Black to Comm is Dekorder label owner Marc Richter, an expert manipualtor of adventurous and unusual drone studies.

'The Soba Noodle Shop Incident' unfurls clouds of reverberating tones, thick billows of metallic shimmer, deftly crafted into muted melodies. Chimes and bells are smeared into blurs of warm melodic drone, distant percussive twinkles, all wrapped up in gorgeous dreamlike sprawl. The sound is intensely immersive and almost dizzying and underpinned by subtle rhythms - a swooning and swaying and woozily hypnotic whole.

Flip over for 'The Convenience Store Incident' where vocoded fragments deliver something sonically mysterious and impenetrable, churning and shimmering, buzzing and whirring, twisting into strange shapes, offering up incidental melodic overtones. Microscopic squeaks and creaks are twisted and tangled until the constituent parts became something alien & new, and are reborn into new sonic shapes - cool, moonlit and otherworldly.

Limited edition 7" in full colour picture sleeve.

Jan 2009, TR017.

The Soba Noodle Shop Incident
The Convenience Store Incident

 

Black to Comm is the chappie who runs the Dekorder label and he's a drone-meister indeed. On Trensmat, he pulls two 7" size nuggets out for your delectation, both spilling with sharp minimalist structures & imaginative sound design. It all sounds pretty scintillating & richly textured but for once I can nowhere near match the eloquence of the press release above which is as close to the mark as you need info wise! Incidents' is limited, as always on this fine label.
Norman Records


Mentioned this briefly in passing a missive or three ago. Again ultra limited in quantities and no doubt soon to be as rare as hen’s teeth, the second instalment of the current brace of tailor made turntable treatments from noise taste makers Trensmat comes courtesy of Marc Richter who in stolen moments prized away from his heading up of his much cherished Dekorder imprint (the Hafler Trio, Daniel Padden of Volcano the Bear fame, XELA et al) can be found in his sound shed merrily crafting all manner of head expanding tone manipulation cycles and squeezing out the last vestiges of groove space with his hybrid psychotropic collages under the guise of Black to Comm. With over a dozen releases to his name for labels such as Quasi-pop (mentioned last time out in passing if I recall rightly), twisted knister and 267 Lattajjaa - all of which have sadly flew past our normally20vigilant radar, Richter has been a much admired artist on the drone circuit.
’incidents’ features two exclusive cuts prized from the Black to Comm workbench. Bathed in showers of shimmering textures ’the soba noodle shop incident’ could easily pass for some shade wearing celestial communiqué dispatched by recent Trensmat visitor Cheval Sombre albeit here found in some freakish locked groove scenario, subtly awash with soft psyche tonalities this cosmically channelled cruise cascade is an applied example of sound progression with the underlying drone waves seemingly acting like a magnetic pulsar drawing to its core the surrounding freewheeling arrangements and absorbing them all the time gathering mass, dimension and depth whilst simultaneously imparting upon the listener a sublimely calming trance like state with comparisons drawn first hand to Sonic Booms collaboration with Sunray for the landmark drone sequence ’music for the dream chine’.
Over on the flip you’ll find ’the convenience store incident’ - a curiously playful cutie again built upon a repetitive looping drone montage over which the disembodied and fragmented chatter of binary communications in the shape of a distressed vocoder delivery are received through a series of splintered transmissions that give it an off kilter glitch like effect, admittedly deeply strange nonetheless compulsive listening even if you are minded to play the blighter backwards in the hope of deciphering some vague calling from beyond.
As usual with these Trensmat treats - essential.
Losing Today


Awe-inspiring drone/chop pieces by Marc Richter, a biorhythmic chorus of milky heartbeat percussion oozing under multifaceted layers of sound – synths, vocal samples, and field recordings get supercollided into shimmering worlds of new sound. A labor-intensive process I’m sure, even in our age of technology, and it’s produced a grand end result, swarming and beautiful.
Dusted


The alias of Dekorder label owner Marc Richter, Black To Comm is a vehicle for exploring the outermost psychedelic perimeters of the known drone universe. While on one side you'll hear skittering micro rhythms adding a nervous energy to the more customary star-gazing drone aesthetics, the other involves what sounds like a stammering vocoder line tucked away in an electronic tangle that brings to mind the Growing/Black Dice school of electronic weirdness.
Boomkat


Heavy doses of beamed down burbling flux from Dekorders head honcho, Marc Richter. Hot on the heels of his recent Fractal Hair Geometry long player, this little nugget boasts more of the same cybernetic chatter and psychetech hallucinatory action that made that disc such a delight.
With more than a nod to Neil Campbells Astral Social Club matrix, theres even a bit of rumpy-pumpy beat squelch thrown in for good measure, Kompakt-style of course. Raise your arms this minute, in supplication to the nu-intergalactic ecstatic.
Record Collector


This here's a new two tracker from German experimental dronelords Black To Comm, two mesmerizing loopscapes, strangely titled 'The Soba Noodle Shop Incident' and 'The Convenience Store Incident', both seemingly linked sonically and thematically, each crafter from a dense flurry of looped and repeated Reich / Riley style dronescapes.
The A side is like Riley doing Sunroof!, a high end symphony of overlapping tones, locked and looped, mesmerizingly repetitive, all underpinned by strange percussive bloops and blurred streaks of creak and squeak, eventually, the sound of whirring machinery surfaces and transforms the track into an almost Boards Of Canada bit of squelch and skitter.
The B side begins as another stretch of looped stuttering tones, faster and more frenetic this time, and within those looped tones, another series of strange sounds lurks, a fragmented melody, an off kilter counterpoint, playing out beneath, also chopped and looped, but strangely vocal sounding, as if it was some weirdly processed alien voice, the result is equally hypnotic and mesmerizing. Cool stuff for sure, a dizzying hybrid of Sunroof!, Boards Of Canada and Terry Riley, meditative and space-y, but dense and very very layered and kinetic.
Packaged in cool full color sleeves.
Aquarius Records


Great new single by Hamburg's Marc Richter, who creates a couple of very fifferent flows of chopped and channelled sound. The A side is a self-enveloping cloud of machine cheese, in which various parts are generated and then directed to eat each other, leaving a glowing stream of radiant shit in their wake. The flip is similar, but with a bit more meat content.
Wire