light-years: ly006
Ludwig Wandinger - Is Peace Wild?
Pre-order Is Peace Wild?
An album of hypnagogic nocturnes that relentlessly searches for a sense of calm in the great unknown, 'Is Peace Wild?' is German producer, drummer and visual artist Ludwig Wandinger's upcoming release on light-years. He dreamt it up while unpacking the breakdown of a long relationship, working in hotel rooms during the downtime between a series of chaotic live shows. To help empty his mind, Wandinger developed a suite of soulful reflections that prioritize harmony over rhythm and clarity over trivial complexity - music that confronts the eternal duality of romance and tragedy. Almost beatless and consistently sublime, 'Is Peace Wild?' is punctuated by hypnotic lyrical contributions from multi-disciplinary artist, poet and activist Yves B. Golden and producer and vocalist Evita Manji, both of whom bless the album with indispensable friendship and familiarity. "It's almost as if they were telling me a good night story," says Wandinger.
With a series of albums and EPs under his belt already, Wandinger is a tireless solo artist and a prolific collaborator. He's released material for Orange Milk, Gin&Platonic, Creamcake, 3XL, and he worked alongside artists such as Evita Manji, Sara Persico, Grischa Lichtenberger and Brodinski. 'Is Peace Wild?' though emerges as Wandinger’s most personal work to date. The title track opens the album, and Golden's voice breathes softly over Wandinger's warm, lulling arpeggios. "Balloons and birds delight in the flow of air between rooms," she murmurs, floating her surreal phrases in a tranquil pool of pitch-skewed pads and chiming, music box synths. But this airiness doesn't last long: on the noisy, sombre 'Vien', Wandinger interrupts his elegiac, organ-like synths with metallic crashes and distorted, rasping bass, weaving twinkling, pensive notes into the spaces in-between. The oscillation between darkness and light is remarkably even-handed, capturing the aching sense of longing - or "Sehnsucht" - that's at the core of German Romanticism. And it's even more evident on 'Xhausted Form', one of the album's heaviest tracks. Unfolding initially with affecting, sacred chords, the serenity is challenged by eerie, dissonant crunches and unsettling feedback shrieks, yet the spark of romance, in all of its intricacy, never diminishes.
Meanwhile, the album's illusory qualities are fully dilated on 'Fire'. Manji's hypnotic freestyle was recorded in a single take as they were lying in bed on the verge of falling asleep, and provides a quiescent counterpoint to Wandinger's muted trance vibrations. "The world is on fire drowning in its own fluids," they slur into the abyss, vocalizing playfully while Wandinger freezes the sentiment in vanishing 4/4 thuds and dissociated processes. This makes the baroque 'Overlife' and the noisy 'Eternal Image' all the more dynamic. On the latter, Wandinger creates a noisy, apocalyptic atmosphere for Golden's sardonic words, cooling his euphoric synths with hissing white noise and burnished cybernetic textures. "They are afraid of loud noises," Golden mouthes. "Bodies like mine are made for turbulence."
Open-ended and tangled with emotional paradoxes, 'Is Peace Wild?' can be interpreted in many different ways. Wandinger's own serenity is personal, but laying himself bare, he provides listeners with a cracked mirror to consider their unique patchwork of conundrums.
CREDITS
Ludwig Wandinger - Is Peace Wild?
Pre-order Is Peace Wild?
An album of hypnagogic nocturnes that relentlessly searches for a sense of calm in the great unknown, 'Is Peace Wild?' is German producer, drummer and visual artist Ludwig Wandinger's upcoming release on light-years. He dreamt it up while unpacking the breakdown of a long relationship, working in hotel rooms during the downtime between a series of chaotic live shows. To help empty his mind, Wandinger developed a suite of soulful reflections that prioritize harmony over rhythm and clarity over trivial complexity - music that confronts the eternal duality of romance and tragedy. Almost beatless and consistently sublime, 'Is Peace Wild?' is punctuated by hypnotic lyrical contributions from multi-disciplinary artist, poet and activist Yves B. Golden and producer and vocalist Evita Manji, both of whom bless the album with indispensable friendship and familiarity. "It's almost as if they were telling me a good night story," says Wandinger.
