'Mentos Gulgendo (1)' is the Nowacka sisters' consuming Slip debut: a mercurial set for transfigured organ and voice, shaped to shudder, creep, or take flight. From the rough, anchored sound of a Unitra Estrada 207 AR organ, Antonina and Mila alchemise 6 nagging, fearful pieces, which alternate between burrowing, prickly beds of processed instrumental sound and more spacious sighs, buoyed up by dancing, full-blooded vocals. The Polish duo's careful ear for the grain of the organ - sometimes allowing it to sink in, more often urging, pressuring it onwards - makes for a magnetic, addictive listen. 'Mentos Gulgendo' is a new project by Antonina Nowacka and Mila Nowacka, who make possessed, hallucinatory sound and visuals as WIDT, most recently in a wild, unnerving collaboration with German producer Christoph De Babalon for Bocian in 2018. --- Music composed, performed and recorded by Antonina Nowacka and Mila Nowacka at the Family Allotments "Kaloria", using a Unitra Estrada 207 AR organ. Mastered by Filip Marcinkowski Artwork by Masia Debska --- Slip Imprint, 2020

  Eliza McCarthy plays 6 piano pieces by Mica Levi on ‘Slow Dark Green Murky Waterfall’. The pair’s collaboration has patiently cemented in the past three years, with McCarthy (winner of the 2013 British Contemporary Piano Competition) featuring on Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Pablo Larrain’s ‘Jackie’. Eliza has performed Mica's work at the Barbican, St John’s Smith Square, and on a 7” both shared with cellist Oliver Coates on Foom in 2017. ‘Remain Calm’, Levi's 2016 collaboration with Coates, is the composer's previous outing on Slip. The EP is bound by a sense of unreal poise: the elegant, blunt, low-lit, and gloopy seep into one another. The titles describe what the music is trying to emulate. Levi's idiosyncratic mix, and the care in McCarthy's playing, give ‘Slow Dark Green Murky Waterfall’ a sense of lived-in warmth.  --- Eliza McCarthy / piano --- Music by Mica Levi. Additional Mixing by Sam Slater. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Mica Levi and Eliza McCarthy. 

"'Pleasure Island' is British composer Tim Parkinson’s disquieting and joyous Slip debut: play time in end times. Titled after the Disney adaptation of ‘Paese dei balocchi’ (or the Land of Toys) in Carlo Collodi’s ‘The Adventures of Pinocchio’ (1883), 'Pleasure Island' is a metaphysical playground of organic and digital cohabitation, its inhabitants pacified by toys and comforts. Alongside Dawn Bothwell, Suze Whaites, Laurie Tompkins, and Francesca Fargion, Parkinson exerts an uncannily emotional pull from an unlikely but potent alliance of ultra-minimal aesthetics, dead-beat drums, junk electronics, and mechanised mantras. Voices are hemmed in by electronic sound. People buffeted around by machines. Words surrounded by garlands of digital interference. Time repackaged as countdown. Tim’s trash-opera ‘Time With People’ continues to be performed around the world, past champions of which include Object Collection, a.pe.ri.od.ic, Edges, and NEC, and he is a co-curator of London’s longstanding ‘Music We’d Like To Hear’ series. Despite decades of fiercely independent production, this is his only piece conceived of first and foremost as an album. --- Tim Parkinson / keyboards, stylophones, drums, percussion, midi, electronics, sounds, vocals Francesca Fargion / vocals on 'Happy Birthday' Dawn Bothwell / vocals Laurie Tompkins / vocals Suze Whaites / vocals --- Recorded in London Oct–Dec 2017 & Newcastle May 2018. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Rick Pushinsky.

"Yeah You's black-hearted return to Slip: poisonous, weaponised pop, spat out on the roam. Father-daughter Mykl Jaxn-Elvin Brandhi's defiantly other improvisations tangle up defouling sermons with ragged beats, gnashing bass, and ear-worm synths. Recorded in a black Renault Clio in Holland and Germany, and at Aurora, Budapest throughout early 2017, 'KRUTCH' is the 'You at a freshly terrifying apex, filtering the desperation of black metal through an unerring pop nous." “The  music  and  letting-go  part  of  it  is  already  sort  of  social  suicide  –  and  then  on  top  of  that  I’m  doing  it  with  my  dad.”  –  Elvin  Brandhi  interview  with  Tristan  Bath  for  the  Quietus  “...the  best  father/daughter  duo  sinceSerge  and  Charlotte...”  –  Boomkat --- Artwork by Elvin Brandhi. Mastered by Stephen Bishop.

