Since inception in 2020 Edinburgh’s Werra Foxma Records has quietly gone about curating some fine electronic music (back catalog here), with two of its more recent offerings from Morgen Wurde & Tis and autumna getting an igloo ‘view below.
Werra Foxma :: Curating fine electronic music
Hybrids of ambient, neo-classical and deep techno
Morgen Wurde & Tis :: Wacht — Morgen Wurde (J. Wolfgang Röttger) and Tis (Christian Schmidt) team up for Wacht, billed as ‘an ambient techno journey to surrender to the awe-inspiring mysticism of the forces of nature,’ topped off with the angelic vocals of Maria Estrella Aggabao, long-time musical companion of Morgen Wurde, whose ‘calling,’ no less, is described as ‘to create vocal sound forms beyond our conditioned experiences.’ Perhaps most familiar from recent Kompakt Pop Ambient episodes, Morgen Wurde has previous on Time Released Sound, Off Rec. and Frozen Light, while Tis has appeared under various guises on his own labels (formerly) Verform Records and Roo Records, current projects include Klordop (ambient techno) and Synthese (space music), under which alias he signs off Wacht with a transportive remix. With dark romantic devotion these Northern Germans ‘traverse vast spaces of wonder, driven by the stoic pulse of the eternal indifferent working of the forces’ with cinematic hybrids of ambient, neo-classical and deep techno evoking the ambivalence of nature with its majesty and menace, as alienated acoustic instruments elevate the mind part of intelligent dance’s mind-body equation to mystic heights.
Wacht breaks across the sound field in microvariative waves, symphonic grandeur, archaic drone and occult clangor fused with mesmeric beats, anchoring the unearthly, otherwise freeform, nature of it all with a sonic life of its own, with a range of sonorities from warm organic keys to dark field captures effectively blending ethereal and chaotic. Highlights: the brighter horizon of “Leuchtet,” with the solace of melody in its palette, “Gewahrt” arresting with a chiming drone sequence, and Maria Estrella’s harmonies floating over the percussive pulse of “Geweiht.” “Lasst Ios” also harnesses her voicings in creating a musical landscape of rich intensity, as does the final Synthese remix of the title track, offsetting light with shade as tones descend into uneasy terrain attended by a certain remote euphoria.
Wacht is available on Werra Foxma. [Bandcamp]
Uneasy-but-winsome ambient electronica
autumna :: Secret Radio — Belgium’s Emile Wauters tags his autumna ‘broken music for happy people,’ backed by the byline ‘Lost in worlds filled with melancholia and memories of summer sunbeams,’ with the wistful clincher ‘often dark but always with a soft shimmer or hint of diamond dust.’ Active since 2011, with 50+ s/r singles, EPs and albums ranging from lo-fi beatbox house to dusty nostalgic ambient, after going largely under the radar for the previous decade despite his prolific self-release schedule, autumna started work in summer 2021 on what was to become Secret Radio.
Last sighted here with Lutalica (Shimmering Moods), a similar blend of dusty beats, degraded pitch-shifted synth and loops, and cryptic vox captures distinguishes Secret Radio‘s uneasy-but-winsome ambient electronica mix of oneiric tonefloat and lo-fi production. The likes of “Cheat Codes” and doleful closer “Healer” beguile with their susurrating ambience, while familiar (to adepts) crumbly beats underpin the saturated imaginary OSTs of “Aeronautica (Healing),” “Fair Weathered (In Absentia)” and “Seas and Surveys” projected into your head cinema. ‘For me, radio has always been a form of time travel,’ muses Wauters, for whom the harnessing of memories of his gran’s vintage hi-fi system afforded the keynote sonic recall concept of radio-as-time-machine. And there’s mmx-mmxx, a 22-track 2-volume compilation of selected ambient works, as a primer to the best of autumna’s first decade, ranging from minimal lo-fi techno (“Venetian Blinds,” “DNA Kill (mute)” “Mare Nostrum”) to paranoid downtempo (“Eroiyu,” “Sanitas”) to beatless drift (“Rafferty Sings the Blues,” “Soul Dirt,” “The Unspoken Secrets That Divide Us”). With Secret Radio, it bears eloquent testimony to an unerring facility for conjuring up nostalgia and longing through musical dreamweaponry.
Secret Radio is available on Werra Foxma. [Bandcamp]
