Enough Records

dUAS sEMIcOLCHEIAS iNVERTIDAS (or dSCi for short) is the name of a Portuguese jazz rock noise project. I saw them playing live at a couple small concert venues in Porto, Fábrica de Som and Casa Viva.

I already knew the drummer through participation at a portuguese online music forum, and the guitarrist looked familiar from another rock project i loved, which was already seemingly extinct, Lemur, they had an awesome EP out at the, also already seemingly extinct, Merzbau, a fellow Portuguese netlabel.

I loved their gigs, they reminded me of videogame music played with a band ensemble, and so i approached the guys on both occasions to tell them their concert kicked ass and that if they wanted to put something out online i’d be happy to have it released at Enough. A few months later they sent me their latest limited edition album for online re-release: II

Although dSCi are all Portuguese, II was actually recorded in Barcelona, on their way back from a tour across Spain and France. dSCi love playing live more then anything, they are one of those true forever touring indie rock bands, playing anywhere and everywhere they can just for the sake of putting their sound out there. The moment an european tour ends, they start planning the next one. To celebrate the ending of another tour in late 2010 they sent me another EP for online re-release: I

dSCi not only plays like hell, they also randomly organize concerts and festivals in Lisbon through their collective / promoter Associação Terapêutica do Ruído. Just don’t try to figure out what genre of music they promote, because you’ll fail to pin it down, it’s just music.

In 2011 they had a tape out through a new label A Giant Fern, and once again asked me to re-release it online for free download at Enough Records. I was happy to comply.

And now in 2012 they are on tour again with another new album named 4, limited physical editions released through A Giant Fern, Experimentáculo, Another Shame, Eclectic Polpo, Fooltribe and Human Feather. Online edition promised to come out when the tour ends. Meanwhile you can already listen to it at bandcamp and check their myspace or facebook accounts for tour dates around Spain, France and Italy.

I seldom pick up a piece of music, listen to it, and feel moved enough by it to write an editorial on it. However, this particular release was much too damning for me not to comment on; and so here I am once again, exploring myself indirectly through the sounds of another artist, fumbling as I try to make sense out of the music that I’m hearing, how it makes me feel, and the thoughts behind the words that I am typing. In a world that has become over-saturated with the characteristic qualities of commercial music, it’s not every day that you come across music of this caliber – to say the least.

Pulsipher is a musical artist (or project) based in Poland. The driving force(s) behind the music is/are currently unknown. The project’s debut album, entitled “Isip”, is just as mysterious as the enigmatic figures who helped create it. Although the release is best described as being experimental, dark ambient, [post] industrial music with some breakcore influences, I think it’s best to respect the music for what it is – not what the labels attempt to characterize it as.

Pulsipher makes the type of music that drives me mad trying to understand. I’ll listen to it endlessly; exploring the music in an attempt to further comprehend the artist’s original message, meaning, or intent behind the piece. “Isip” conjures a haunting curiosity inside you that begs to be further understood. The more you listen, the quicker you start to realize you may need to listen closer (and/or deeper) to interpret the expression of the artist; and the deeper and closer you become with the music, the quicker you start to realize that the music is actually struggling to understand you more than you are with the music. It’s usually in that moment you pause for personal reflection.

I’m grateful for artists like Pulsipher. Releases like “Isip” remind me that the world of true art is still a limitless one full of unadultered expression; a world that could never be bound by commercial standards, nor could it be bound by industrialization.

I don’t think I could ever rate this album. This album seems very content just the way it is.

And the way it is is beautiful.

• Pulsipher – “Isip [Stateslaver Edition]” on Archive.org

After i play a gig, friends usually ask me how it went. Some do it just for the sake of being polite. Others for being curious. I never quite know if i should stick with the short or long answer. And usually Murphy’s Law is at it’s best here, so whenever i retork a brief remark folks expect more and vice-versa.

Since i was back in Porto for the holidays I took the oportunity to play a gig on the second day of the 4th edition of Festival Matanças. So this time i decided to write a report about it. Incidently it seems to be quite hard to talk about a concert without contextualizing the festival it was part of so here goes.

