pantata ‘sounds from a small apartment..'
(relaxed tzechia electronics)
Palmbomen II ‘Dancing & Crying’
(new wave proto trance ep series)
Sasha Renkas ‘Safe Place’
(ambient pop album)
Betonkust ‘Concrete Coast’
(electronic goth pop album)
~earlier releases~
For a few years, Slovakian born & Czech-based artist pantata (Štefan Barčák) has been making music for himself, while running a record store slash coffee bar (called 25,2 rpm) in Prague. Over the course of a month in 2024 pantata made many songs with different analog machines and selected the favourite tracks out of this. His music is very laidback -almost empty- analog music that reminds of K. Leimer and Tara Cross mixed with Czech & Slovakian childhood memories and love and honesty of nowadays memories.
‘sounds from a small apartment in prague’ by pantata is distributed worldwide by Clone and digitally through Bandcamp.
"I was born on March 3, 1998, in a small town in eastern Slovakia. In the distance, you could see the Slovak mountains. That image of big mountains on the horizon still inspires my work today. In my early years, before my family and I moved to Prague, I was quite an outsider, I liked drawing and painting and I never stopped.
Nowadays, I have a nice setup at home. A few synths: Sequential Circuits Six-Trak, Pro-One, Yamaha DX7, Roland Juno, JP-8000, S-1 (a small SH-101 clone), and classic Roland drum machines like the 909 and 707. I also use a few effect pedals, an old mixer, and a Tascam Portastudio where I record everything to tape.
When I make a track, I usually need to finish it in one day. I start playing my instruments, and whatever feeling I have that day needs to be recorded. If I leave a song for tomorrow, I might lose the feeling and feel something completely different, so I prefer to start a new track instead."
Dancing & Crying is a club, just outside Carmel Vista, that is open 24/7. Here you can dance and cry on your favorite Emotional Dance Music. Producer Palmbomen II (Kai Hugo) teams up with different performers to release a series of EP’s made for the fictional Dancing & Crying club. Music that makes you dance and cry.
The music has been recorded over the last few years; from COVID-19 confinement up till now, while Kai was building a new recording studio, during which he made a small temporary studio in a hallway of his house and while doing soundtracks for films and series. In this edition singer Naiara Trivino takes a special spot and sings in French, Spanish, and English and she features in the music video made aroundthis EP.
This EP ranges from dramatic French synthwave (“Tes Yeux”), touching the world of Kai’s other project Cindy, to proto-techno “Darker Days” (with Antenna) to dreamy breakbeat (“Your Eyes Are Empty”). Welcome to Dancing & Crying.
‘Dancing & Crying EP1’ by Palmbomen II is distributed worldwide by Clone and digitally through Bandcamp.
Kyiv (Ukraine) born Sasha Renkas, made music as Antenna for almost a decade, releasing many EP's and a full length album. Now he follows his urge to make a different kind of music. The result is a full length album with slow, intimate, nighttime music varying from abstract pop ballads to ambient movie score pieces. At times they sound like stripped down Kate Bush instrumentals, drenched in reverb, or introvert Roxy Music with a touch of dub and nineties trip-hop.
‘Safe Place’ by Sasha Renkas will be distributed worldwide by Clone and digitally through Bandcamp.
My name is Sasha Renkas and this is my album called Safe Place. I am normally known for my house and electronic project Antenna and at a certain moment in my life I was struck by stagnation and wanted to try something different. I moved to a rooftop apartment on a hill in Brussels and gave myself total freedom from formats and expectations. I followed my introvert urges and music started appearing very naturally out of nothing. The music could be one or six minutes long, could be a pop ballad or an ambient piece. This time I wanted to approach it differently and step away from the somewhat static methods of creating electronic music. I tried to compose music more organically and performed my instruments live for this album. I mainly used old synthesizers and other instruments, under a heavy layer of eighties reverb machines.
I’ve been listening a lot to Cocteau Twins, Blue Nile, Roxy Music, nineties trip hop and minimal composers at the time of making this album. I wanted the album to feel like a seamless story, like a soundtrack to an imaginary movie.
