APR Year In Review: Official Releases
Yesterday, we ran through a year of mixes, videos and one-off audio artifacts from our stable of artists and today we’ve got a summation of all that we’ve released through official channels over the past 12 months. Starting with SHALT’s Acheron and ending with the British producer’s Inertia, these are the releases we poured our heart and soul into and that have garnered some nice placements on year end lists over the past week and a half or so. Yesterday, Resident Advisor named LOFT’s “Heffalump” into the top ten of their annual best tracks feature and the previous week the online magazine featured APR among their top 20 labels of the year. Mixmag was also kind enough to slot us in among their top ten favorite labels of 2016, referring to our well executed “plan of attack.”
That comment felt especially on point considering the timing of the label and the feeling we had going into the year. In short, we’ve wanted to start a record label for around five years now, but never felt that we had a coherent enough vision. The timing never quite felt right until we had Acheron in hand really and fortunately everything just sort of unfolded from there. We’ve always had a bit of antipathy towards labels that function as pit stops for artists so the opportunity to build relationships with SHALT, Chants, Nunu, Exit Sense and LOFT was an absolute joy this year. We’ll be back with three projects in the first few months of the year, one bootleg package, one official remix project and one follow-up to one of 2016’s artist debuts. As always, keep an eye on this space, as well our label website and our Bandcamp. Hit the jump for details, buy/streaming links and press bits for all seven of our 2016 releases.
SHALT – Acheron
APR101
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“Like any good sci-fi, lots of Acheron is mind-bending, even when it’s dealing with familiar concepts…This is an innovative debut with an appetite for destruction.” – Resident Advisor
“Shalt throws some vital grit in the machine with a 2nd EP of caustically textured club music abstractions inspired by Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy.” – Boomkat
Chants – The Zookeeper
APR102
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“The Zookeeper EP is infused with energy and dramatic tension that begins as early as in the first bars of “Silencer Magpie” and lets up only as the second and last “Sussurus” track disintegrates slowly into silence.” – Decoder
“The Zookeeper is an uneven, often hectic ride, but like most of what Astral Plane touches, it’s never boring.” – Resident Advisor
Nunu – Mind Body Dialogue
APR103
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“An accomplished, exploratory release, staking out new ground in the spaces across and between the internet and the club, the human and the non-human.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
“It’s a sensational exercise in sparking up your 3D proprioceptions, precisely attacking from every viable angle across six skeletal, post-human structures perfused by computerised wraiths, BM spirits and glitching holographic soulbots.” – Boomkat
Exit Sense – Amor 107.5
APR005
Bandcamp | Soundcloud
“By conflating atonality, dissonance, and melody, Amor 107.5 generates moments of paranoia, beauty, melancholy, and pain, charting the emotional and affective topographies of minoritarian becoming.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
SHALT – Acheron Remixed
APR104
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“The coarse textures and jagged rhythms of Acheron provide each remixer with something to really sink their digital fangs into, whether its Moro with the dramatic slice ’n dice dynamics applied to Unconfined, M.E.S.H. with a masterful dissection and cybersoul extraction performed on Acheron itself, or Kid Simpl’s nose-bleed hypertrance re-boost of Unconfined.” – Boomkat
LOFT – Turbulent Dynamics
APR105
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“It pairs next-level sound design with mind-fuck feats of rhythm, weaving a tapestry of interlocking grooves that shift and phase subtly.” – Resident Advisor
“If art is a model of life, then LOFT’s Turbulent Dynamics is a model of the dancefloor. It’s music that tiptoes around club music, bends its form, observes the dancefloor as an event, a space to explored, experimented with.” – Tiny Mix Tapes
SHALT – Inertia
APR106
Bandcamp | Boomkat | iTunes | Soundcloud | Spotify
“Flitting between the dancefloor and something far wider, SHALT’s vision is on full display throughout with a sensory assault of harsh electronics, hook-like riffs and knife’s edge sound design.” – Hyponik
The Astral Plane 