Matanças means killings in portuguese. As in the act of slaughtering. The good folks of Soopa et al have been organizing this festival every year, always on the 22nd and 23rd of December, for the last 4 years. It usually features bands vaguely related to the carnal and raw. I actually digged up the original press release of the first edition, just do describe it more clearly: “The festival featured numerous bands from the local psychic-death, anarcho-satanic and contemporary-occult.” So, lots of shaman and pagan rituals, devil worshipping, pentagrams, red candles and altars with all things rotten and evil are always to be expected and present. The blinking xmas lights gives it a warm holiday spirit too.

The festival has always been free entrance, and takes place at casa viva. Casa Viva is a free thinking space in Porto, open to everything, opposing all opression, strongly anti-fascist, in favor of animal rights and veganism, you get the idea. Vegetarian food and beer are usuablly available for cheap prices. During the festival they make sure to have some specials related to the occasion. Nothing like a slice of the body of seitan to get your tummy in the satanist mood.

Day one consisted of 5 projects: T34, HOMO, COVA, TENDAGRUTA and HHY. T34 being a recurring project at Matanças, a 5 piece ensemble playing some re-vamped versions of old interventionist music. HOMO being one of the organizers, his set was a short noise burst fiddling with guitar pedals without a guitar. COVA played some electro idm / dubstep sounds. A short set that had enough loud bass to mess with the speakers system. TENDAGRUTA literally means cave tent, or tent cave, i guess it means to invocate an urban sense of living seccluded with yourself. They played some industrial noise sounds while wearing ski masks, a short set, included a laibach cover, hitting a metal barrel with a sledgehammer and such. HHY closed the night with lots of smoke from the smoke machine and some ethnic electronic loops. There were some other activities after the concerts but i had to leave early.

Managed to get a copy of Edições Côdea from Samuel Ufusus, a self-published book featuring rants and random lost poetry by artists active in the Portuguese experimental sound scene. Indie stands present at the festival included things from Let’s Go To War, Latrina do Chifrudo, Soopa, MMMNNNRRRG and large serigraphy prints. Should have taken some Enough Records physical releases to present there myself but slightly forgot to handle those logistics in due time.

The second day featured 6 more projects. AMP opened the hostilities with 7 minute sonic performance with a huge white strobe synced to the beats blinding everyone in the room. I was up next, playing as ps with some improv assistance by gmr of team kali.

Room was pitch dark with some smaller white strobes flashing. I was wearing my Pirate Bay hoodie, gmr was with his white rainbow satan ski mask on. Our set was a remodeled version of what i had played at Kuucvaals festival, gmr interveining with some noises and samples whenever he felt like it. The initial idea was to replace the metal banging parts with the use of some sound apps on the iPad, but the guys from TENDAGRUTA had left their metal junk lying around from the previous day, so i ended up also banging on the metal barrel all the same. The set was around 20 minutes. Started with some damp beats and sample soundscapes, shouting out loud to wake up. Claiming that our democracy is dead and that we are all living a lie. That we are the 99% and we have to get rid of it. Things die down a bit, psychedelic ambient builds up, gets shattered by a break-beat loop which is filtered up and down while a wall of field recordings, glitches and noise builds up into a massive torrent. Everything slowly quiets down back to psychedelic ambient. New beats slowly emerge, metal banging ensues with more shouting making sure people are awake. The techno industrial beats get more hectic and frantic, turning into idm and powernoize. Layers of ambient echo around in a long fade down.

Next up was BANANA METALÚRGICA, playing some folk / pop-off and ended up offering balloons and bananas to the crowd. It was odd. HELLCHARGE were up next, they played some rock / black metal / punk of sorts. BLACK PIGS played some freejazz mashed with electronics. And finally the room had to be cleared off to set the stage for PAIÃO AMANHÃ which performed an opera rock covering tracks from Carlos Paião in the key of grunge doom or something. It was quite a performance. Stage girls were holding up posters claiming for the return of our long lost hero. After a few tracks the vocalist finally emerged from the coffin in the center of the stage and started destroying the place, first throwing the coffin into the audience, then throwing himself into the drum set. The opera ended with offering of a bowl of wine and the resurrection of a teddy bear bunny. An opera rock indeed.

