Discrepant Vinyl & CDs

Review: To say Goncarlo F Cardosa lives an enviable life would be nothing short of an understatement. If this is your first meeting with his islands series, the ongoing project sees the man in question - boss of the Discrepant label - head out to various rocks in various seas to record what he hears, and then piece this back together in a way that may or may not make sense to anyone other than him. To be frank, logic matters not when you're making such transportive work.

So last time we were in Zanzibar, whereas now we find ourselves washed up on the shores of Borneo. The result is something that might not immediately place listeners on the Malay peninsula, but certainly takes us out to some far flung, rain forested land or other. Sounds of jungle precipitation and species, deep, moody almost monastic vocal numbers, lighter, refrain-led ambient workouts - as varied as the destination itself.

Review: Laurent Jeaneau's Discrepant imprint delivers another burst of magnetic outsiderism thanks to this latest LP by Algerian bass wizard, El Mahdy Jr - this being his debut for the label and only his second full-length work. The North African beat experimenter has previously put out material on the excellent Zam Zam and Aisha Devi's Danse Noire, and we're always curious to hear his very own brand of morphed n' warped electronics, a pleasure on the ears and a blow to the chest. Ghost Tapes travels across the two sides of the wax plate, with Mahdy going deeper and more cavernous than ever before thanks to flurries of field recordings, vocal samples, fuzzy drones and swarms of dubbed-out noise. A good old mash-up of everything that we love. Hot.

Review: London-based Discrepant follows reviews up some great ones by the likes of Etrusca 3D, Only Now x Orogen and Charbel Haver to introduce a new project Called Lagoss comprised of label boss Goncalo F. Cardoso and Tenerife-based Mladen Kurajica and Dani Tupper aka Tupperwear. Lagoss borrow from the exotica playbook of ideas and provide over three dozen sonic shapshots of trouble in paradise. Off-kilter grooves, imaginary soundtracks, exotic polyrhythms and intelligent dance music collide on this curious release. As the label so eloquently stated themselves "no armchair xylophone grooves here."

Review: Tenerife-based trio LAGOSS are back with a second album of escapist electronic sounds. Goncalo F. Cardoso, Mladen Kurajica and Daniel Garcia leave behind the mega-mix vignette of their first album for a more song-based but still avant-gard collection here. Their raw, live jamming style mixes up tropicalia and electronic freakouts with found sounds, percussion, bird calls and rich samples that all bring these tracks to life as it moves through various different moods, gores, genres and eras with style. Somehow inviting yet eerie, this a very personal sound world but we're all welcome inside.

Review: People Like Us, the long-running project of Vicki Bennett, returns with her first album since 2018's The Mirror. Again via sampling, and stylising in vintage neo-psych-tronic audio collage, Copia here muses on abundance and self-replication, reassembling fragments of sound into something sub-interconnected, rhizomatic. Emerging from her recent AV performance The Library of Babel, the album blends electronic textures with whimsical, often uncanny vocal moments, inlining contributions from Matmos, Ergo Phizmiz, Hearty White, Gwilly Edmondez, and others. Lyrics and melodies by Phizmiz act as a connective spine, while the project as a whole embraces an "exquisite corpse" approach, multitracks traded over oceans and timelines, forming a gaudily grotesque patchwork resistant to linearity. As always with Bennett's work, Copia blurs the borders of past, present and potential, offering a poignant meditation on creativity.

Review: Joao 'Shela' Pereira is a keyboardist based in Lisbon who often works with bands such as Paus, Rinding Panico, LAmA and Linda Martini but here she goes it alone for her new album TV Songs. It is a melodically melancholic album that has a rather haunting quality - the quietness of the sounds and subtly of the playing make it all the more poignant. She has described it as "a scrapbook of recordings from the heart" and it is taken from a series of spontaneous ideas that came to her while sitting at the piano as a TV played out in the background. Amazingly, they were all recorded using WhatsApp which lends them a dusty and lo-fi feel which is perfectly reflective of the imperfections of life itself.

Review: Inspired by the idea of an ocean of islands - an Aquapelago - this latest offering from the Discrepant imprint is nothing short of a curveball for those expecting to be lulled into a soft, blissful sleep by the sound of waves crashing accompanied by gentle chords. Or at least parts of it are, and none of it is remotely that obvious or twee. Allow us to divulge.

Opening with Sugai Ken's 'Boundary', you could be forgiven for thinking you'd accidentally hit play on one of those YouTube videos with an AI narrator. Spoken fragments of text describe Ningen, a humanoid-whale creature from Japanese folklore, here read as a statement about Industrial whaling. Cue a weird medley of noises that wouldn't sound out of place in a 1970s sci fi movie. From thereon in, we're taken deeper into this imaginary region, rich textures and deep-rooted melodies captivating pulling us down below the surface.