"'Lost In Shadows' is American composer/performer Ashley Paul's bewitching Slip debut: an expansive, deeply personal excavation of recent motherhood, told through songs dissolving and re-crystallising at the threshold of free improvisation. At the LP's heart is Paul's mercurial multi-instrumental style, which renders the primal wails, clunks, and twangs of clarinet, saxophone, percussion, and guitar uncannily melodic, alchemised by frank, vulnerable vocals. The deft negotiation of the fragile and the coruscating evidenced on Paul's ‘Line The Clouds’ (2013) and ‘Heat Source’ (2014) has now reached a kind of hesitant sublime. Recorded over 3 weeks at a FUGA residency in Zaragoza, Spain in December 2016, 'Lost In Shadows' documents a cathartic outpouring; the first time Paul had been able to write since the birth of her daughter 11 months earlier. The record is completely influenced by "many hours spent awake at night in a dream like state of half consciousness, darkness and solitude; an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and exhaustion made light by a profound new love", with Paul's solo playing bolstered by additional baritone saxophone, cello, tuba, and percussion. This ensemble set-up, which premiered much of this work at 2017's Counterflows festival, gives the LP a fresh sense of luxuriousness, bounce, and rich possibility.'" — Artwork by Gayle Paul. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

'Ample Profanity' is composer Laurie Tompkins and cellist Oliver Coates' collaborative debut: coagulated gristle surfacing from a Beal, Brooklyn-brown, Ray V, Bangs, GAN, Rugs and Works acid bath. The EP collects 5 pieces composed by Laurie and then co-edited and performed with Olly. The former plays keys, tape player, and samples, the latter cello with effects. Both sing.  Here is grazed, contorted classicism, here post-binge hallucinations, here gunky funk.  "I met [Laurie] when I was 16, at school. I don’t know where along the way he’s found that he can make a piece out of flower pots and shouting, and it can be genuinely moving. With Laurie, there’s this thing with Netflix culture and tropes in the promotion of electronic dance music. Like, “you must all listen to footwork now” because they market that at you. Ample Profanity is all about awkward juxtapositions: bits of music from House Of Cards coupled with RP Boo. That’s the headspace he’s in and he’s trying to articulate these as cello rhythms. I find that really satisfying. It looks really spidery and architectural on the page. You’ve got to repeat it 17 times and then shout the next thing, so it’s absurdly difficult to play. To play it physically, the energy of playing it, that’s why I do it." - Oliver Coates, The Wire, September 2018. --- Laurie Tompkins / vocals, keys, tape player, samples Oliver Coates / vocals, cello, effects --- Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Laurie Tompkins and Suze Whaites.

'Ray' is Ashley Paul's bright, sensual return to Slip: a lifting, delighting suite of yearning winds, loose beats, and cocooning, humid bass coming together and falling apart as songs. The LP airs Paul's new trio, alongside bass clarinettist Yoni Silver and bassist Otto Willberg, who fatten out and shine light on her singularly intimate, multi-instrumental with mystery and grace. 2018's 'Lost In Shadows' wrote into the bewildering ecstasy of recent motherhood with a tingling resolve. On 'Ray' - recorded remotely during lockdown - Paul's deliciously hesitant songcraft is an outpouring and an anchor in freshly tumultuous times. Says Ashley: Over the past six months I've found myself needing music in a new way, a way of coping. I found again albums I had loved in the past, full of melody and humour, to cancel out the barrage of terrible news happening outside. I think this album is a reflection of that need. There is the playfulness of spending my days with our four year old, and the hours spent tending to plants in the garden and examining bugs, and also the pain of missing family and friends. It’s hard for me to fully comprehend the breadth of emotion I've felt recently but maybe this is a small window. The trio idea had been formulating in my head for months, and then lockdown happened. At first I was very disappointed and thought I'd be waiting forever to finally make it a reality, but time passed. I started working on a new album and could only hear it with these guys. We recorded remotely. I sent material in a variety of ways; written, aurally and verbal ideas/queues, sometimes with just a shell of a track and other times nearly completed. I wanted all our voices to be present, and to allow freedom in the parts for interpretation and improvisation. Maybe because we've all worked together in various situations and are friends, I’m not sure, but it came together naturally, magically and quickly. --- Ashley Paul - voice, alto saxophone, clarinet, guitar, percussion Yoni Silver - bass clarinet Otto Willberg - double bass Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi Painting by Gayle Paul Design by Ashley Paul --- Slip Records, 2020