With a series of albums and EPs under his belt already, Wandinger is a tireless solo artist and a prolific collaborator. He's released material for Orange Milk, Gin&Platonic, Creamcake, 3XL, and he worked alongside artists such as Evita Manji, Sara Persico, Grischa Lichtenberger and Brodinski. 'Is Peace Wild?' though emerges as Wandinger’s most personal work to date. The title track opens the album, and Golden's voice breathes softly over Wandinger's warm, lulling arpeggios. "Balloons and birds delight in the flow of air between rooms," she murmurs, floating her surreal phrases in a tranquil pool of pitch-skewed pads and chiming, music box synths. But this airiness doesn't last long: on the noisy, sombre 'Vien', Wandinger interrupts his elegiac, organ-like synths with metallic crashes and distorted, rasping bass, weaving twinkling, pensive notes into the spaces in-between. The oscillation between darkness and light is remarkably even-handed, capturing the aching sense of longing - or "Sehnsucht" - that's at the core of German Romanticism. And it's even more evident on 'Xhausted Form', one of the album's heaviest tracks. Unfolding initially with affecting, sacred chords, the serenity is challenged by eerie, dissonant crunches and unsettling feedback shrieks, yet the spark of romance, in all of its intricacy, never diminishes.
Meanwhile, the album's illusory qualities are fully dilated on 'Fire'. Manji's hypnotic freestyle was recorded in a single take as they were lying in bed on the verge of falling asleep, and provides a quiescent counterpoint to Wandinger's muted trance vibrations. "The world is on fire drowning in its own fluids," they slur into the abyss, vocalizing playfully while Wandinger freezes the sentiment in vanishing 4/4 thuds and dissociated processes. This makes the baroque 'Overlife' and the noisy 'Eternal Image' all the more dynamic. On the latter, Wandinger creates a noisy, apocalyptic atmosphere for Golden's sardonic words, cooling his euphoric synths with hissing white noise and burnished cybernetic textures. "They are afraid of loud noises," Golden mouthes. "Bodies like mine are made for turbulence."
Open-ended and tangled with emotional paradoxes, 'Is Peace Wild?' can be interpreted in many different ways. Wandinger's own serenity is personal, but laying himself bare, he provides listeners with a cracked mirror to consider their unique patchwork of conundrums.
CREDITS
When the world's chatter is hushed to a whisper and emptiness replaces clutter, time falls away completely, exposing a vast, open canvas for the imagination fill with reflection, contemplation and abstraction. On their first collaborative album, released via Caterina Barbieri's light-years label, Grand River and Abul Mogard gaze longingly into the abyss, capturing atemporality, splendour and tranquility with confident, impressionistic sonic strokes. Dynamic and poignant, 'In uno spazio immenso' balances on a knife-edge between booming, operatic grandeur and soft- focus simplicity, casting as much light on the subtle outlines and illusory rhythms as it does its dense, almost overpowering textures.
Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, has been evolving her unique musical language since she released 'Crescente' on Donato Dozzy and Neel's Spazio Disponibile imprint in 2017. A trained linguist, she uses her instrumentation and advanced processes to challenge cultural perceptions, portraying emotions and moods rather than fixed, visual images. Abul Mogard meanwhile is just one of veteran Italian producer Guido Zen's many aliases, and over a series of acclaimed albums for labels like Ecstatic, Houndstooth and VCO, he's muddled fiction with stark reality, shaking kosmische synth fantasies into post- industrial ambience and blissful shoegaze memories.
Working together, Portioli and Zen find unity in intensity, freezing their discrete concepts and techniques into a glacial emotional expanse. On opening track 'Dissolvi', they peer out hand-in- hand over a colossal, reverberant landscape, conducting booming basses, evaporating voices and brassy synthetic swells that pick out the formidable topography. Beatless but not without rhythm, the composition moves at its own pace, twisting time and form to suggest the duo's obliquely hypnagogic narrative. And with each action, there's inevitably a reaction: 'Frantumi di luce' is a hushed refraction that simmers with intrigue, decorating its subtle, flickering pulse and dazzling rays of thoughtful ambience, while 'Altrove, lontano' transports listeners into a different locale entirely, cloistering its meditative mood with angelic choral echoes and evocative strings.
