Another year, another frontier. For one reason or another Schematic has no plans to throw an event for this year's Winter Music Conference. However, many of us have plans to participate in parties around town. Both members of Phoenecia are planning to speak on panels at the conference and Richard Devine will be demonstrating how to blow speakers with the latest software at the remix hotel. Listed in the Functions sidebar are the details for the confirmed events thus far. More events will be posted as they are confirmed. Stay tuned...

Phoenecia in Australia update: 21,600 miles, 9 flights, 5 live sets, 3 dj sets, and 2 radio shows, and 1 dead laptop later, we are back.
Australia rules. What can we say? Respect to the ones who brought us there, the ones who came to watch, and the ones we can now call our friends. View the picture archive (21mb) here.
We are now preparing for "LABYRINTH: the backward path", a group exhibition installed in a Labyrinth. Our presentation will be the only sound peice, and most likely in sexta-phonic surround (6:2) with proper visual accompaniment. Visit the Labrynth site here. More details have been posted in the functions sidebar.

Moving up a notch on the Schematic news page, Richard Devine makes the news by setting fire to his touch-screen music workstation during a lrecent live performance. Real event or press hoax? You decide by watching here.
Richard Devine, court-jester of computer music, schizophrenic investigator of sound has just completed the sound design for the Halo 2 website. He is currently producing Mike Patton's (Mr. Bungle, Faith No More) next album. He has recently been endorsed by Ableton, Yamaha, and Krispy Kreme. and is currently finishing the presets for NI's Absynth 3. Ho-hum, just another day at the office...

Schematic data is available for download at Warp's Bleep.com and Apple's iTunes Music Store. To listen to or buy Schematic albums from either retailer, visit the Schematic Shop and click the respective logos next to each album on the page.
Note: Bleep has a Schematic label section, iTunes Music Store does not.

Out Now: Finesse & Runway
Schematic Waste Management SCH045
Info: "Pre-ordained dancefloor meltdowns; nihilistic and primitive. Egyptian Lovers explode themselves and as they are repaired by nervous genders they appear out of their own pockets, melt into liquid skies and play themselves all while engaging in Miami's vices.
Finesse and Runway's songs flow between ass-shaking roller-skating jams and chaotic, amphetamine-drenched, Boredoms-like noise as they chase people with strobe lights, roll around on the floor, and basically lose their shit. It's close to watching someone have a fit of Tourette's -- you don't know what will fall out of their mouths next. But it is impossible to look the opposite way because the music is so deeply entertaining."

"Finesse and Runway is the trouble child of Miami booty bass and visqueen sheen post-disco 80s fury. Listening to Finesse and Runway is like strapping on afro-futurism night-vision goggles and looking at all your 1980s 7-inches. As much indebted to KMFDM as they are to Madonna, these electro-riotbots hold down the dance floor while simultaneously raising the jizz rag flag of sexual revolution."

Click to listen/buy at iTunes Music Store.

Out Now: Dino Felipe - I'm You
Schematic Music Company SCH039
Info: "Dino Felipe is the Charley Patton of electronica. If the Mississippi Delta blues never had a player with quite the same slip-and-slide frenzy as Patton, then Atlanta might never have a more half-crazed, dot-matrix funk-face than Felipe. Felipe's music has the soulful brokedown jams that stand to make him the seminal voice of our generation's economic collapse. Felipe's music is the glorious epitome of the home-made sound: anarchistically cluttered, cigarette-burned, and hyper from cheap coffee: every speck of lonely life digitized and made into a WAV file. Felipe can turn a gluttonous mess of industrial samples, Moog-noises, disco breaks, and satanic-style backmasking into a heroic tribute to modern life: our freeways, vacant lots, disposal bins full with discarded PC towers, stretch limos with teenagers inside, and lots of commercials-it's all there in Felipe's sound. “I'm You” is the honest truth. He turns our thoughts into sound."

UPDATE 11/01/04: Meeloatch, longtime visual aid for Phoeoencia's live perfomances and upcoming DVD archive, has posted a video for Otto Von Schirach's "Ear Juice Synthesis" From last years, Chopped Zombie Fungus". View it here (45.4mb).

Update 10/15/04: Otto is now on tour with Skinny Puppy, supporting them on their "Greater Wrong Of The Right" tour from mid-October through November. The confirmed dates are as listed in the Functions sidebar.

Out now on CD: Otto Von Schirach's Global Speaker Fisting.
"Deafening audiences and defying protocol, Otto Von Schirach returns in '04 with a freshly-lubed full-length to give electronica another ghetto suppository. The follow up to 2002's Chopped Zombie Fungus, Global Speaker Fisting is from the under ground's under ground: it's the twenty-eyed electrified monstrosity living in the darkest, deepest sewers of the hardcore avant-garde. Moving from death metal send-ups to plagues and biotech disasters, Von Schirach's fourth album is easily his finest and most accomplished record to date.

Out now on CD: Secret Frequency Crew - Forest Of The Echo Downs
"The musical terrain has some mighty oaks, and it can be a challenge to predict which saplings are going to be strong enough to weather the frigid gusts of every oncoming trend. Among recent undergrowth, The Secret Frequency Crew are already a vivid and exceptional breed, an early bud of underground genius. This record seeds itself in the stereo. It takes root, like so many of the great, nearly immortal records never far from being replayed... While many underground artists shudder with anxiety trying to find the future's style, the Crew are growing it themselves. Without a doubt, the private innovations of the Secret Frequency Crew makes "Forest of the Echo Downs" a debut that's as tall as a classic." - Lee Henderson


Select cuts of Forest Of The Echo Downs will be released on vinyl in mid-November in a joint release with Andrea Parker's Touchin' Bass label. Forest Of the Echo Downs was designed lovingly by Friends With You.

