Everyone at forwind is delighted to finally let go of the balloon and unleash Tokyo based producer ‘Tomonari Nozaki’s ‘North Palace’

He may not be the only artist to have forsaken the convenience of producing his music on a macbook but there haven't been many we have heard who have produced such a thoroughly captivating sound from their old reel to reel tape units and analogue equipment in recent times.

‘Tomo's' hugely immersive sound feels like opening an old dusty wooden box and hearing a frayed melancholy soundtrack to somewhere standing outside of time and the concerns of the world. It manages to be remote and indefinable in parts but has such spirit and warmth it's hard not to let yourself become completely absorbed.

Tomonari has been previously released under his UNKNOWNjp. alias on the Slovakian Label Soun Records. ‘North Palace’ sees him make his physical release debut, the first of hopefully many more.

It has been a real labour of love getting this album across the finish line with a huge amount of TLC going into the production, mastering, artwork and presentation.

There is an album sampler available to listen to now on soundcloud featuring excerpts from all of the albums tracks

We hope you enjoy the music as much as we enjoyed helping to get it out there.

Forwind 07 hits the virtual shelves today at boomkat, iTunes, Amazon, Juno and all the usual suspects.

Here are the details!

Forwind is very pleased to present one of the murkiest, most foreboding excursions on the label so far in ‘Vardøgr’ the debut long player from the Dublin trio Dentistry.

The word vardøgr is a Norwegian term defined as 'a premonitory sound or sight of a person before he arrives’. Like a reverse episode of déjà vu possibly, the title hints at many of the mysterious sensory anomalies that have confronted many of the great thinkers and spiritualists as they have contemplated the philosophical minefield of trying to understand human consciousness and perception. And it is this foggy terrain that gets explored over the albums five tracks.

Dentistry are Cian Walker, Patrick Fennelly and Jason Joomun -

Starting off as a virtual collaboration the project developed offline and organically until they were ready to enter the studio armed with instruments and electronics to record the material for their debut. Vardøgr is the end product of those sessions where the trio set about producing a work that hinged on extensive improvisation as well as more traditional stucture. They draw influence from a large number of sources from Cage to Ambarchi which is evidenced in the restrained and evocative nature of their beguiling debut.

Hope you get a chance to listen.

It may seem a little odd 'rereleasing' this album. Form is about 8 years old, has had numerous tracks from it put out on vinyl and various compilations and had a full long player printed as the first Forwind release back in 2008.

Back in 2008 when I went about compiling the album, I took all my finished pieces from the said period and tried to find a track order and listing. Many tracks did not make the cut. Others were shortened with various little edits and then mastered with what tools I had to hand (at the time using Studio 64 linux distro running just Jamin!). Not having the appropriate hardware or monitoring for mastering can be problematic particularly when the source material is a sampled and sequenced digital work. For this edition I have changed the version of Elastic (previously released on vinyl on Psychonavigation - PSY 002) from what was included in the 2008 edition. The reason being that during the recent mastering of Form at Cyclone it became apparent that the previously released mix was essentially distorted !

It seems that in my attempt to master Form on my own in 2008 I had obviously overlooked some glaring problems. Lesson learnt, never master your own output. A mastering engineer will immediately hear glaring issues that you won't.

This kind of audio in my opinion really needs warming up during the mastering which can be difficult to achieve without some nice and expensive analogue kit, something like this Manley for instance. Graham at Cyclone did a fantastic job here. The lower mids as usual were problematic but also I had over EQ'd the life out of it in the 2008 version. Graham managed to restore life to it and also give it a well needed polish.

Form is an album that was written between 2001-03 while I lived in Dublin and in my home town of Dungarvan. For majority of that time I was studying at the Music & Media technologies department at Trinity college Dublin where I was fortunate to be lectured by the likes of Donnacha Dennehey, Dermot Furlong and Roger Doyle. I would like to think the course material (such as electroacoustic composition and survey, Psychoacoustics, DSP) deeply influenced my output during this period. All instruments were originally sourced. Either recorded live or created from scratch from sampling or DSP. It features vocalists such as Laura Hyland from Clang Sayne and Suzanne Spratt whose previous choir experience adds a definite haunted feeling to track 4, In Between.

This remastered version finally has the feel to it that I was trying to achieve way back when. The artwork delivered by Paul Finn back in 2008 perfectly captured the aesthetic that we were after. At last, 8 years later, I can now sleep soundly knowing Form is actually finished. Anal, I know I know ...

Blindlight is the second release from London based electro-acoustic improvisers Sonnamble, again consisting of Conor Curran on electronics and software and Peter Marsh on stringed instruments.

The recording sessions took place not long after the release of the duo's well received debut Seven Months in E Minor and according to Curran it's 'a nice little closer to that chapter'. Again, the focus is on Marsh's lap steel guitar, whose drones, chords and twangs are coaxed into expansive ambient fuzziness or atomised into grains of noise by Curran's home-cooked software. But there's a spareness and a more pronounced spikiness to the music this time round; it's still immersive stuff, but more edgy. There's even some spoken word on the closing Society; a recording of Curran's uncle describing the state of Irish mental health in the last century. It's funnier than it sounds, but the combination with the dolorous swirls of processed lap steel give it a curious emotional resonance. The title is a corruption of the name of an installation piece by sculptor Antony Gormley, in which vistors were invited to wander around in a large, brightly lit glass tank full of thick grey fog. "I went two or three times", says Marsh. "It was a very weird, but kind of comforting experi- ence. You could hardly see your hand in front of your face. The music, when it's really working, gives me the same kind of feeling, so it seemed like a good title for what we'd done..." Opening track ‘Aphelion I’ was selected for the latest Wire Tapper compilation available with the August edition of the magazine.

Quick - drive by - zooming piece of news this!

FWD05 - Fourth Page's 'Along the Weak Rope' has been added to our ever growing label section on wage killing website supreme boomkat!