The album's most devastating track, 'Archi' is an apex of sorts, a collision of widescreen electroid oscillations and overdriven drones that careens into a grinding industrial beat, and 'Sulle barcane' is its serene inverse, a breathy exhalation fashioned from cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads. But 'In uno spazio immenso' isn't a story about Portioli and Zen, exactly, it's an invitation to listen to an inner voice that's different for each listener. Space is whatever we want it to be, and how we decide to fill it is a choice that's dependent on the depth of the imagination.
Berlin-based Dutch-Italian composer and sound designer Aimée Portioli, aka Grand River, has been evolving her unique musical language since she released 'Crescente' on Donato Dozzy and Neel's Spazio Disponibile imprint in 2017. A trained linguist, she uses her instrumentation and advanced processes to challenge cultural perceptions, portraying emotions and moods rather than fixed, visual images. Abul Mogard meanwhile is just one of veteran Italian producer Guido Zen's many aliases, and over a series of acclaimed albums for labels like Ecstatic, Houndstooth and VCO, he's muddled fiction with stark reality, shaking kosmische synth fantasies into post- industrial ambience and blissful shoegaze memories.
Working together, Portioli and Zen find unity in intensity, freezing their discrete concepts and techniques into a glacial emotional expanse. On opening track 'Dissolvi', they peer out hand-in- hand over a colossal, reverberant landscape, conducting booming basses, evaporating voices and brassy synthetic swells that pick out the formidable topography. Beatless but not without rhythm, the composition moves at its own pace, twisting time and form to suggest the duo's obliquely hypnagogic narrative. And with each action, there's inevitably a reaction: 'Frantumi di luce' is a hushed refraction that simmers with intrigue, decorating its subtle, flickering pulse and dazzling rays of thoughtful ambience, while 'Altrove, lontano' transports listeners into a different locale entirely, cloistering its meditative mood with angelic choral echoes and evocative strings.
The album's most devastating track, 'Archi' is an apex of sorts, a collision of widescreen electroid oscillations and overdriven drones that careens into a grinding industrial beat, and 'Sulle barcane' is its serene inverse, a breathy exhalation fashioned from cryptic environmental recordings, static washes and weightless pads. But 'In uno spazio immenso' isn't a story about Portioli and Zen, exactly, it's an invitation to listen to an inner voice that's different for each listener. Space is whatever we want it to be, and how we decide to fill it is a choice that's dependent on the depth of the imagination.
If there's one specific component that grounds 'Sky Flesh', it's focus. Italian musician and sound designer Marta De Pascalis flexed her technical muscle on 2020's 'Sonus Ruinae', layering various sounds and processes in an attempt to touch the sublime. In contrast, 'Sky Flesh' is a single thought, composed using just one instrument: the Yamaha CS-60. A slimmed-down sibling to the gargantuan CS-80 - the analog synthesizer used by Vangelis to create his iconic 'Blade Runner' score - the CS-60 was released in 1977, a few years before the MIDI protocol was introduced to help standardize production methods. MIDI would change the electronic music landscape completely, offering a level of control that De Pascalis consciously relinquishes, preferring to highlight expressiveness and timbre, elements more readily associated with acoustic instruments. The album arrives as much of the wider experimental scene busies itself with algorithmic composition and AI-assisted modeling; De Pascalis chooses to work instead like an organologist, harnessing the CS-60's mercurial magic to suggest deeper truths about our evolving relationship with machines.
Currently based in Berlin, De Pascalis grew up in Rome, where she was surrounded by atrophied ruins that piqued her interest in decay and memory. Over her last three albums, she used tape loops and advanced synthesizer techniques to create a unique sound world that's guided by her musical philosophy, rather than a specific aesthetic. As she's developed her technique and confidence, her music has become even more idiosyncratic, and at this stage in her career she's stripped her sound down to its core elements, focusing on emotion, narrative and mystery. Using timbres that recall a time when electronic music still waved towards the future, De Pascalis' melodic content is rooted in early and Renaissance music, almost cleaving it from history entirely. Fittingly, 'Sky Flesh' is released on acclaimed Italian composer Caterina Barbieri's burgeoning light-years label, the ideal platform for her labyrinthine, cosmic vignettes.
