SOUK ARTISTS
Muqata'a
Ruido(s) album cover by Evan Crankshaw
Lowdjo & D.WattsRiot / Photo: Jordi Verdés Padrón

Videos

Ruido(s)_Shorts03
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  • country:Palestine
  • style(s):Instrumental, Global Beats
  • label:SOUK / Discrepant
  • type:DJ/Remixer
  • instrumentation:electronic
  • artist posted by:Ear Conditioning

Line up

  • D.WattsRiot (Turntables )
  • Gonzo (Electronics, Recordings, Manipulation)
  • Lowdjo (Turntables)
  • Muqata'a (Electronics, Sampler, Sequencer, )
  • Only Now (Electronics)

Links


INTRODUCTION
While exploring the world digging for music that exists at the edge of many genres, the label Discrepant realised the need to create an(other) adventurous new sublabel within the Discrepant family. SOUK Records aims to bring beats from every corner of the world with the divergent and discrepant taste we’ve been delivering since 2010. It is more than a dance music label. Our focus is on the strains of dance/beat music being created in different cultures, with the influences of the globalized world but still with its own identity.

MUQATA'A
With that in mind, our first release couldn’t be more on point. Beat master Muqata’a, one of the brains behind the thriving hip hop scene in Ramallah, Palestine, delivers a unique instrumental album. “Inkanakuntu” is more than an instrumental hip hop album, with nods to classic hip hop works and mixed with a downtempo grime feel that captures the urgency and eagerness of UK’s dance culture.

With these eight instrumentals Muqata’a shows how vast and deep his music knowledge is, with a refined taste and a perfect sense of melody moulding. Sometimes it’s real raw, in others we can feel a mellowness and jazz feeling or the perfect pop beat. Make no mistake, Muqata’a is a beats craftsman.

ONLY NOW
Captivity is the next highly anticipated extended EP by Kush Arora aka Only Now, following a triptych of self-released output in 2019. Continuing the project’s ever evolving engagement with themes of time and existence, Captivity encompasses versatile synthesis, mutant kuduro, widescreen sound design, turbulent cold fronts of power ambient and melodic undertones of black metal.
The product of a two-year period in which Arora was contending with transitional shifts in his personal life, Captivity is a culmination of what the project has explored both in a prolific run of recent material and as a whole, across several years of time dilating, mind altering music.
Although shaped by adversity and corresponding sentiments of angst and insignificance, Captivity is pitched at total transcendence. Adopting a meticulous approach to production, a methodology which opens up almost every element to transformation and deconstruction, Arora generates forms which possess a sense of pointillist precision, as well as a keen psychedelic potency.

GONZO
Sometimes you know it’s coming, sometimes it’s unexpected, but the time to hang your boots will always come. It’s better when you have total control, even better if you end up on a high (or on a low). After seven years of sonic interferences, calibrating the soundscape of field recordings and helping to recreate the old sounds of today, Gonzo is retiring from music. It’s a goodbye, yeah, and a well-crafted one.
Gonzo fires up his last album as an skewed homage to a Portugal that doesn’t exist, never did and never will.
But “Ruído(s)” doesn’t sound like an intentional one. You won’t listen to it on any of the thirteen tracks that scavenge for a solution in the space between ambient music and field recordings. You won’t feel it in the intense connection between human and natural sounds and how sometimes everything oscillates in opposite states of mind. You won’t even read it in the intense, but subtle, humor present in some of the pieces. You won’t, because it’s not an intentional goodbye. You only know it is, because you’re reading this.

What is it then? It’s a celebration of random sound. How can you experience something scholastic and, simultaneously, deeply hilarious? Just think about the amazing triad formed by “A Fuga dos Grilos”, “Degredado(s)” and “Cantiga Parva”. First, you’re blessed with six minutes that build up on the idea that sound can be an intense religious experience, echoes going back and forth to create a fantastic Boiler Room feeling (one populated with raving Gonzos doing dabs in front of the camera) that eventually ends up with a cinematic touch: someone saying the title of the song out loud. One second after we are into the Flying Lizards world, with two songs that shake any pretentious seriousness of the previous track.

GUESTS ON SELECTED DATES

D.WATTSRIOT
The Ear Conditioner, Brewer of genres

LOWDJO
Lowdjo, hailing from Brussels, has been djing for 15 years under different alter ego's and has an extremely varied taste what probably makes him the most eclectic dj in Belgium. Whether he's playing tunes for kids, rocking a big festival crowd or banging hardcore beats in an underground squat, he leaves every crowd astonished.

Lowdjo has always had a preference for the more bizarre, obscure & experimental music. Lowdjo takes you on a journey with his ethnic beats extraordinaire, all laced together by a tantalizing mix of contemporary electronics. Lowdjo takes you on a dizzying trip exploring the globe's weird musical heritage.
MORE TO BE ANNOUNCED