Ralph Cumbers makes a very welcome return to Slip with the sweet drive and unguarded lyricism of 'Orezero': a smiling-through-the tears chaser to 2019's majestic '111 angelic MIDI cascade'. Says Clef: "'Orezero' is both the prequel and sequel to '111 Angelic MIDI Casacde' in that I'm not sure which ones is Wonderland and which one is through the Looking Glass. So it can stay unresolved as both and neither? Feels like a strange time to be releasing what might be the most joyous Bass Clef record. Certainly 'One Tree Island' and 'Heavy Lifting Light Wave' are two cuts of happiness, but the kind of happiness that acknowledges and incorporates all the unhappiness that came along the way. Other tracks are a more rarefied kind of joy I guess, I find myself stripping back layers on these tracks to an extent I never would have dreamed was possible for me. These tracks were recorded in 2019 over quite some time, although each track itself takes no more than 3-4 hours and are recorded live. Editing clears the clutter to reveal the intent, not always obvious at the time of recording. I was pushing myself, again, to focus on harmony, and melody, the two things I think I am worst at, rather than returning to rhythm and texture, the playgrounds I always felt most comfortable in. Instrument restrictions helped as always – most of the sounds heard are from two ROMplers, much-loathed relics of pre-computer music, loaded with largely un-tweakable samples of acoustic instruments, samples you have heard on a billion records, but hopefully stacked in new combinations this time around. Backed up with Microkorg, a resolutely and extremely popular, yet deeply uncool, digital synthesizer. The tracks here were originally intended for two different records (maybe that’s why the prequel/sequel feeling persists) but thanks to excellent old school A&R in the form of an evolving conversation with Laurie from Slip, together we eventually uncovered one record that I think manages to weave all these threads together. I hope it will bring some smiles to some people." 'Orezero' [SLP059] is available from October 2020 on cassette and/or download. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. 

"'111 angelic MIDI cascade' is Ralph Cumbers' exquisite Slip debut: a finely forged collection of joyous electronic music built to surge and heal. This is Cumbers' first deliberate Bass Clef album since 2012's 'Reeling Skullways' on Bristol institution Punch Drunk, and a forceful departure from the bubbling, rogue club 12"s since issued on The Trilogy Tapes, PAN, and Idle Hands. Drums are almost entirely absent, making way for a braiding of soaring machine melodies, and taut harmonic threads. To be clear: this is no ambient record. No drifty clouds, no cocoons, no sonic platitudes.Recorded in Rotterdam in August 2018, amidst an immersion in the history of clairaudience, scrying, and natural philosophy, '111' is a leap into pinpoint mysticism, with Bass Clef as happy alchemist." --- Written and Recorded by Bass Clef. Mastered by Stephen Bishop. 

