Lightarmour Editions

BANDCAMP FRIDAY - 25% OFF ALL VINYL & DIGITAL

Bandcamp Fridays means Bandcamp waives their revenue share of all sales so that it all goes straight to the label & artists. Use the code below to get 25% off any vinyl or digital releases, running from now to Saturday the 2nd (Midnight UTC). Current catalogue covers New Wave / Post-Punk / Industrial / Dark Ambient IDM / Doom Metal / Synth Punk / Neo-Classical Drone / EBM / Post-Industrial Soul / IDM BreakCore / Power Noise / Techno Noir….

Code: fridaylight25
Link: https://lightarmoureditions.bandcamp.com

In Lightarmour We Trust

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Lightarmour Editions Lightarmour Editions is a Music Label inspired by an underlying spirit rather than any specific genre.

LIGHTARMOUR EDITIONS MOMENTS #5 - The Brutalist Collage of Life & Skinny Puppy Incisions…

As a lover of all things musically edgy and adventurous, coming across Skinny Puppy’s Mind The Perpetual In*******se and (later) Cleanse Fold and Manipulate albums was a humbling and exhilarating moment; the cohesive sum of the Visual / Thematic / Musical / & Vocal aesthetic was an emotional depth charge and an instant teleportation to another planet. As for so many others, the grandiose yet feral vibe felt like home; the very human language of pain resonated meaningfully, nail on the head - especially thru the signature combination of hurt, disgust and rage conveyed in Nivek Ogre’s stream-of-consciounsess words & vocals. In fact, Nivek Ogre’s poignant, tongue-twisting wordplay was always one of the elements that elevated SP above the Industrial-by-numbers conveyor belt.

The Art of Hardware Sampling had become a significant part of the language of many underground music genres, and Skinny Puppy were masters of it (along with one of their early influences and studio collaborators - Australia’s Severed Heads (Tom Ellard). As alluded to in the album title of Cleanse Fold And Manipulate, Dwayne Goettel and Cevin Key operated as audio editors and reshapers, snatching sound glyphs from the collage of life and recombining to form entirely new abstracted and brutalist insights. Samples as rhythm & drums, samples as textures, dialogue, effects, stings & transitions, atmosphere…everything was put under the editing knife towards SP’s clinical Dark-Futurist punch. As is well known, one of the main sources for the sound bites was a connoisseur’s array of Horror and Underground Cinema; check out sample-heavy Stairs and Flowers or Draining Faces for classic examples of SP’s splicing euphoria.

Personal beat-centric favourites like One Time One Place, Three Blind Mice, Dig It, First Aid, & Addiction changed the landscape of Industrial and Electronic genres and left most of the pack behind, bewildered; the avant-garde power, menace, and cliche-destroying arrangements were on another level entirely. The more experimental soundtrack-ish material exalted noise and ambience in fresh ways., and Mind TPI’s God’s Gift (Maggot) announced itself as one of the most unforgettable, powerful and unique Industrial tracks ever committed to an unsuspecting audience. Again (just like the recommendation in the Coil post & the track Blood From The Air) it’s not for the faint-hearted, but the vocal delivery and pitch-black alien soundcraft are without comparison.

In 2024, as the Skinny Puppy entity exits the stage, we tip our hats in gratitude for the inspiration and the illuminance of their cathartic majesty. Stay alert, and best wishes for the new year,

In Lightarmour We Trust

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Link : https://youtu.be/RUxtQzMlSFw?si=6x9fWoH5wUlbpsZ4

Lightarmour Editions Lightarmour Editions is an Australian Music Label inspired by an underlying spirit rather than genre

RAW ANALOG NEW WAVE - MODUS OPERANDI

It was 1984 and the project name Modus Operandi was a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of main influences at the time - primarily Depeche Mode obviously, but also Fad Gadget / Duet Emmo / Yazoo / Kraftwerk / OMD / Human League / Portion Control / The Normal etc.

The excitement of Post-Punk Electronica, New Wave, and the promise of a new Avant-Garde Pop was electric. Modus Operandi was a side project from moody synth trio Childhood’s End (with vocalist Andy Brown, which would soon morph into Crimson Boy).

The explosion of affordable analog gear was a teenager’s dream come true & Petar Zadraznik was the first of our gang to master programming those early hardware sequencers and drum machines. The Machine Breathes was an improvised jam (recorded sometime early to mid ’84) saturated not only by the nice noisy cassette, but also by the stylistic and thematic tropes of the era and the underground scene of the time.

The bassline is the primal and distinct-sounding Roland MC202 (which also triggers the Sample’n’hold sci-fi bubbling on a Roland SH101), drum machine chugga-chugga is the Korg DDM-110, and the melodies and ambient textures come from the Roland Juno 106 (which had just been acquired and was like owning a space ship). The original cassette recording has been used as the source for the master, but a good portion of tape noise has been kept so as to not steal from the tones of the instruments. The Machine Breathes is the sound of musical innocence, of self-conscious bright-eyed New Wavers, and of the excitement of electronic lurrve.

Modus Operandi operators :
Petar Zadraznik - Synthesizer Sequencer / Drum Machine
Vince Valentini - Synthesizer

Live now on Bandcamp / All other platforms 19th of December.…
https://lightarmoureditions.bandcamp.com/track/the-machine-breathes-cassette-master

LE31 - In Lightarmour We Trust

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The Machine Breathes (Cassette Master), by Modus Operandi track by Lightarmour Editions