Anatolian Weapons returns with an EP of brand new remixes following June 2019’s debut To The Mother of Gods with Seirios Savviadis.
Featuring new takes on key album track “Ofiodaimon” by Tolouse Low Trax, Mr TC and Mekine U Teksi – as well as an instrumental dub take by Anatolian Weapons – the remix collection further opens the third eye that the album’s rapturous Levantine grooves first channeled.
The EP unfolds a with a collaboration between Germany’s seasoned Tolouse Low Trax and Anatolian Weapons, a cyclic, languorous mid-tempo stomp that hones in on microscopic elements of the original, swirling and constant in its drive, falling deep into the Kraut-fantasies that the album version flirts with and beckoned by the vocals of Savvaidis like calls from beyond.
Freedom To Spend’s next release revisits the environs of late Portland, Oregon musician and sound historian Ernest Hood.
Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score and documentary composed and directed by Hood to offer, in his words, joy in reminiscence.
Each month, we invite an artist from the cast of characters that color the RVNG, Beats In Space, and Freedom To Spend universe to compile 15 – 20 tracks that are resonating with them.
From Craig Leon, to you ~
Some tracks I played on various radio shows so far this year: Celsius Drop on dublab, Charlie Bones’s Do!!You!!! Breakfast Show on NTS, Henry Rollins on KCRW, and others. Some are my own, but they’re mainly pieces from friends, colleagues, and musicians who I admire and have been listening to lately.
There are a few rediscoveries like the piano music of George Antheil which I’ve been listening to a lot along with various prepared piano pieces. I was inspired to revisit a few of these (including one I did in 1982) when I heard the work of Kelly Moran, who is continuing on in this area. I heard her when I played Moogfest earlier this year. She drew my attention back to the work of Henry Cowell, John Cage, and Lou Harrison. There’s also a lesser-known piece from William Basinski which is piano-based…
I feel like it’s getting to be the time to write something new that features piano.
I am not particularly a fan of Spotify or streaming services and do not advocate that the format should be the sole purveyors of sonic entertainment. However, I’ve done this playlist to see if Spotify can unconsciously help fulfill the need that exists for the promotion of new and “difficult” music.
I’m going to leave this list up for a while and then contact my friends and colleagues who are on it to see if they experienced any response at all from listeners who may have first heard their work on this list. I hope that some have been able to contact new listeners.
Best, Craig
RIYL-ty Bytes is updated by a different artist each month. If you like something, save it to your library.
The story of Dylan Moon’s Only the Blues unfolds with “Hope Dog,” a showcase for the LA-based musician’s Lydia Davis–esque ability to move listeners incrementally through entire worlds. The clip, directed by Ellie Tremayne, is an animated lament for time wasted and a testimony to the resilience of the world that moves around us.
Let your peace flag fly, Friends & Fiends ~ Our new PEACE, PLEASE tee available for pre-order now in limited quantities, expected ship date by the second week of July.
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Freedom To Spend previously offered all four Rimarimba albums in an edition of 250 screen-printed canvas carriers. The canvas collection is long sold-out, and this second edition of 200 4x LP sets will be the only other opportunity to access Light Metabolism Number Prague. Today, On Dry Land and In The Woods are available individually for the first time. Each album features artwork reinterpreted from its original edition by Will Work For Good, a “Certificate of Absurdity” from Robert Cox, and accompanying abstracts by Jon Dale.
By his third album, it’s clear Robert Cox has recognised just how liberating technology can be – “All these intricate layers of things that I was trying to play, and didn’t have the musical ability to play, I could suddenly program them” – but he also recognises that if you head too far down that road, dull perfection is your bitter reward. Human music intoxicated and lurching through a new forest of machinery.
Enjoy director Matthew Reed’s audiovisual postcard of Felixstowe, UK, Cox’s hometown (and where all of the music of Rimarimba originated), featuring “Pacific,” a selection from In The Woods:
Freedom To Spend previously offered all four Rimarimba albums in an edition of 250 screen-printed canvas carriers. The canvas collection is long sold-out, and this second edition of 200 4x LP sets will be the only other opportunity to access Light Metabolism Number Prague. On June 21, Below The Horizon, On Dry Land and In The Woods will be available individually for the first time. Each album features artwork reinterpreted from its original edition by Will Work For Good, a “Certificate of Absurdity” from Robert Cox, and accompanying abstracts by Jon Dale.
Anatolian Weapons, the newest project of Athens, Greece-based artist Aggelos Baltas, debuts on Beats In Space Records with To The Mother Of Gods. Best known for a handful of celebrated EBM 12”s as Dream Weapons and a particularly heady brand of krautrock as Fantastikoi Hxoi, Baltas conceived of his Anatolian Weapons project as a way to bring together these two concepts within a distinctly Greek lineage.
On To The Mother Of Gods, Baltas reinterprets eight compositions from local musician Seirios Savvaidis, dissolving traditional recordings and folk lyricism into a Golden Pudel-approved percussive storm, where polyrhythms envelop soaring chants and basslines repeat and swirl. Baltas steers the listener through Athenian past and present, seeking a future sound as wind-kissed and mystical as his country’s oldest yet lifted by the swell of dancefloor dynamics.
To The Mother Of Gods is out now on limited vinyl and unlimited digital forms. Learn more here
