Peek-A-Boo sadly announces the death of one of the pioneers of electronic music :Alan Vega who died at 78. Alan died peacefully in his sleep last night, on July 16. With Martin Rev he formed in the early 1970’s Suicide. Their first, self-titled album is one of the albums that many artists cite as an influence.
To quote Dirk Ivens: the ghost riders will never ride again...

The waiting is over! Three years after publishing their last album „Even the devil doesn’t care“ Diorama will release their wishfully awaited new master piece „Zero Soldier Army“ in September 2016.

There are many already confirmed live dates at the end of this year so all fans can look forward to experience the new material soon.

DIORAMA - Live dates 2016

13.08. - 14.08.16 M’era Luna Festival

03.09.16 Flums Hochwiese (CH), Eine Nacht im Bergwerk

08.10.16 Athens (GR), Death Disco

03.12.16 Reutlingen, Kulturzentrum franz.K

09.12.16 St. Petersburg (RUS), Opera Club

10.12.16 Moskau (RUS), Synthetic Snow Festival

DIARY OF DREAMS & DIORAMA - Coma Alliance Tour 2016

16.09.16 Krefeld, Kulturfabrik

17.09.16 Dresden, Reithalle Strasse-E

18.09.16 Heidelberg, Halle02

After recently announcing their new album, Icelandic sisters Jófríõur Ákadóttir & Ásthildur, AKA Pascal Pinon are sharing another slice of their minimal take on folk with new track 'Orange' from their forthcoming record. Their album 'Sundur' is due Aug 26th via Morr Music.

Speaking about the new track, one half of Pascal Pinon, Jófríõur, went on to explain the thoughts behind ‘Orange’ when she said: "One of the challenges Ásthildur and I put in front of ourselves when making this album was writing songs for only piano and voice. Coming from a classical background we had our own idea of what that 'usually' sounds like and we also had our own ideas of how to make it better.

The main themes in 'Orange' is wordplay (repeating phrases but changing one word to alter the whole meaning), diary- or a kind of memoir-styled lyrics and imagining you're in a piano bar in the 50's singing about your loves and tragedies.”

Pascal Pinon's third album is the Icelandic duo's rawest and most diverse musical statement yet. Produced only by themselves, Sundur comprises material written over the course of 1 ½ years. While most parts of the album are sparsely orchestrated and follow the experimental lo-fi-leaning aesthetics of the duo's previous two records, the overall tone has become more intimate with its metronome-like rhythms, occasional synth lines and driving piano melodies.

Sundur lends its title from the Icelandic proverb "sundur og saman" (meaning "apart and together") and could be considered the companion of 2013's Twosomeness. Thematically, it reflects upon the voluntary separation of the two sisters. "We had never been apart our entire lives until we finished touring with our last album", remembers Jófríður Ákadóttir. While Ásthildur went to Amsterdam to study classical piano and composition and back to Iceland, her sister Jófríður went to tour the world with her other band, Samaris, and still leads a nomadic lifestyle.

Being apart is not only the main thematic thread running through Sundur, it also turned Pascal Pinon's writing process upside down. Although Ásthildur and Jófríður frequently visited each other in the Netherlands and respectively Iceland from early 2014 until late 2015 to finish the writing process, the geographical separation also influenced their compositions and thus the album as a whole. "The fact that we spent so much time apart creates completely different connections between the songs than on Twosomeness, which for me makes it more diverse in the best way possible",says Ásthildur in regards to the LP's predecessor. Indeed "Sundur" sees two different people arriving at their shared creative goal.

Due to a conflict of schedules, Ásthildur and Jófríður ended up recording the bulk of Sundur in only two days. Their father, composer Áki Ásgeirsson, helped out with the engineering and contributed percussions played with scrap metal he brought with him, including discarded parts of airplanes. While few of those details will be audible on the surface, the unpolished sound design and added bits are crucial to Sundur, the result of an intense musical collaboration between the three family members. "It makes the album feel more real and raw which is what it essentially is all about," explains Jófríður. "It's very sparse and a lot closer in the approach and in regards to the sound of our very first album. It's kind of funny that seven years later, we would go back to the same place where we were at age 14!" Here they are however, with a record which is as intimate as it is mature.

