Stellate 1 marks the start of the Stellate Series: sounds gathered from the experimental frontiers and outer edges of electronic music. For every Stellate release four producers have each created two tracks. The eight resulting tracks highlight four unique minds and the disparate sounds that gravitate together at the periphery. SASTE001 brings together the visions of Lucy, Borful Tang, Perc and Kevin Gorman: yet as diverse as the forms and textures that they use are, something intangible provides a sense of unity. Stellate 1 taps into the place where electronic music-making began. It delves into a liminal Post-War atmosphere where the very fabric of society was being completely re-thought and composers dug into dissonance to explore the essence of making it new. Lucy references this Modernist legacy with track titles taken from Becketts bowler hat clad characters in Waiting For Godot, a play where nothing happens, twice. In Lucys hands Estragon and Vladimir are transported forwards to the point where Post-War becomes Post-Riot and where Post-Modernism trickles into nothing more that the Post- Millennium. The optimism of 2000 has faded giving way to a slump where we wait impatiently for Godot. Post post-prefixes youll find Borful Tang. Meet The Band and The Seduction Ends In Tears are somewhere between eyebrow raising and brow furrowing. Oblique to the nth degree and processed into another era the tracks are populated by haunting presences. Created entirely from the debris of the C20th, Borful Tang extracts droning, stuttering dialoguesand remembered conversations that are filled only with regrets. Distancing himself from his instinctively physical approach to music, Percs Paris and Molineux lay aside the mores of the dance floor. This is not music that you recognize, categorize and listen to passively: these tracks demand an audience with your inner ear. Perc becomes a sort of flaneur free to draw strained, eerie conclusions from his experience of the urban landscape. Paris is a bleak landscape of back streets and side alleys and Molineux sketches the fleeting reverberations of the avant-garde. Frequency Phase Parts I and II and Frequency Phase Part III refer to Steve Reichs late 1960s phasing experiments. Kevin Gorman is preoccupied with augmenting sounds, sounds that stem from the blissful utopia that the future promised. Elegant strings soundtrack the political ideals that nations are founded upon, only to be overridden by grating samples from a leader of the supposedly free world. His subtext, his call to make it new does not solely concern itself with aesthetic or musical structures, but also political agendas. The Stellate Series is boxed exquisitely in circular metallic tins which contains two transparent 10" vinyls. Each vinyl is separated by a typographic print on recycled paper. The Stellate releases also contain a hand-numbered artwork inlay by Oblivious Artefacts. The entire artwork is comprised of four parts which are divided between Stellate 1 to Stellate 4. Additionally every release contains a card with a unique download code. Each Stellate release is a strictly limited edition of 300. The entire Stellate Series was craftily mastered in Berlin at the Artefacts Mastering Studio.
