Portals Editions

· PRTLS 018 ·

Kontrapoetik is a very personal and simultaneously historical investigation, tackling the
deceivingly serene, yet turmoiled past of composer Maria W Horn’s home region Ångermanland
in the North of Sweden, and her own counter-exorcism project thereof.
The musical territories explored by Horn on Kontrapoetik are vast, but at the heart of each piece
is a strong fundament of reductionist technique no matter how maximal the results may sound.
Deceptively simple harmonic progressions are refractured through the means of inversion and
repetition, presented either in a pure state or being crushed and deformed by layers of distortion.
This work, while saturated by an almost overbearing sense of longing
and loss, never gives in, but stands steadfastly defiant.

· PRTLS 014 ·

Hypodermic Letters is a shimmering interplay of the extremely remote and the radically proximate,
the vast and the intimate. A sense of substantial materiality and referential stability is
established momentarily only to face its immediate dissolution.
Erlandsson’s use of ambiguity reveals a fundamental fragility at the core of certainty.

But fear not, although elegantly masquerading as ambiguity, the dominating
affective state of Erlandsson’s Hypodermic Letters is that of clarity.

· PRTLS 015 ·

A visceral auditory experience rendering itself from the numerous collapsed and recomposed forms
of quantified electronic outlay: rhythm, ambience and concrete all configured to construct an
amorphous narrative based work where each piece unfolds as a mutated container of previous identities.

Distinctive in development, design and execution SELENIC stands as
a solitary gesture of Crippa’s idiosyncratic experimental research.

· PRTLS 014 ·

Loyal to the sonic concepts of Gainstage, Arikon presents
The Prophet’s Blood Is Boiling, a solo enterprise into deepest ‘drum & drone’.
Hypnotizing distorted polyrhythms puncture through shards of fragmented melodies, producing potent
mixtures of desperate tin can banging, a panoramic sonic scope, and the bleakest of soundsystem nightmares.

· PRTLS 013 ·

The Hyperlucid Gaze hides in waking dreams where the foundations of perception are laid.
This corrupted society has fed the eye with tantalizing, soulless imagery and
the mind has absorbed it all, seeping into the corroding, disheartened body.

If the eyes would instead turn skywards, to gaze upon the cascade of lights,
those sparks of memories where the spirit resides, then a freshly drawn
reminiscence of previously perceived dimensions would be revealed.

· PRTLS 012 ·

Enter the Thorned Maze. A hint of dreamy optimism is often interrupted by dissonant,
atonal clusters, rattling textures and rhythms that suggest subterranean infestations.
Touching on something eternal, conjuring images of fallen idols and ruined civilisations - past and present;
An astral free-float through imagined eras and landscapes,as well as a hazy reflection on
the cracked mirrors of the now. Hinting at the inner turmoil of a cyberpunk dystopia.

· PRTLS 011 ·

Cooper Bowman is a Melbourne-based visual and sound artist working in the margins of the Australian
experimental and electronic scene. Isle Of Isms is a suite of short vignettes part of a cohesive whole.
Made with minimal equipment and recorded directly to tape, this release is largely informed by the
processes associated with early Kraut electronics and musique concrète.
Wherein Bowman allows for chance-based encounters with sound,
forgoing the stricter templates of his other projects.

· PRTLS 010 ·

A burnt offering to the undead rave. The architecture of longing styled by the black hand beyond.
Leaping from tectonics to tenderness as it meditates on the violence of creation, reincarnation and rebirth.
Cascades of sheetrock peel away to reveal a private bardo. Though a student of technical finesse,
Baruc drives listeners to examine their inner mythology and confront the golems they have raised.

· PRTLS 009 ·

Sounds rear up, diffuse, and rhythms dissolve into tones thereby creating an unholy conglomerate of
frigidly staged disorders, digital fragments, broken melodies and the vibrant, tugging sub-bass caprices of the
Brazilian “voodoo” rhythms – “a fala dos atabaques” (“speech of the drums” with violence
and passion as if they were trying to force the gates to transcendence open.

· PRTLS 008 ·

Tightly orchestrated symphonic noise paired with bludgeoning splinter rhythms and fractious
melodies to create brutal electronic epics, which leave senses nourished and obliterated in equal part.
A bruised and feedback-damaged take on amen break abandon that pounds like early Wolf Eyes,
betraying the kind of ear for detail that an HD soundsystem will no doubt reward.

· PRTLS 006 ·

A lover’s memory. Centuries of thought dissolved into unusual dimensions,
creating a new language woven from the fragment of a mad entity.
Amorphous at first, it evolves to become as piercing as glass.
Caught in a patiently eternal and animal gaze,
all that is left to do is to surrender
to the vacuum of this cosmos.

· PRTLS 007 ·

In this age of electronic surrender, where identities and realities can be sloughed from you as easily as leprous skin,
it must be considered: What is the storage capacity of our personal spiritualties?
Does our ease of transition affect only the exterior, or do our humanities become ragged with use—
or does it become compressed as these fragments of reality splinter away from us?

· PRTLS 005 ·

Luminescent constructions of abstract realities, conceived and perceived by swarms of connected brains.
A socially hyper-connected ecosystem inhabiting an envenomed wasteland where the vitality of the
body is entrapped in a shadow biosphere. Trying to transcend physicality it bypasses the sensorial experience
and propels towards a substitution with its surrogates.

· PRTLS 004 ·

Soaring melodies and marching synthesiser-sequences wander through the still void.
Attempting to find ground, floating through an infinite myst.
A faint memory of a forgotten past shines through.
Extinct existence, brought back to life.

· PRTLS 003 ·

Urban, bleak, violent – suspended in a slow motion malaise.
Grasping for a semblance of something substantial and concrete.
Palpable dread and dismembered drum machines — beyond the vast emptiness of a sun-scorched land.

· PRTLS 002 ·

Evoking the old spirits of the Earth using modern technology,
Pierce Warnecke and Arik Hayut embody the truly terrible and
awe-inspiring aspect of Gaia in their tribalistic doom-tech rhythms.

· PRTLS 001 ·

Twin stars, each fueled by the other's heat—burning together in the endless void of space.
The shattered duet of their shared voices echo back to each other, a sonic bridge forged of shared pain.
What worlds their black radiance illuminates are bathed in the storm of their aura(l)s.
This is the agony and the ecstasy of

Shadaah Tuum