"The  Godfather  of  Wild  Pop." "'Trouble  Number'  is  a  major  retrospective  of  four  decades  of  peerless,  visionary,  and  feral  production  from  Gwilly  Edmondez  -  the  dad  from  Yeah  You.  This  90  minute  package  cherry  picks  from  hundreds  upon  hundreds  of  hours  of  psychoanalysis  through  pop  waste,  performed  by  Gwilly  upon  himself  since  the  founding  of  his  '80s  outfit  Radioactive  Sparrow.  Bewildering  and  basically  incomparable  in  its  entirety,  'Trouble  Number'  mongrelises  strains  of  hip-hop,  black  metal,  folk,  power  balladry,  more  more  more,  with  a  properly  prophetic,  popwise  soul.    Pay  your  respects." Says  Gwilly: Gwilly  Edmondez  just  grew  as  a  character  project  in  the  mid-1980s,  offshoot  from  the  to’l-spon/non-com/pop-kak  invention-pool  that  was/is  Radioactive  Sparrow,  itself  founded  by  a  group  of  Bridgend  (13-year-old/non-voter)  elements  in  1980.  Gwilly  is  a  solo/collaborative  improvisation  that  started  out  making  fake,  unwritten  rock,  then  progressed  in  the  1990s  to  real  unaccompanied  rock,  before  settling  into  a  mode  of  practice  defined  by  sampling,  tapes  and  vocals.  Over  many  years,  Gwilly  has  struck  up  many  material  partnerships  and  misadventurist  associations  of,  with  the  likes  of  James  Joys,  Val  Persona,  Faye  MacCalman,  Karl  D’Silva,  Tobias  Illingworth,  Laura  Late-Girl,  b-cátt,  Odie  Ji  Ghast,  THF  Drenching,  Tony  Gage,  Richard  Bowers,  People  Like  Us...  But  in  the  end  none  more  so  than  Elvin  Brandhi.  ‘Gnarlage  of  Self’,  the  C30  album,  was  made  on  Newcastle’s  hottest  day  in  2017,  in  an  upstairs  room  in  Heaton,  recorded  by  Dario  Lozano  Thornton  with  Schoeps  MK2/MK8  pair  to  Sonodore  preamps  in  one  take  subsequently  edited  and  disorganized  by  Dario.  ‘Gwilly  Edmondez:  A  Retrospective  Mixtape  Made  Questionably  &  Unquestioningly  by  Himself’  started  out  as  a  kind  of  slapstick/slapdash  best  of...  but  quickly  became  its  own  entanglement  of  old  stuff,  new-but-unused  stuff  made  for  the  C30,  and  bits  of  recent  live  sets.  The  first  half,  side  one,  tries  to  bungle  blindly  into  the  nature  of  supplication,  confession  and  self-condemning  introspection  –  find the  self  then  kill  it;  side  two  starts  on  the  other  side  of  death  inhaling  wafts  of  cheap  air  freshener  as  a  means  to  hallucinate a personal  history  that  never  could’ve  happened  anyway,  before  scrambling  back  through  the  rear  end  of  personality  only  to  be  consigned  to  liturgical  palliatives  in  a  manner  carried  out  by  his  countless  forebears  of  the  cloth.  It  could  only  end with “Walken’s  Kiss”,  a  sardonically  pronounced  cliffhanger.  --- Music  & Artwork by Gwilly Edmondez. Mix and Edits by Dario Lozano Thornton and  Gwilly  Edmondez. 

'Merry Peers' is Brad Henkel & Yoshiko Klein’s mercurial, self-titled Slip debut: a vapour trail of lonesome, entwining half-song made tactile with a dubwise feel for space and bass. Using only trumpet, synth, a little voice and effects, Brad and Yoshiko channel sensual ambience, haptic glitch, and time-smudging melodic flights. Earthquake drones. A faint ringing in your ear. But a pervasive physicality, wryness and urgency underpins and unsettles 'Merry Peers'’ sumptuous surface. Hands and breath shape inhuman sounds, self-help slogans comfort desert winds, and the album’s stately passage is decisive, free of drift. Recorded and Mixed by Dan Peter Sundland. Mastered by Joe Talia. Artwork by Brian Henkel.

Slip are proud to announce Sleep Spindles, the debut full-length of Dublin-born, London-based composer Paul McGuire. McGuire’s fastidious pieces wrench the fizzes, crackles, and hums of acoustic instruments into towering swarms of sound. Sleep Spindles collects three of his most focussed, guttural works to date. On ‘Tampered’, the minute squeaks of Céline Papion’s cello are gathered in solid hunks; the microtonal guitar drones of ‘Marshes’ are part seduction, part dread; and ‘Sleep Spindles’ gleans an earthy poise from the skins of a simple percussion set-up. Sleep Spindles makes the nanoscopic speak with exquisite force, and carves out a defiant zone between the luxurious washes of ambient maestros like Tim Hecker, and the more rarified noise compositions of Helmut Lachenmann.

Competition makes a blue return to Slip with ‘Repetititive Music’: a sawn-off songbook of doting vocals and incisive, heart-ache instrumentals, carried with a soft swagger. Poised between insistence and tenderness, ‘Repetititive Music’ is an assured, dreamy successor to 2018’s ‘You turned into a painting’. As ever, there is Competition’s rare care and delight in the unadorned material of modern song. Chopped strings,keys, machines and speech are screwed with classical grace. A voice pines and frays as it circles. Beyond the cut and theloop something yearns and lingers. Craig Pollard (aka Competition) is a quietly pivotal figure in Newcastle’s musical underground, curating events as one half of the Wild Pop collective and operating across the city’s artist-led communities. A collection of Craig’s writing - ‘Inside A Gleaming Feeling’ - is forthcoming on Glasgow press The Grass is Green in the Fields For You. Artwork by Competition. Mastered by Phil Begg.

