Mhamad Safa's Al Qadir is an unreleased track made prior to the album Ibtihalat, to be released in the Fall of 2021, and which draws from the same research and locations. A series of rhythmic invocations and envisioned spatial paradigms speculate on the particular aural and musical traditions of occult and work music from the Arabian Peninsula and North Africa. Derived from these styles’ singular and evolving ceremonial dimensions, the compositions that make up this album introduce processes of musical synthesis and algorithmic design, initiating rhythmic meters and polyrhythms within beat-based compositions. While drawing resonances between these styles and their intersections with electronic dance music, Ibtihalat contemplates sonic futures of these practices within geographies morphed by unprecedented migration and logistical and extractive accelerations.

Kermesse is a duo from Buenos Aires, Argentina, composed of Pedro and Gurtz. The pair became friends traveling and playing music together, and in 2015, they merged their ideas into a new sonic enterprise.
Their sound could be described as effervescent and colorful, balanced by a stimulating groove born from their unique fusion of electronic sounds with instruments and vocals. Released in 2020 on the album “Awake,” Chacarera del Tiempo embodies this entwinement, suffusing a string-heavy foundation with dreary vocals tied together by extended spells of synthy bass lines.
They have released music on labels such as The Magic Movement, LNDKHN, Kamai Music, Serafin Audio, and more.
As active members of the fabric of contemporary electronic music, Kermesse has remixed or been remixed by artists like Acid Pauli, Mira & Chris, Dorie, Dandara, Noema, and many others.
Their songs have been played by many DJs and producers and their kaleidoscopic live set has taken them to Berlin, Zurich, Moscow, Sochi, TelAviv, Beirut, Istanbul, Mykonos, Amsterdam, Ibiza, Barcelona, and Santiago de Chile.

In 1997, two hydrophones in the Pacific Ocean picked up an unfamiliar sound. Scientists traced the sound to a spot over two thousand kilometers off the Chilean coast in the middle of the ocean. Although the two hydrophones were over 5,000 kilometers apart, both registered the same data. Whatever produced the sound was large enough to project it over an immense distance, making it exponentially louder than blue whales, the largest animal that ever lived.

The sound lasted for one minute, then was never heard again. Once sped up by a factor of 16, experts dubbed it “bloop,” due to its high-rising onomatopoeic quality. Many wondered if bloop was the result of secret military activity, or perhaps the rumblings of undiscovered oceanic beasts. Others speculated it proved the existence of mermaids, or that the fictional city of R’lyeh was real and that what the hydrophones had recorded was the Call of Cthulhu.

Humans register sounds with frequencies between 20 and 20,000 hertz. The bloop’s vibrations produced sound waves on an infrasonic level, undetectable to human ears. Despite bloop’s enormity, it would not have been audible to human beings without the use of equipment. In other words, bloop was sound we couldn’t hear.

Infrasonic waves occur on scales ranging from the minute calls of insects to the colossal shifting of tectonic plates. In 1883, the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa erupted, producing the loudest sound in recorded history. The waves wrapped around the earth seven times, only most of them were not audible to us, even though we felt their impact.

Without instruments to record and register these sounds, they exist on undetected planes.

“Someday the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.” - The Call of Cthulhu

Nicola Cruz (Limoges, 1987) is a Franco-Ecuadorian DJ and producer, who explores local sounds from Ecuador and the region, recontextualizing them into complex compositions that defy categorization. In recent years, he has expanded his sound, which was initially so called “Andes step”, propelling the “genre” forward. His studio work 'Prender el Alma' (ZZK Records, 2015) and his recent album 'Siku' (ZZK Records, 2019), reaffirm him as the owner of an unmistakable sound that has managed to entangle with the use of local instruments while inserting itself into contemporary electronics. Taken from his EP 'Cantos de Visión' (Multi Culti, 2017), the track 'Danza de Visión' is a great entry to his proposal.