The Stroom machine keeps on keeping on... I swear i end up missing just as many of their releases as I catch. This latest four track compilation does what Stroom does best by pulling together a range of lost sounds from a seemingly parallel/lost past... where do they keep finding this stuff? I understand this is the first in a series of ambient/fourth world leaning collections - you could almost make that claim of the whole label MO. This one starts and ends with two Ron Boots cuts, which amounts to 20+ minutes of sky-searching cosmic bliss - passing through the sky gate kinda material. Closer Far Boundaries is particularly forceful, a shapeshifting epic which will turn the heads of the Edgar Froese heads. More importantly, like with all great labels, i can't hear any of this music without the context of the label. Stroom's focus on sounds predominantly situated in the liminal halfway zones between the outerreaches of a whole host of genres lends the entire operation a dream-like form, the music functioning as memories you probably never had by playfully (and never absolutely) envisaging alternative histories. Hypnagogic? Hauntological? Perhaps, but i think mainly just well curated. Record shops like World of Echo are propped up by labels like Stroom. Their cultural heavy-lifting makes it easy for us to do the light work of presentation. In what has been a year of nightmarish visions of a terrible future, it's energising to find new pasts being built. New possibles where you might have previously only seen dead ends. Sometimes we must move backwards to progress.
A1 Ron Boots - Lachrymation
(produced and composed by Ron Boots)
Previously released by Groove Unlimited on ‘Detachment Of Worldly Affairs’, 1994
A2 Jo Bogaert - Ambient Kinsky
(produced and composed by Jo Bogaert)
Previously released on 'Different Voices', 1993
B1 Morten Søndergaard - Sahara i mine hænder
(produced and composed by Morten Søndergaard. Remastered by ET mastering)
Previously released on ‘Lyd Lyrik’, 1996
B2 Ron Boots - Far Boundaries
(produced and composed by Ron Boots)
Previously released by Groove Unlimited on ‘Detachment Of Worldly Affairs’, 1994