Couldn’t stay much longer after the concerts were done, so i packed up, gave my farewells to my friends in the Porto underground music scene and headed back home to indulge the holidays family rituals. Couple days later caught a plane back to Finland.

Demoscene is the root of all evil. Or if not the root of all evil, atleast it is the root of Enough Records. Two of our founders were active demosceners when we first decided to transform Enough Radio (our very own pirate online radio) into a label.

At the time i was part of a demoscene collective known as Calodox, it was through Calodox that i originally met Oliver ‘Genox‘ Studer. I was taking my first steps into programming in OpenGL and exploring Jeskola Buzz to do some experimental soundtracks to accomplish my demo ideas. Genox was part of the group and already had built himself a solid reputation as an electronic musician, he has been laidback beats and electro sounds for over 20 years now. We regularly swapped previews of new tracks to get some feedback and i ended up joining his netlabel NSE with other demoscene musicians such as nula, kaneel and tomaes. The label is defunct for nearly a decade now.

Genox is not only a musician but also a graphics designer and occasional programmer. He was actually the one responsible for our generic Enough Records covers.

After many years of sporadic nagging for an ep i could promote through Enough Records, he finally pulled through and sent me the Hourglass EP one year ago.

And what a great release that was. Here is a review to prove it:

“The recent case is a groundplan based upon diverse faced beats infiltrated and interfering with each other. Indeed, breaking off the ground from electronic pop-based drumming and trance-like brooding to more technical and near-abstract IDM cadences. In the higher layers of the concept can be found out decent atmospheric shimmerings and dusty dubbed-out channelizations. However, it is hard to map the average, cross-sectional area regarding all of this enterprise.”
– Recent music heroes

It’s been nearly 2 years since the idea of forming a blog to support Enough Records netaudio activism shaped up into a reality. Truth be said the past few months haven’t been very active. Some technical problems migrating to our own server and the usual writers inertia made things die out abit in here.

The netlabel in itself is still pushing out it’s regular bunch of new releases and activity on the social media sites, as you should know. Which means it’s time to bring the blog back into activity with some new posts! Expect updates soon.

For now, we just annouce our new Promo Material page, with information on how you can get your physical copy of our releases in case you are a reviewer, dj or event promoter.

This past weekend i went to Latvia to play at an underground noise festival called Kuucvaals. I met lots of nice people and had much fun, so i decided to write a party report about it! And while we are at it why not abuse this oportunity to educate some curious folks about the noise music genre and link to some releases of my netlabel Enough Records.

First you should know that i’m a Portuguese living in Finland. The idea to visit Latvia came to me when i was talking to a Finnish artist friend of mine called Nosfe. he was telling me he was scheduled to play a few gigs in the Baltics this Summer. Nosfe is an artist and performs on several noise projects, including the Enough Records release project Grey Park. I been a long time fan and producer of noise music. Sadly in Portugal the closest thing we have to a noise scene is the ocasional Industrial events which i always tried to support but usually focus more on electro-industrial and not so much on the more harsh post-industrial kind of sounds which i so much love and on occasion, produce and release at Enough.

What is Noise Music

Now if you don’t know much about the noise scene i can try to explain it abit for you even though i’m not really an expert. There are several different kinds and genres of noise, some are slotted as sub-genres of the so called post-industrial genre, a name that signifies what came after the industrial music scene.

If you don’t know what industrial genre means then just know that it is somewhat based on sampling common day materials and making music out of it. Playing music with junkyard or kitchen utensils. A specific label called Industrial Records focused heavily on this music and became a genre setting.

