Stephen Mallinder - Tick Tick Tick - VINYL LP

Cabaret Voltaire co-founder Stephen Mallinder's second solo outing for Dais further distills his signature fusion of minimal synth, oblique wordplay, and Inchwonky discoInch into a riveting rhythm suite ripe for our Age of Escalation Tick Tick Tick. Channeling the temporal malaise of lockdown through a lusher palette of modular electronics and stereo strings, the songs embrace ambiguity and plasticity, loose systems of percolating circuitry and airless funk. Recorded across a handful of sessions at MemeTune Studios in Cornwall with frequent collaborator Benge (aka Ben Edwards), Mallinder cites no guiding aesthetic premise for the collection beyond Inchcowbell on every track, and entirely no reverb.InchFrom the first coiled cybernetic groove of opener InchContact,Inch the album's spatial dynamics are disorienting and asymmetrical, alternately cold and sensual, opiated and claustrophobic. But, throughout, Inchrhythm is the default, the bedrock, the building block - even the melodies are rhythmic.Inch Across 40-plus years of electronic musicianship, Mallinder's sense of timing and tempo has honed into a rare tier of mastery, limber and fluid but knotted with strange frictions. Shades of Detroit technoid industrial (Inchringdropp,Inch InchShock To The BodyInch) crossfade into no wavy punk-funk (InchGuernica Gallery,Inch InchGalaxy,Inch InchThe TrialInch), bad trip IDM (InchWastelandInch), and jittery vapor house (InchHushInch), at the threshold of modes both familiar and foreign.Lyrically the record is equally evasive, rich with allusions and associative linguistics, surveying liquid notions of societal noise, ecological ruin, art world pretension, and the trials of daily life. But the lack of fixed meaning remains Mallinder's main muse InchMusic should draw you in; lyrics should make you think. Most interpretation is misinterpretation.Inch This is music of countdowns a

Singer/songwriter Nancy Bryan brings forth a stunning debut of original songs touching on a range of emotions from elation to anguish. Her unique voice and vision is supported on this project by bassists Dan Schwartz (Sheryl Crow) and Jerry Scheff (Elvis Costello), drummers peter Erskine (Steely Dan) and Burleigh Drummond (Ambrosia) and Nancy's Husband - guitarist John Bryan.

Stephen Mallinder, co-founder and frontman of the iconic Cabaret Voltaire, has returned with his first solo album in over 35 years Um Dada. Laced with leftfield house and cut-up sound collages, Um Dada is a melding of energies that are an exercise in simplicity and motion. Sincere, playful realism that beckons your body to move, always reminding you to never take yourself too seriously without forfeiting your agency. While steering Cabaret Voltaire through the 1980's, Mallinder was already busy piecing together his first solo album entitled InchPow WowInch, which would help define Mallinder's interest in the more leftfield electro sounds shaping England at the time. It was this diverse and abstract hybrid that helped inspire generations of artists and musicians through steeping raw machine funk within the whimsical and absurdist ideology. Since the of InchPow WowInch in 1982, Mallinder continued his pioneering work with Cabaret Voltaire, as well as recording and touring with his electro projects Wrangler, Creep Show, Hey Rube, Kula, and Cobby & Mallinder. In addition to his non-stop schedule in electronic music, his professional life as a journalist, broadcaster, producer and now a professor of Digital Music & Sound Art at the University of Brighton, has lead Mallinder to a unique point in his career. Most in his position would be caught up in rosy retrospection, but Mallinder himself says, InchThere's too much digital finger-licking right now; every thought and desire at the turn of a dial... well a click of the mouse. And there's a giddy, false nostalgia about the analogue past. Sorry to burst your bubble but the truth of history is more mundane practical, pragmatic... Um Dada is about 'play' - cut and paste, lost words, twisted presets, voice collage, simple sounds - things that have been lost to technology's current determinism. Let the machines talk to each o