep listening hybrid DJ mix. Fukuda camo to the scene in the late 2010s, attracting the attention of Berghain resident Tobias Freund. Fukuda's sound delves into minimalistic narratives and dark atmospheres, with a penchant for longer, conceptually inclined works which culminated in early 2020 in the two-vinyl collection of electro-acoustic improvisations compilation under the philosophical aegis of Enso featuring such acts as Recent Arts, Renick Bell or Rabih Beaini. Fukuda return returns with a full solo project, Reuten, his debut LP and his thirteenth release on the Reiten label – a platform he created to showcase his techno music and the more general, experimental aesthetic agenda of which the club music is but one face. Ruten is a Japanese concept whose closest Western counterpart is the ancient Greek notion of ‘panta rhei’. Referencing Heraclitus’ famous

Our new mixtape steems from recently launched journal-zine FOCUS On Sound, an anthology of scholarly articles and artist responses to the subject of sound. A one-shot issue featuring work by independent artists and articles by researchers and emerging scholars associated with different universities around the world, where each contributor has a double-page, across which they present their focused take on the central topic, sound. The magazine was founded and edited by Nicholas Burman, - a writer, researcher and editor with a background in Comparative Cultural Analysis-, and features articles on topics as diverse as the relationship between sound and modernisation in China, decolonial listening practices, aurality and orality in Latin America and the use of voice recognition technology on the German borders to name a few. Among the multimedia, spreads are a stained glass collage, a memory-based comic, psychogeographic maps of sonic experiences, and a meditative photo/text combination. There are also a few c

The first mixtape of the year arrives with a label focus by Pointless Geometry, an independent label founded in 2015 by Justyna Banaszczyk (FOQL) and Darek Pietraszewski (aka VJ Copy Corp) in Warsaw, Poland. The label specialises in tape releases of experimental electronic, electroacoustic and dance-esque music as well as audiovisual projects on VHS tapes and is one of the most interesting labels in Poland. During these last five years, the Pointless Geometry catalogue has grown to include 36 releases by WIDT, Mchy i Porosty, Jakub Lemiszewski, FOQL, Fischerle, Jakub Gliński and Muka, to name just some of the artists. All the label entries are accompanied by a carefully designed graphic design, available in limited collector’s series, prepared by some the most interesting Polish artists such as Stachu Szumski, Sandra Sygur and Tomek Popakul. And once or twice a year, Pointless Geometry releases an audiovisual project on VHS. These releases are limited to 20-30 copies. The team shares they don’t really make

Mixtape 23 sees Mexican artist Lorena Quintanilla crafting a selection of tunes to warm the late November afternoons. Originally for Guadalajara, the artist made a name for herself as one-half Lorelle Meets The Obsolete, a duo responsible for some of the most sonically adventurous psych experimentalism of recent times with a reputation for exceptional live shows and a catalogue of equally impressive albums to match. Now relocated in the less hectic city of Ensenada in Baja California, Quintanilla has reinvented herself into J. Zunz, a new solo project where she explores similar atmospherics but marking a distance with what she had been doing with the obsolete. J.Zunz is also the result of a metamorphic process whereby the minimal is rendered maximal and the personal fused with the political. The initial vision for the J. Zunz project was for Lorena to strip her approach down to the basics. She remembers reading a biography of John Cage, where the author was referring to the influence of Buddhism and meditatio

Next in our mixtape series comes with Prairie, the project of multi-instrumentalist and producer Marc Jacobs who has prepared a mix to submerge our minds into a semi-awake state, where senses are heightened and we experience sound and reality in a different way. Jacobs, with his Prairie output, has recently published a new album in Denovali Records "And the Bird Said: Cut Me Open and Sing Me", his second release on the experimental German label. With a sound that some have acquainted to a space between Bohren & der Club of Gore and Sunn O))), his releases are infused of a vivid cinematographic narrative. Sonic landscapes provided by layers of synths and instruments that remind us of the passing of time and the persistence of memory. "And the bird said", Jacobs says, "was inspired by the silence of the birds, the tone between a mother and her daughter, the Sandsnipe twins, constant wailing sirens... the memory of a Vangelis track". Composed in several locations from urban in the city, or in his studio Les

The new mixtape comes from the hand of SPIME.Im, a Turin-based media art collective formed by Marco Casolati, Davide Tomat and Gabriele Ottino. Their practice that aims to investigate, through transmedia projects, the aesthetics and the languages derived from the affirmation of digital reality. The collective includes musicians, video makers, creative coders and engineers, with all these different backgrounds having a large impact on their creative process when developing new works. Spime is a concept that defines the internet of things. Spimes are objects that know how to talk to each other. A concept that was coined and refined by Bruce Sterling; he first imagined spimes as an extension of RFID tags, where a physical organization of things could be representative of an also intangible web of things. By juxtaposing Bruce Sterling’s «spime» concept with «I am», SPIME.IM is the being that is intertwined between the artificial and the natural, with they work representing human-machine interactions in sound,

Ville Aalto is the Finnish sound artist and electronic musician presenting our 20th mixtape. Originally from Helsinki, Aalto has been working on a project called Avian Electronics for a few years now. The main focus of the project is creating and imitating birdsong with synths and it includes surround sound installations, sound art works and electronic music featuring synthesized birds and other natural sounds. Aalto has recently published the first album related to this project, also titled Avian ElectronicsThe music on the album is primarily divided into electronic, rhythmic works and 'ambientish', droning works that are a sort of loose electronic interpretation of natural soundscapes. The project is a slightly twisted love letter to the sounds of birds and nature. It aims to raise questions about the relationship between us, nature and technology as well as the changing (aural) environment that we live in and affect all the time. The artist states that nature as a stable, separate entity does not exist.

Pablo Casares is the artist taking up our next mixtape instalment. Born and bred in San Sebastian and holding a degree in philosophy and masters in science, technology and communication, Casares had a long trajectory in poetry and illustration before turning to synths and sound. Since then, he has tried to learn about the complex world of sound using a media that suits him better to express himself, bringing him closer to creative worlds that he couldn’t reach otherwise". The artist shares his most immediate challenge is to achieve sounds and sound environments so that people can listen to them and use them as a medium for their mind to expand. Nature and its poetic veils seem to be a regular inspiration in Casare’s productions, probably an influence of the Vasque Country’s dramatically beautiful scenery. The sound and music orbit in the ambient realms, creating dark musical landscapes and abstract industrial atmospheres, which some have defined in a magic suspension dream, where Casares finds his way. His m