Who is the Secret Frequency Crew? Lean more from this informative biography.
Visit Secretfrequencycrew.com now.

This album is available at Warpmart, iTunes Music Store, Forced Exposeure, Asphodel, and many other fine retailers. Turntable Lab is offering the album bundled with a free mix cd. While there, check out Diplo's new Florida Vinyl LP featuring an Egg Foo Young (SFC member & referee) remix.

Meet Nick Reyes, dreamer, schemer, screamer. Nick is Schematic's new mail-order shipper and handler. In an all-time first, Nick spends his first month with Schematic firmly holding the coveted position of Schematic's employee of the month.
If your shopping experience at the Schematic store is less than ideal, your complaints will go directly to Nick. He will be overjoyed to take care of you personally... In all honesty, he's a pussycat. he's gentle, and he won't crush your records. Promise.

The Gallagher and Ted Nugent of snot-rock are back. Hearts of Darknesses + Girl Talk bring you "Woodstock Ass Bros. Summer Tour 2k4 (aka) Boyz Gone Wyld Wyld West", a 17 date bonanza of side-splitting laughter and uncontrollable seed-spillage. If you've never witnessed a HOD/GT show and would like to know what to expect, visit heartsofdarknesses.com and click the Japanese tour photos link.
For more details, look in the upcoming functions sidebar or visit heartsofdarknesses.com

Our good friend Seb at r-selected has just finished the new fandangled official website for Richard Devine. There you can keep up with Rich and his busy schedule, listen and download exclusive sound bits, and view sexy pictures of Rich in lingerie.
Enjoy...

Rich has also just finished an instructional video for NI Traktor produced by PCAudiolabs.
On the DVD he reveals all of his special mixing secrets except his branded techniques of facial contortionism.

He has also been interiewed, probed, and endorsed by Universal Audio, a music hardware manufacturer. Read the interview here.

Glen Velez – Internal Combustion:
Schematic’s reissue of Glen Velez’s phenomenal hand-drum improvisation from 1985 acts as one of the essential links to an understanding of the relationship between modern electronic composition and prehistoric sound, wherein ‘Internal Combustion’ finds Velez’s intense, lifelong study of the frame drum—all his work for such artists as Steve Reich and Zakir Hussain, his decades of solo and ensemble recordings, his inspiration on, among others, John Cage—is displayed with a total mastery and utter oneness with his instrument, showering the listener with nimble, double, triple, all-finger rumble patterns on the drum, circular and mesmerizing in structure, and reminiscent of Moroccan slave songs, Indonesian ritual music, Native American trance, as much as the sooty percussive sound of Phoenecia or Autechre, exploring an intense, almost palatal clap to the drum, searching for an unconscious connection to the higher power, like speaking in tongues through the skin of a drum—a kind of incredible psychic ascension happens here, and it’s a fitting tribute, not to mention an accurate lineage, to see Velez’s ancient music has found a home at one of our most forward-thinking labels. - Lee Henderson, Feb. 2002

Review from Stylus Magazine:
Internal Combustion is, as its name implies, a dense and fiery collection. Its unique aesthetic approach sets it far apart from everything else on the Schematic label -- though its interest in the drone does link it tenuously with both electronic and minimalist music - and its surprising variety of styles and moods makes it far more than just an extended drum solo. This is improvisation at its most enjoyable and accessible, pushing boundaries and exploring crossovers while reveling in the overdriven glee and excitement of free drumming...

Other Reviews:
Gridface
Brainwashed.com

It's time once again to talk about Richard Devine. He's been a busy little boy lately. As one of the main contributors and beta-testers for Native Instrument's Traktor and Stanton's Final Scratch, he the focus of a promotional video that was filmed between his home studio and at Schematic's "Gorge, Binge, Purge" party in Miami last November. Click on the bouncing Richie and win!. Look for a spread of Richie featuring pictures of a few ramp launches (no landings though) in the next issue of XLR8R. The article will attemp to catalogue Richie's busy calendar and brain activity. The City Homes section of Creative Loafing, Atlanta's most popular weekly magazine, has just posted an articles about Richie and his studio here. He's headlining the fifth Flashbang Festival in Atlanta, an interactive digital media event. He's playing the Bitz festival in Rome along with Gescom, Plaid, Venetian Snares, Push Button Objects, Cannibal Ox, Ceephax Acid Crew, Legowelt, and many more. And to answer the most frequently asked question here at Schematic, the release date for Asect-Dsect, Rich's new full-length CD/LP is October 7th. Whew... More information is very likely to be posted soon.

Phoenecia's performance at the Sonar '03 Festival in Barcelona, Spain has been archived for your listening pleasure. Enjoy the sound of our musical equipment short circuiting to the delight of thousands. Every performance at Sonar has been archived. Perfermance of note were Jamie Lidell, Lithops, Aphex Twin, Patrick Pulsinger, Bjork, The Puppetmastaz, and a few others... Umm, we forget.

SCH040
Radio Boy - Rude Workouts EP
Special delivery from mood-master Matthew Herbert. Precision electronics for the pelvicly challenged. Remixes of the Richard Devine sound library.
Format: 12"
Release date: TBA

SCH052
Otto Von Schirach - Hermaphrodite Tampon Eater EP
Global Speaker Fisting outtakes. Especially good for the hard of hearing.
Format: 12"
Release date: TBA

SCH035
Otto & V/A - Armpit Buffet remix LP
20 poweful tributes to Otto Von Schirach by Soft Pink Truth, Jamie Lidell, Mr. Quintron, Secret Chiefs 3, Richard Devine, Venetian Snares & many others.
Format: CD
Release date: TBA