Light Sounds Dark Vinyl & CDs

Review: Sound collage is a genre where ideas and sounds can get a blank canvas to express those ideas and not have any pressures to create full songs. The Gesua Plateau: Enslavement Of The Species pushes the boundaries of experimental and electronic music to an exciting place. This multi-sided album dives into ambient textures, unusual sonic landscapes and evocative soundscapes that feel alien and oddly familiar. Side-1 serves as an entry point, with five shorter tracks showcasing ambient and experimental ingenuity. Highlights include 'Track 2', where a blend of saxophone, electronics and effects evokes a chamber-like resonance and 'Track 4', featuring a dark, sequenced rhythm that feels futuristic and thrilling. 'Track 3' introduces nature sounds, adding an organic touch to the experimental palette, while 'Track 5' leans into spacey electronics that expand the album's ethereal tone. Side-2 delivers 'Track 6', a cavernous exploration of dissonance and sound processing that feels otherworldly. Side-3 offers 'Track 7', an industrial, mechanical piece that's haunting and deeply atmospheric. Finally, Side-4 ventures even further into the unknown, presenting soundscapes that feel unmoored from terrestrial reality. A profound journey into sonic experimentation. If you're interested in the avant garde, musique concrete or experimental sounds, this ambient album has all that and then some.

Review: Alexander Melzak's new album, Substrates, showcases his mastery of electronic textures and ability to create stunning soundscapes and vivid sonic imagery. Melzak's unique sound highlights his distinctive and unconventional compositional style and gives rise to a record that feels both boldly escapist and richly imaginative. Substrates takes you on a real journey through otherworldly realms, blending unexpected moments with captivating, immersive sound design and spectacular sound design.

Review: The incredible post-coldwave label Light Sounds Dark are *rara aves* of the experimental music underworld. Here they again do what they do best, procuring a (literally) incredible full-length compilation record: these tracks are credited to no one. The titular Salt Line Continuum is an invented metonym; together with the cartographic front cover, it suggests 19th Century geopolitical boundaries, delimitations of national and international territories, potentially alluding to everything from Middle Passage slavery to freemasonry. LSD transmigrate to Eurasia and Africa here, apparently tracing the invention of whiteness alongside masonry; chivalric orders like the Knights Templar are known to have crusaded across the featured locations on the sleeve. Red tracer lines on a paleo-geographical front cover help us cognitively map roots of both of hatred and shadowy dominance, as uncannily cold, schismogenetic sound wafts from a minimal source-set, as we hear the sounds of bells tolling; kalimbas plucking; patinated metal screeching.

Review: One may easily shorten the Light Sounds Dark label name to LSD. So too does this new V/A compilation of dark industrial soundscapes by the label befit the bad trip. With minimal release info besides an ardent confirmation by an unnamed witness - "definitely a trip into a darker dimension" - the notion of ingesting LSD takes on a whole new meaning here. The otherwise absence of info motivates some detective work: a stained-glass design on the front cover; a title referencing Indo-European paganism and/or Zoroastrianism; intense cloud-sonics and glassy chamber spaces on the ensuing tracks; everything intuitively fits, though we're not quite sure how. Some way to a narrative revelation emerges on track four, though at best it's a speak n' spell numbers station voice, half-lost under the solemn, soily noise scramble beneath. The trip only grows weirder, with strange bird calls melding into gong sounds and pan flutes on the lossy eighth track, and the closing locked groove spelling ultimate doom for the more harmonically inclined.