De Pascalis introduces us to the album with a triptych that establishes her sonic landscape immediately. On 'voXCS60x', 'The Shapes We Buried' and 'Blue to Blue', she presents the CS-60 in all its malleable glory, running its serrated, ring-modulated oscillations through booming reverb and reducing them to vapors. Despite not working with MIDI sequencing, De Pascalis exerts a remarkable level of command, bending her compositions into abstract shapes without sacrificing their evocative earworms. It's an almost ritualistic process that centers a musician who's not only in dialog with technology but with the cosmos itself, channeling its puzzles through her machines. This soul-searching is most evident on 'Yueqin', a dreamily ornate, moonlit composition that breathes through filigree melodic flourishes and triumphant fanfares, signaling a distant romance in the heavens.
De Pascalis takes a brief detour on 'Commas Light' and 'Cut Off Horizon', investigating tonality in miniature and coaxing expression out of her delirious runs of notes with uncommon ease. It makes the conclusion of 'Làsciati' and 'Equal to no Weight' hit that much harder, the former a dissonant dance into psychedelia and the latter an almost ten-minute cloud of obscured harmony. With all traces of the CS-60's sound humbled by tides of noise, it's an apt finale, climaxing with suggestive echoes that pointedly disappear into silence. With 'Sky Flesh', De Pascalis doesn't freeze time, but expands its reach, offering a fresh perspective on cosmic music that's steeped in riddles and wonder.
Currently based in Berlin, De Pascalis grew up in Rome, where she was surrounded by atrophied ruins that piqued her interest in decay and memory. Over her last three albums, she used tape loops and advanced synthesizer techniques to create a unique sound world that's guided by her musical philosophy, rather than a specific aesthetic. As she's developed her technique and confidence, her music has become even more idiosyncratic, and at this stage in her career she's stripped her sound down to its core elements, focusing on emotion, narrative and mystery. Using timbres that recall a time when electronic music still waved towards the future, De Pascalis' melodic content is rooted in early and Renaissance music, almost cleaving it from history entirely. Fittingly, 'Sky Flesh' is released on acclaimed Italian composer Caterina Barbieri's burgeoning light-years label, the ideal platform for her labyrinthine, cosmic vignettes.
De Pascalis introduces us to the album with a triptych that establishes her sonic landscape immediately. On 'voXCS60x', 'The Shapes We Buried' and 'Blue to Blue', she presents the CS-60 in all its malleable glory, running its serrated, ring-modulated oscillations through booming reverb and reducing them to vapors. Despite not working with MIDI sequencing, De Pascalis exerts a remarkable level of command, bending her compositions into abstract shapes without sacrificing their evocative earworms. It's an almost ritualistic process that centers a musician who's not only in dialog with technology but with the cosmos itself, channeling its puzzles through her machines. This soul-searching is most evident on 'Yueqin', a dreamily ornate, moonlit composition that breathes through filigree melodic flourishes and triumphant fanfares, signaling a distant romance in the heavens.
De Pascalis takes a brief detour on 'Commas Light' and 'Cut Off Horizon', investigating tonality in miniature and coaxing expression out of her delirious runs of notes with uncommon ease. It makes the conclusion of 'Làsciati' and 'Equal to no Weight' hit that much harder, the former a dissonant dance into psychedelia and the latter an almost ten-minute cloud of obscured harmony. With all traces of the CS-60's sound humbled by tides of noise, it's an apt finale, climaxing with suggestive echoes that pointedly disappear into silence. With 'Sky Flesh', De Pascalis doesn't freeze time, but expands its reach, offering a fresh perspective on cosmic music that's steeped in riddles and wonder.
Written, produced and mixed by Marta De Pascalis
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi
Photography by George Nebieridze
Design by Nicola Tirabasso
Italian composer Caterina Barbieri has spent the best part of a decade breaking apart the rigid structures of electronic music, using advanced, idiosyncratic techniques to build bridges between academic experimental, dance and pop landscapes. Her breakthrough moment came in 2017 with the Important Records-released "Patterns of Consciousness", a confident fusion of analogue synthesis and algorithmic compositional methodology that defined her unique voice. And when she followed it with "Ecstatic Computation" on the legendary Editions Mego label in 2019, wide acclaim ensued, with critics praising its potent fusion of minimalism and trance-inducing synth experimentation. Pitchfork has described her music as "a mind-altering journey" and "a dreamachine for the ears".
Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini.
"Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint with an exclusive new track, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show.
If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave.
The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.
Since then Barbieri has worked hard to subvert expectations at every turn, offering an eccentric spin on the remix album with "Fantas Variations" - a selection of collaborations and reworks from friends and inspirations like Kali Malone, Jay Mitta, Evelyn Saylor and Kara-Lis Coverdale - and developing a modish articulation on last year's poetic and densely layered "Spirit Exit". Described by NPR as “deeply psychedelic and, by extension, subversive," the album was more than just a selection of tracks; it launched her own light-years label and arrived alongside an ambitious live experience that developed her philosophy in multiple dimensions, bringing in additional voices like Bendik Giske, Nkisi and Lyra Pramuk and bespoke visuals from Marcel Weber and Ruben Spini.
"Myuthafoo" was written at the same time as "Ecstatic Computation", which Barbieri regards as a sister album. Both albums are based on creative sequencing processes that playfully unravel Barbieri's deep-rooted interest in time, space, memory and emotion. And since she was set to re-release "Ecstatic Computation" on her own light-years imprint with an exclusive new track, it made sense to accompany that album with this intimately entangled set of unreleased recordings. At the time, Barbieri had been touring excessively and her process began to shift in response to that nomadic, interactive energy. Using the Orthogonal ER-101 modular sequencer, Barbieri manually programed patterns into the device and fed them into her arsenal of noise generators, trialling different combinations at each show.
If an idea worked well in the live environment, she would put it to one side, letting longer pieces breathe and transform as they sprung to life and developed organically. It's a process she relates to her interest in cosmogony, the study of the origins of the universe; her music is rooted in the limitations of a small number of options that branch out into a much larger structure, eventually reaching towards an open-ended cosmos of possibility. From 'Math of You', it's clear that the sounds are grounded in a similar sonic philosophy; blipping synth sequences nudge alongside each other harmonically, disrupting trance's addicting euphoria with filigree polyrhythmic pulses. Like 'Fantas' before it, the track is focused around emotionally affecting repeating phrases, but a closer examination reveals hidden intricacies as these phrases flicker like illusions, dissolving and dissipating as they snake and weave.
The album's title track is its most generous and most tender, blunting Barbieri's usually razor-sharp sequences into rubbery möbius strips that twist romantically, bending back on each other. It gazes at the stars from an atemporal vantage point, relying on synapse-popping psychedelic logic as well as established physics. 'Sufyosowirl' meanwhile is rigorous and rhythmic, as melodically charged as pop music and as soaring as Jean-Michel Jarre's lavish stadium electronics. Closing track 'Swirls of You' encases Barbieri's celestial sequences in gaseous vapors, allowing the music to ascend slowly and purposefully until it flickers and fades to nothing. Barbieri's music sounds as if it has a life of its own, endlessly expanding and transmuting until it's able to develop its own rules and gestures. "Myuthafoo" teases an ecosystem where technology and biology are intertwined, and where the past, present and future are part of the same essential narrative.
Three years after the original release date of Caterina Barbieri’s career defining album Ecstatic Computation on Editions Mego, the Italian artist reissues the record on her newly found own label light-years. The re-issue features an unreleased track available as digital download as well as a beautifully reworked version of the original cover art.
Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.
Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.
Ecstatic Computation reissue on light-years is now available for pre-order as LP (black and silver), CD and digital.
Ecstatic Computation revolves around the creative use of complex sequencing techniques and pattern-based operations to explore the artefacts of human perception and memory processes by ultimately inducing a sense of ecstasy and contemplation. Computation is turned from being a formal, automatic writing technique into a creative, psychedelic practice to generate temporal hallucinations. A state of trance and wonder where the perception of time is distorted and challenged.
Equally nervous and ecstatic, the fast permutation of patterns can create a state where time stands still whilst simultaneously being in motion. Is this propulsive music moving forward or backward? As long as the perception of the present is constantly enhanced and refreshed in an endless sense of loss, re-discovery and the search for self-orientation this question lies mute aside the thrilling and perplexing moment of the matter at hand.
Ecstatic Computation reissue on light-years is now available for pre-order as LP (black and silver), CD and digital.
