Clot Magazine

Just when London is basking in scorching temperatures, we turn away from our more abrasive electronics sounds to we bring you a new mixtape soothing as a fresh summer breeze by Dukes of Chutney. The transcontinental trio of Dustin Lynn, John Paul Jones, and Petra have been exploring the different spaces and places with their productions, between nothingness and nature, that nurture inner and outer peace. Cosmic yet intimate, long-gestating and free-flowing, diffuse and centred. Jones' has established a beguiling production touch to various edits and remixes Under the moniker Tom Croose. Lynn is an accomplished filmmaker who has collaborated with artist Gabriel Orozco and directed campaigns for designers Alexander McQueen and Corto Moltedo. The trio’s recently published their debut album, hazel (rvng Intl), the Dukes turned towards their immediate sanctum and a network of friends and colleagues. As they say, Hazel explores life’s wandering ways while widening its path. Recorded from remote yet commonly tran

Our next mixtape instalment comes by Temp-Illusion the Iranian experimental/electronic duo consisting of Shahin Entezami and Behrang Najafi. Formed in 2011 and mainly operating as a live act, temp-illusion use a wide range of music programs and hardware synthesizers in their music production to combine noisy and atmospheric layers with melodies and complex beat programming to achieve a unique style of dance music. In recent years, an exciting Iranian electronic music-scene has quickly emerged and reached western ears, partly thanks to the work of Sote and Zabte Sote, a sister-label to Opal Tapes that focuses on putting out experimental electronic music by Iranian composers that he runs, as well as SET festival. Temp-Illusion release their first album Autoelected in 2019 in Zabte Sote as well as the more recent Pend, released earlier this year. While Autoelected was a perfect example of what recently has become known as ‘deconstructed dance music, Pend takes it from there to evolve into an assembly of ca

In this 16th mixtape volume, the Italian-born and Berlin-based experimental producer Andrea Taeggi has prepared a selection of sounds that inspired his last album Mycorrhiza (OOH-sounds, 2020), also including some recordings from the late Sanne van Hek, a dear friend of Taeggi and a great artist. Taeggi’s work is often categorised under the labels of experimental ambient, techno or minimalist through which he explores the sculptural potential of sound. His research expands the physicality of sound, its tactile quality and implied 3-dimensionality, the grey area between acoustic & electronic sources, the disassociative & hypnotic power of repetition and the fictionality of recorded audio. For his research endeavours, he has been a regular guest-composer at renowned research institutes such as STEIM Amsterdam, EMS Stockholm and Willem-Twee, where he further developed his investigation in analogue synthesis, extended techniques, reel-to-reel tape treatments, recording techniques and composition Earlier this

For the 15th Mixtape volume Danish artist Minais B is takes us through a selection of inspirational music and a few demos from the making of Quiet Bloom, his second full-length album. Behind the moniker, we find Villads Klint, who is also well known for being part of the avant-pop trio KhalilH2OP and a collaborator of Copenhagen artists Astrid Sonne and Xenia Xamanek. Minais B’s debut album was received as a strain of post-internet abstract and cybernetic music. But with this second album, released this year by Anyines, the artist shapes a considerable turn in his compositions: I needed less conceptual music, more direct and not afraid of emotion. The album was inspired in part by the loss of a loved one and the experience of grief; music grew from a place of great loss and emptiness but sparked a new whole creativity horizon. Drawing from Minais B’s interest in spiritual music traditions, in particular Danish hymns, combined with electronic, synthesizers and organ compositions as the artist explains, wea

For the new mixtape polish electronic jazz duo Skalpel brings a selection of the main inspirations behind their music. Skalpel, originally from Wrocław are DJs, musicians and record producers, Marcin Cichy and Igor Pudło, who have been making music since the late nineties. Their musical style is a distinctive blend of local, traditional jazz inspirations and new electronica. Citing influences from the likes of Miles Davis, leftfield avant-garde, minimal, the duo alludes to roots in Polish jazz and trip-hop. This particular mixture caught the interest of Ninja Tune, the legendary record label founded by Matt Black and Jonathan More (aka Coldcut), where they released two albums: ‘ Skalpel ’ and ‘ Konfusion ’ gaining recognition worldwide. They became one of the first polish DJs to get recognition abroad. This year they released their third album in NoPaper Records/!K7, HIGHLIGHT, which has marked a significant shift in their creative technique, a shift away from samples to virtual instruments. For this mixtap