So Post-Industrial Music is music that took influences from those kind of sounds but drifted apart into it’s own sub-niche genres that are mixed with other influences or cultures. So for example when you mix ambient and industrial influences you now have ambient industrial music. And when you mix industrial with electronic music you get EBM – Electronic Body Music. If its extremly brutal and non rhythmical you call it Power Electronics. If it’s focused on distorted beats you call it rhythmic noise or powernoize.

Other genres of “noise music” that don’t fit into the post-industrial include some forms of glitch, breakcore, idm, cinematic and experimental. You can also find lots of influences from doom metal, death metal, sludge metal, dark ambient and drone scenes.

Kuucvaals Festival

But enough of genre definitions. Noise and experimental electronics is not everyone’s cup of tea, but i like it, so i contacted one of the organizers of Kuucvaals and asked him if i could also come and play. They were very happy to have more foreign projects involved but warned us of the underground conditions of it all.

The festival takes place in a farm in the middle of nowhere, actually abit close to the Lithuanian border i was told. You have to drive some 15 km in dirt road to get there. This farm has an old house that is getting slowly restored by the owners and huge barn where the concerts take place. Folks also bring their tents and just camp out in the fields around the barn. Curious locals from nearby farms occasionally show up to take a look at what the hell is happening.

It’s not a very large festival, only about 100 people maximum showed up, Latvia is not a very big country and this is a very specific niche genre. But word gets around and performing artists usually bring some friends along. In fact i believe probably half the attenders were artists performing at some point during the two days of the event. A total of 21 acts played at the festival.

While Riga was sunny hot, the weather at the partyplace 140km down South was pretty terrible. A heavy rainstorm on the first day probably scared some additional visitors from showing up. On the second day things werent as bad but still abit humid from the occasional shower drizzle. Plus the mosquitos made some nasty battlefields out of our legs. We still managed to have a great time.

The great part of the festival is the ambient around it. It’s a small scene so everyone more or less knows each other and there never were any problems of any sort. Dress code was as hectic as it gets. There were a few casualy dressed folks, but most of the attenders had the black clothes thing going in different variants. Your regular bunch of glowing cybers, some with military boots, other more purely goth. Some folks wearing farmer jeans, others with soccer t-shirts or extremly garish “gay and proud” pink t-shirts. Plenty of folks heavily drunk, others didn’t drink at all. All of them gathered around the bonfire and were not afraid to randomly go peek inside the barn and get some more of their heavy noise dosage.

Here is a snip youtube video of what it was like Nega @ Kuucvaals, performing a set somewhere in the lines of powernoize.

Gave an interview about Enough Records at Pete Cogle’s Podcast Factory. Check it out. Also, if you’re looking for our catalogue, it’s all available here free for download.

Free netlabel music may not have penetrated the orchestral hall, or been streamed in luxury hotels. But one purpose it has achieved– it has supplied a lot of fun music for people with open minds. For me, chiptune is a bit of an anomaly– why go back to primitive electronics, when it comes time to create songs? The resolution is lower– everything sounds gritty, and well, ’80′s– so– why?

In Rolemusic’s “Straw Field”, I believe I have found an answer to this question– sheerly for fun. There is something very entertaining about these pieces. They are not without complexity, but have absolutely no pretension.

It all reminds me of watching a friend’s young son huddled over a portable Mario game last year. My imagined question, “Why”, is met with the equally, if not more appealing response, “Why NOT”?

Are you a fan of chiptunes? Not sure what they are? Either way, definitely check this release out, it is a sheer pleasure.

Straw Fields at Archive.org

This is a response to a recent article titled Speaking Free, written by my friend Dylan Orchard, on the uncertainty of the direction and focus of the netaudio scene.

In respect to order and chaos

A scene or movement is always a dynamic entity, it forms itself out of people with different backgrounds and interests that atoned to a common goal or characteristic. It doesn’t mean they’ll all play by the same rules. It definitely never implied they shall all get along and share the same visions and values.

