Various - De Nor 2020

With Ultra Eczema it often feels like the presentation of the music is as highly revered as the music itself - collected together, the sleeves tell their own story - and nowhere in their catalogue has that been more accented than with this new compilation. They've timed it right, since De Nor 2020 feels like the quintessential embodiment of UE's straddling of the art and music worlds. Which is: a 16 track compilation consisting of artists due to play a UE-curated event at De Nor last year that, for reasons i don't need to make clear, didn't take place, pulling in sounds and ideas from all corners of the European underground. I mean, this might even be the ground below the underground, a sub-subterranean excavation of current creative activity. Thurston Moore is here, yes, but there's also Ka Baird, Ben Bertrand, Hiele, Miaux, plus loads of others i've not heard of. It's a fragmented listening experience, in the way 'music festivals' should be tbh, exploring all sorts of manifestations of drone, noise, electronics, collage and the iconoclastic avant garde. Best of all is the Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt collab, which beautifully goes nowhere for it's eight+ minutes, and in doing so is a bit like De Nor 2020 (and the last twelves months full stop!) itself - it didn't happen, but here it is, in all its beauty, even when its ugly as hell.

"In defiance of pandemic-era dress-down codes, this edition (which is limited to 600 copies) is bedecked in a hardcover linen sleeve with debossed lettering and peek-a-boo die-cuts behind which Marcel, De Nor’s legendary bartender, will carry on ignoring you for all eternity. There is also a cut-out-and-fold De Nor paper sculpture by Gerard Herman on the insert!" - Ultra Eczema