In our 13th instalment of the series, Japanese musician Yasuyuki Uesugi shares a 30 mins-long track specially produced for CLOT Magazine. Truths is a noise track that expresses the question of whether all the truth should be conveyed or how hidden it should be to live. Uesugi produces wall of sound kind of noise music, using almost a fully analogue workflow, u including a custom-made synthesizer made by JMT SYNTH (Japanese handmade synthesizer maker) the NSDQ, a 2VCO synthesizer equipped with multiple sub oscillators, delay effector, phaser effector, and a 16-step sequencer. Once the parameters on the instruments are set, Yusuegui doesn’t physically play, the noise changes and evolves due to the effects of the analogue instruments and spring reverb, recording all in one take and letting each passing moment decide where my sounds go The producer started being interested in noise music when he met the mind behind JMT SYNTH: I became fascinated by operating the analogue synthesizer and freely searching for nois

The 12th Mixtape brings Hoshina anniversary with his mix Session 2.0, a rework of his most recent album, Odoriko, released on Alien Jams, the independent and superb record label run by Chloe Frieda. Based in Tokyo, Hoshina anniversary has been producing house and techno for the last five years, releasing on labels such as Turbo Recordings, Octopus Recordings and Boys Noize Records. His style mixes experimental sounds using elements of rock and pop into his productions. The japanese producer debuted on Alien Jams last month with a 7-track-long album Odoriko. Referencing the archipelago in Miyagi prefecture, the Tokyo-based producer presents a cluster of visually harmonious symbols: Japanese gravestones, foam and tethered objects pieced together with minimal electronics and traditional Japanese instruments. The grouping and intricate arrangement of these motifs results in a measured dynamic atmosphere throughout the album, balancing creative sound design with effortless flow, all the while conveying a range

Michael Vincent Waller is an American composer based in New York. Some describe them as one of the most interesting composing of the big city, and we surely agree. His music has been described as lyrical and introspective, drawing inspiration from impressionism, post-minimalism and world music. There’s a melancholic longing quite unique in his sound. A student of names such as minimalist legend La Monte Young, Bunita Marcus, and Elizabeth Hoffman influenced, Waller compositions are suffused with an avant-garde essence of enthralling beauty. Waller's most recent publication, Moments (Unseen Worlds, 2019 is a collection of minimalist pieces performed solo by pianist R. Andrew Lee and vibraphonist William Winant. The piano pieces bring memories of Satie gravitating between softness and more dramatic tones. The album draws on Western classical music tradition in its most archetypal forms through its use of modal melodies, triadic harmonies and metered rhythms. Yet the emotional heart of the music is not in atta

Our 9th Mixtape instalment brings Sorcery -the acclaimed electronic experimental drummer- with a very specially crafted mix: Manufactured Stimulus" - the unfolding of a surreal hyper narrative though music. Merlin Ettore (the man behind Sorcery) is a multifaceted creative: a highly skilled drummer, producer and also visual artist. With a long-established artistic career, he developed a very personal bold esthétique noir. Whilst the intense, polyrhythmic power of his live performances his compositions reveal a mastery of both the acoustic instruments and analogue equipment that define his particular sound. Speak“There are no strict rules to how I compose beats, calculate clever subdivisions or bend time signatures, the rhythmic alchemy is dictated by feeling the impact that resonates in me. Ettore has lent his unique drumming imprint to the techno scene throughout various contributions and collaborations including Kangding Ray and Powell Last September, under his alias Sorcery, Ettore has published his debut

For our 8th Mixtape, CLOT Magazine's editor Jacobo García has prepared a selection of the most relevant Spanish ambient and experimental sound artists and musicians from the 80s and 90s. Only a few years after the end of the fascist dictatorship, Spanish musical scene exploded, and every region started developing micro scenes mostly focused on rock, pop or punk. This was preceded by a few interesting blends of flamenco, rock and funk in the 70s. From the 80’s explosion, the most widely recognized movement is the Movida, an amalgam of punk, new wave and pop that it is a still a reference to many new bands in the country and music connoisseurs outside it. At the same time, but in different circles, a group of producers, composers and sound artists were developing works in the experimental and avant-garde terrains. Supported from a few independent labels like El Cometa de Madrid, Hyades Arts (a partnership between mainstream singer Alejandro Sanz and renowned writer Elvira Lindo) or Auxilio de Cientos. The m