"'You Are Under Our Space Control' is firebrand US group Object Collection's inimitable Slip return: a utopian space-opera, a homing signal cast into an empty universe, a beacon for an aesthetically radical future. Drawing on space travel, transhumanism, astronautics and the resurrection of the dead, Kara Feely's texts rehearse a progressive politics through a total re-envisioning of everyday life. Travis Just's limber speech-song vocal parts are eerily and spasmodically FX'd, and navigate surprisingly glistening instrumentals - a headlong tangle and squelch of flexing 808s and metal objects, roboticised guitar, and unreal synthesis. YAUOSC's bubbling force belies its diverse, unruly underpinnings. The opera’s musical backbone is a drum-machine transcription of John Cage's 1951 piano solo 'Music Of Changes', a landmark of indeterminacy; its title grabbed from Cy Roth's sci-fi romp 'Fire Maidens From Outer Space' (1951); its texts inspired by Sun Ra and the Russian Cosmists’ poetics and philosophies, and interviews from real (and imagined) space travellers and astronomers. Object Collection charge these impulses with a burning, engrossing physicality. This is, above all, an LP of heaving, life-giving music, deep in the mess of futuristic fervour." Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Artwork by Frank Eickhoff. 

"'brace, brace' is Julia Reidy’s soaring Slip return: a dread-tinged incantation unfurling from breath-down-the-neck field recordings, auto-murmured voice, synthetic hum, and irrepressible guitar kinetics. Reidy’s signature 12-string playing - precise, burrowing, rhapsodic - dominates the LP's outer cuts, framing a plaintive electric centre. Blooms of arpeggiations and desolate strums re-inflect slow-moving pitch sequences; the music feels at once on fire and graceful, inevitable.Perhaps most surprising is how organic 'brace, brace'’s expanded palette feels. Reidy’s electronics are subtly eerie extensions, alien resonances of her playing, both embedding her instrument and making it somehow unreal. This strange smear of body and apparition is neatly nailed in Reidy’s sung-to-herself vocals, coaxed out and encroached upon by autotune Succeeding recent issues of her work by Feeding Tube and Room 40’s A Guide To Saints, 'brace, brace' is a definitive statement from a blazing, restless talent.The LP tours with visuals from Suze Whaites. Whaites’projection environment is built from the coruscant light sources and surface reflections with which her video footage is made, creating mutable vistas at once microscopic and panoramic, domestic and sublime." --- Mixed and recorded by Sam Slater. Mastered by Joe Talia. Artwork by Suze Whaites.

Dawning On is Australian, Berlin-based guitarist Julia Reidy’s Slip debut: a razor-sharp précis of pent-up, blazing melancholy on a lone 12-string guitar. Reidy’s playing is lucid and poised, teasing out elegant inflections from half-melodies, rugged strums, and curious tunings. Her compositions are lingering streams: barely-shackled attacks give way to introspective arpeggiations before resurging again, all spurred on by a yearning, nervous energy. With the album’s single-track A-side clocking in at just under half-an-hour, this is by some measure Julia’s most comprehensive solo statement to date, and a luxurious listen which revels in the 12-string’s generous resonance. For our money, it’s up there with the finest work of her fellow Aussies The Necks, Anthony Pateras, and Jon Rose.

'Solo' [SLP016] is the Slip debut of Berlin-based composer Andreas Dzialocha: a collection of lilting electric bass melodies refracted through a tangled network of live computer processing. 'Solo'‘s ruptured nocturnes are intimate duets between instrument and machine, with Dzialocha eloquently responding to randomised pulsing reverbs, filters, and compressors, which snatch his delicate motifs into virtual space in real time. Andreas studied art history, musicology, and computer science, and is founder and director of Berlin-based Serenus Zeitblom Oktett, and upstart publishing platform BLATT 3000. 'Solo' interactive website: solo.andreasdzialocha.com ---Mastered by Hannes Fritsch. Artwork by Rian Treanor

“’Got Gills?' [SLP015] is the exigent Slip debut of Manchester-based Otto Willberg, and a commanding introduction to the double bassist’s assertive, heady style. This unhinged collection of live acoustic takes (no amps, no overdubs) marries rasping grit and mesmeric repetition, and announces the arrival of a precocious instrumental talent.  Otto is a double bass player living in Manchester, interested in improvisation, experimental and contemporary music. He is a core component of caustic psych outfit Desmadrados Soldados De Ventura, and of Manchester's ever-blooming underground.”