But this is a good thing. Diversity implies a greater ability to rapidly adapt to changes. Considering how fast technology evolves and how transient the human interest in new music can be, these characteristics bode well to the indie music scene. Which explains the exponential growth the netaudio scene has had and why so many models that have been prototyped first in the netaudio scene are only now getting adopted by the mainstream artists and indie label owners tired of the old models.

I don’t see the netaudio scene as having lost focus or a common ground at all. Just an ever-increasing expansion and sustained evolution and reanalysis, which every label and artist has to do for themselves and try things out to find their soft spot.

The audience

But one thing I do entirely concur with is that there is a lack of audience reach within the netlabel scene, and that we seem to cultivate a certain underlying fetishism for the introspective underground. Which is kind of ridiculous if you ask me since we don’t even know each other all that well and probably never will, since there are so many labels and artists out there. Yet we keep focusing on releasing more of the unknown to an unknown “cyberspace” audience. Casually ignoring the lack of feedback on new releases as a personal stance holding the flag on the democratization of music releasing.

Yeah, it’s a lot easier to put a new release out there these days. But you still have to build a reputation for yourself, get a network and promote the releases if you want to get anywhere beyond your circle of friends.

Free music is free

Amidst it all we have the freeness of it all, which, rightfully noted, has different meanings to different people, and for some they even change with time, i’m sure some folks can think of a few artists and netlabels who suddenly forgot their netaudio roots in a fleeting ephiphany that they might be able to achieve more notoriety if they renounce the cult of the free.

Guess they slightly ignored how many indie labels and artists have done the exact reverse path, but that’s subject matter for a whole other series of articles.

More important then the discussion of whose version of free is the most accurate and should be scribbled down on all our guidelines of standards and rules that only a few in our scene would actually abide to; is the subject of why should members of a scene atone to a single definition to begin with? Different people release in different ways, if they still have a download for free, it’s netaudio else it’s not. Each label and artist must follow their own path of figuring out what works best for them.

There are several views on whats free, some more legal than others. Some legalities more moral than others. But people will keep making, listening, promoting and distributing music regardless of all that. Monetization is a parallel paradigm. Netaudio simply removes that issue for the listener.

Free but not netaudio

Another interesting phenomena are artists, labels with albums that despite being free for download don’t like using the term netaudio applied to them. It has a negative connotation. As if the release being announced in those channels as opposed to the authors social network would suddenly get lost in a sea of unknown authors and confused for something which might or might not be mediocre.

I think this is symptomatic for the lack of trust in quality the general audience and media still has in netaudio releases, despite lots of very good efforts against that image having been made in the past few years. And this is serious food for thought which unsurprisingly ends up influencing netaudio artists and labels to try out “the dark side” once again.

[originally written for netlabelism.com]

Out of cold Russian Siberia Muhmood was formed as an experimental music project by Alexei Biryukoff. Mixing together visual influences from dark nature and abandoned civilization into sound bridging the dark ambient, drone, doom metal, experimental and noise.

Muhmood music is inspired by the foggy mornings in the forests and swamps, by the blasts of the wind blowing heated sand in the deserts, by the sound of cranky engines in the factories and roaring electricity in the huge power lines. Sound is like emotion, it ranges from rage and sorrow to love and joy, i am not here to impress you with some concept or exquisite musical terms, i hardly know why i am doing this – i just follow my instincts and enjoy myself making this noise…

We have two releases of Muhmood available free for download at Enough Records.

Muhmood – Tamara and Demon [enrmp174] – Cinematic dark ambient soundtrack of the 3D cartoon created By Nikolay Aladinskiy and Petr Bobryshev – St. Petersburg, Russia.

Виктор Iванiв & Muhmood – Rùt [enrmp216] – An EP collaboration with Виктор Iванiв (Victor Ivaniv) a futurist poet. They met in November 2007 when Victor came to Barnaul with a presentation of his book “A Glass Man and the Green Record”. At that time they decided to try to do 2 or 3 tracks to see what would come out. By June 2009 the four tracks EP is done. They continue to work on a long playing album that will include Victor’s poems and prose.