For our seventh instalment, Sote, or Ata Ebtekar, one of the most prominent current Iranian composers and sound artists has prepared a mix inspired by Unsound Krakow's mix, SOLIDARITY. This theme will explore how music unites, both on a sonic level via its presence in a physical space or online, as well as culturally and politically, through scenes, collectives and movements. Sote has produced two of the most exciting albums from the last two years, Sacred Horror In Design (Opal Tapes, 2017) and the most recent Parallel Persia (Diagonal, 2019). Albums where he closely collaborates with traditional musicians such as Arash Bolouri and Behrouz Pashaei. Currently based in Tehran, he is one of the motors behind the vibrant and growing experimental art cultural scene in the country. For this mix he explains that collaborating with talented musician friends such as Arash Bolouri who plays the santour on ‘Parallel Persia’, Pouya Damadi who plays the tar on ‘Parallel Persia’ and Behrouz Pashaei who played the setar

In our 6th Mixtape, Floating Spectrum is presenting a selection of music specially put together to resonate with our audience; music that utilizes data from our universe, such as sounds of two merging black holes, earthquake or planetary data sonification, and many otherworldly songs that take you through a peculiar journey. Floating Spectrum is the moniker for Taiwan-born, Berlin-based composer and audio technologist, Mei-Fang Liau. Her fantastic debut album, A Point Between, is coming out in Temporary residence this September. And it’s been crafted from a combination of synthesizers, everyday household objects, and unique software synthesizers made by Liau herself. Originally inspired by a dance performance for which Mei-Fang that explored the recurring cycles of nature. Liau also relied heavily on a self-made, fractal-inspired software synthesizer called Polyphylla, which simulates the way in which nature creates very complex and organic forms. It allowed Liau to create slowly evolving textures and sou

The fifth volume of our Mixtape series comes by Lost Few, the audio-visual project of Melbourne-based experimental artist David Thomson. For this Mix, he’s prepared a personal journey developing a sense of space and theme that reflect the contexts and emotions he tries and explores with his own work. Lost Few has just published his debut LP Between The Silence (Southern Lights 2019). It showcases ambient techno, disturbed electronics, processed instrumentation & sub-bass experiments, leading the listener to a journey that traverses a world that possesses a sharp, dissonant edge. The album also portrays the artist's relationship with the physical form, which includes sound recordings from the Buchan Caves in Victoria & the Tasmanian wilderness. For this mix, the selection of tracks comes from artists who have influenced Thomson or represent a sound and thematic that he relate to and engage with: "While writing a new body of work I try to limit the music I listen to and separate myself from any external musi

For our fourth instalment, Richard Skelton and Phantom Limb Publishing are bringing us a psychogeographical mix. British musician and sound artist Richard Skelton has been exploring the natural world, its cycles of life and decay and our relationship with landscape and human-constructed spaces with experimental atmospheres. Skelton has just published his latest album, Border Ballads (Corble Stone Press). After spending the last two years living in the rural northern edge of the Scotland-England border, a boundary demarcated by various watercourses, this hinterland topography has informed a series of musical recordings, twelve miniatures fragments of a larger whole, such is their unity in tone and timbre. For this mix Skelton shares that this mix is loosely constructed around absences, vacancies, and dereliction. The image of a deserted church, now falling into disrepair, located deep in the north Cumbrian interior: I pass by the building on a regular basis as I traverse the labyrinthine back roads between

A new instalment of our Mixtape series with a psychedelic selection by the hand of Anatolian weapons. Athenian musician Aggelos Baltas has been producing music for almost a decade, with his Fantastikoi Hxoi project and the more recent Anatolian Weapons, this last one conceived as a way to bring together his influences in krautrock and EBM - two seemingly mismatched concepts- with the polyrhythmic percussion and wailing tones of Greek folk music serving as their unlikely bonding agent. His most recent publication under the Anatolian Weapons moniker, the excellent 'To The Mother Of Gods', is an album made in collaboration with Greek folk musician and composer Seirios Savvaidis. Savvidis contributed stems of ten songs, which Baltas deconstructs and rearranges with an appreciation of the ancestry of their lineage and of the deceptively ancient eerie, droning qualities inherent in the style. Baltas shares that this album was one of these projects that flows very naturally; he felt so inspired by Seirios' origin