soundcloud.com/morrmusic/pascal-pinon-orange

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine's social and political institutions faced massive change, including an increasingly corrupt government and crippled infrastructure. A number of the nation's youth wound up homeless and addicted to a lethal cocktail of injected cold medicine and alcohol. Steve Hoover’s documentary Almost Holy follows a pastor named Gennadiy Mokhnenko, who saves street kids, at times by forcible abduction, and brings them to his Pilgrim Republic rehabilitation center—the largest organization of its kind in the former Soviet Union. The film’s depiction of a country in the grip of poverty, addiction, and warfare is made even more powerful by its captivating electronic score by award-winning composer Atticus Ross, his brother Leopold Ross, and Bobby Krlic (The Haxan Cloak).

“Occasionally a project comes along where one feels compelled to contribute,” Atticus said of seeing the early footage that convinced him to work on the film. “It's a different world over there – of course we have dire poverty in the U.S. – but to see an army of drug-addicted children living in those conditions, children the same age as my own, under ten years old but covered in track marks and sleeping on sewers to stay warm, and someone is asking you to write a little music to help the cause. It would be hard to find a reason not to.”

His collaborators felt the same way, and the trio soon began work on the score — the Ross brothers in the U.S. and Krlic in England. The distance meant the composers initially worked separately, but in the end, the soundtrack feels remarkably coherent. “The music surfs the line of sound design and operates as a support to the overall arc, rather than specifically tied to the characters,” Atticus explains. “Gennadiy doesn't have a theme, and I'm not sure he needs one, or how he could be reduced to one. He's powerful but tender, loving but aggressive, committed but flawed. We felt it was important that the music never dilute or distract from his message. Less is more, so to speak.” However, the message and content of film kept the trio inspired, and once Krlic had emigrated to the U.S., they met at Atticus' studio and continued to work on the album as a free-standing piece.

The film remained the anchor and the catalyst for their creativity, but several of the tracks on the record don’t appear in the picture at all. Almost Holy is thus not simply a soundtrack album, but a soundtrack and an album, one that both enriches its film and stands apart from it.

Director Steve Hoover had this to say about the score:

"Gennadiy’s story was somehow destined to be worked into some form of cinema. It’s all set in Mariupol, Ukraine, a city with sprawling factories and crumbling Soviet architecture. It sounds bleak, but it’s somehow beautiful and not without hope. I wanted an original score that could translate the feeling of being in Mariupol with Gennadiy, at this time. Atticus Ross took interest in the film and proposed a collaboration with Leopold Ross and Bobby Krlic. I knew they would eclipse whatever it was that I was imagining for the score.

There’s a scene in the film, where the people of Mariupol are enjoying fireworks that seem to be a premonition for the shells that would soon cluster the same skies. The score takes a haunting bend that feels like a metaphysical wailing from unknown places, for a people that have had the lion's share of struggle, but would soon be torn in half. The score is ingrained in the narrative because it developed along with it. They were a part of the film before we began production, offering invaluable creative insight. They were just as essential as my crew."

Watch a mood piece with footage from the stunningly shot film set to "Punching Bag" from the score below.

The Monochrome Set has a brand new album out on Tapete Records: Cosmonaut

At the end of the 70s, The Monochrome Set were part of the first wave of post punk bands. Right from the beginning, the band earned a solid reputation as purveyors of fine pop, gaining praise from 80s contemporaries such as Morrissey and Edwyn Collins. Importantly, in later years this praise has continued with artists such as Franz Ferdinand, The Divine Comedy and Graham Coxon, all citing the band as a key influence on their own work.
The Monochrome Set sound has often been described as timeless, and that alone explains why, over the years, the band has continued gaining admirers. "Cosmonaut", the band's 13th album, is a perfect example of this exhilarating mix. The title track opens with a Theremin cyber fly buzzing towards your skull before the song hits, launching you into a mirror dimension that is both familiar and alien. The whole album is a trip that starts with a hallucinating cash-till lady, then travels through dream-sets involving cannibalism, disaffected squirrels, strange gods, dying sweethearts, sexual depravity, Alzheimer's, backward evolution, and ends in an operating theatre, amid a sea of medical tentacles.