For our second Mixtape, experimental musician Zachary Paul has prepared a selection of novel approaches to string instruments. Zachary Paul is a violinist and composer interested in perception, the transportive nature of long durations, and trance states. His work explores the contrast between stasis and movement and questions the possibility of depicting both synchronously with a profound sensibility and emotion, drawing from a long lineage of artists exploring sustained tones within organic performance, including Tony Conrad, Pauline Oliveros, and La Monte Young. Zachary is currently a participant in Touch's curated mentorship program where he’s also released his first album A Meditation on Discord, last April 2019. In this Mix he reflects about one of his main interests: Growing up as a classical musician, he was always attracted to composers who invited the performer to play their instrument in a unique way. The vocabulary of the violin is much larger than the twelve notes of the diatonic scale and there

New series of mixtapes specially created for CLOT Magazine. The first instalment comes from Phantom Limb and Dylan Henner: Alternating Microsound with Film Score a mixtape. Both of these categories of music acknowledge environment. In film score, a soundtrack is part of worldbuilding; it is a key part of the film universe, part of its reality. Microsound music does something similar. It follows different rules to pop music, operating only within its own tiny world. Like film score, it is not made to be a filler of empty space, but to be details within it, like the literal case of NASA's audio recording of the sounds made by Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it flies through the outer universe. A Secretive newcomer, Dylan Henner describes his work as “bliss-out ambient” and released his debut EP A Reason for Living through Phantom Limb in February 2019. Tracklist: 1. Akira Rabelais - 1440 Promp. Parv. 518_2 Wawyn, Or Waueryn, Yn A Myry Totyr, Oscillo. 2. Nick Zammuto - Stealing [from We The Animals] 3.

The Zero Gravity Band is an immersive installation of light and sound 360º that tries to induce sensations of zero gravity and an exhibition of prototypes and instruments designed to create arts and music in conditions of zero gravity and smart space suits. The project is produced by Fundació Quo Artis, a non-profit organisation that seeks connections between art, science and technology through the joint work of professionals in these fields. Quo Artis aims to add value to society and culture by incentivising the creation of innovative interdisciplinary projects. The Zero Gravity Band project aims to find answers to how would art, and it is perception change when we were not restricted to the physical and gravitational laws and create a dialogue on the subject between researchers in such varying disciplines as art, science, technology and philosophy. It was devised by the artist and researcher Dr Albert Barqué-Duran and musician, composer, sound engineer and music producer Marc Marzenit with the scientific

Technological research, design, art, industry and business with a strong focus on future trends were the central axis of Sónar+D 2017. This year’s edition of Marketlab returned to the large public area in Sónar+D and put its center on music technology from both creation and experimentation point of view. There we were able to discover new tendencies in music production, interfaces and tool for sound production that may change our lives in a not-too-distant future. Apart from industry projects, Marketlab paid attention on what creatives hubs, media labs, creative platforms, universities and incubators are developing and researching around the globe. We could get in touch with London incubator Somerset House Studios, and New York’s School for Poetic Computation, Creative platforms like Kickstarter and the littleBits makers tool, as well as the universities RMIT (Australia) and Kuntsuniversitat Linz (Austria). And as well talk to the professionals behind some of the innovative projects that caught our atten

Machine learning - a method of data analysis that automates analytical model building or the science of getting computers to act without being explicitly programmed- is having a growing impact on our everyday lives: from practical speech recognition, effective web search, vastly improved understanding of the human genome to first prototypes of self-driving cars. But what is the influence these new forms of computing intelligence will exert on artists and their creative processes? Can it help us understand human creativity? and how does it work? These are some of the articulating questions the work of Artificial Intelligence curator Kenric McDowell revolves around. Kenrick, who has long had professional interests on the intersection of culture and technology, currently leads the Artists + Machine Intelligence program at Google Research, after moving from New York City and few years working in the advertising industry to L.A. AMI is a program at Google that brings artists and engineers to support and encourage