Before moving to the Netherlands I grew up in the nineties in Kyiv (Ukraine) surrounded by economic turbulence and a weird mix of music from different decades that overflowed after years of isolation, accompanied by the weird early Ukrainian visual culture. I was mesmerized by the music video’s I saw on the TV and I wanted to belong there. I guess I never really grew up, still drifting like a cowboy through imaginary spaces, in a timeless vacuum, outside of real life. I decided to release Safe Place as Sasha Renkas, because it felt very personal and pure, all coming from a spacious, misty place where everybody is still alive and safe.
Solo album by Betonkust (Dutch for Concrete Coast). The vinyl comes with a booklet containing drum patterns used on the album, together with a download link of the original samples that you can use for your own music. This record includes a Bandcamp download code for the digital files.
Buy this vinyl in our store
Betonkust ‘Concrete Coast’ is distributed worldwide by Clone and available digitally through our Bandcamp page.
I was born in Utrecht (1988). I grew up in a very small town somewhere between Amsterdam, Utrecht, and Hilversum. The so-called 'green heart' of the Netherlands. That means there's lots of nature. It was very boring and/or normal. A typical Dutch 1990s upbringing.
I've been listening to house music for as long as I can remember. On cassette tapes, on the radio, it was everywhere. Now I live in Rotterdam and there's a lot going on, mainly in the area of electronic music. There is Operator Radio, Clone, Pinkman, etc. Most of my friends are involved in music in some way.
The older I get the less I care about gear. I didn't use any expensive or exotic stuff. Korg Electribes (both the sampler and the synth), Korg M1, some Boss effects pedals, a cheap mixer, a Shure SM57 mic, a cheap guitar. For this album everything was recorded in FL Studio.
Some tracks on the album started like five years ago with a melody and slowly developed into a full song. Other songs were made one month before mastering. It really depends. But most of the work was done in 2020 and 2021.
I think most of this album is about transience, giving up, the infinite sadness of humanity.
Palmbomen II's new album Make A Film can be viewed as a faux crash course in film making plus the soundtrack to score your first movie. This beautiful double vinyl album comes with an extended step-by-step course on writing, directing and shooting your first film. To make it easy, Palmbomen II included twenty four tracks that set the right mood for different scenes, from "Medium Melancholy" to "Slightly Dark". Everybody could Make A Film.
Buy this vinyl in our store
Palmbomen II ‘Make A Film’ is distributed worldwide by Clone and available digitally through our Bandcamp page.
Hi my name is Kai and I was born in Dordrecht, The Netherlands in 1988 and grew up in the city of Breda. Not quite an exciting city perse but we have a lot of EDM foundation there. I grew up around the corner of DJ Tiësto (my driving instructor’s daughter was married to him, it was that kind of small town thing) and I bought my first records in his record shopMagic Music (because at that time he still played vinyl I guess). My sister was in class with Hardwell and it was just a lot of electronic music all around (mainly trancewhen I grew up). That was not my kind of thing and I discovered a better record shop in Breda, there I found out about Bunker Records, all kinds of electroand other electronic music which made me buy synthesizers and drum machines.
When I was younger I had lessons in instruments like violin and piano and I was composing a bit on the piano with lined paper and all official symbols. I was just quite bored with this kind of classical playing and totally rediscovered music making and composing when I was a little older and worked with ReBirt and then Reason. This led me to real synthesizers and drum machines and all and I understood I really needed lessons and get educated and then took piano, drums, solfege, guitar and bass guitar lessons. I can’t play any of them extremely well, but enough to record with.
Around my twenties I started my studies in music and got education in composition and music production in a kind of conservatorium in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Some of my classmates were Betonkust, Jacco Gardner and others, I still work with a lot of them. There I discovered how much I liked composition as my main tool and that I liked the limitations of older music gear with very little possibilities and that the harmonies really had to create the music, and not music production.
Nowadays I spend most of my time in Antwerp, Belgium after having lived in Los Angeles for the last five years. It’s close to Breda again, so kind of close to home, which is nice in these times of uncertain traveling and all. Also Jacco moved here and lives around the corner. My friend and engineer Ilias moved here too and we started to build some music studios together. It’s fun to be closer to home and to work with people in The Netherlands easily. It’s different than my surroundings in LA but I’m still in touch with many people there. At the moment also composing music for a film there on distance. And people come over from LA that I met there and that I work with still.
The music for this album was composed for different films I worked on and it mostly didn’t reach the final cut or never in the form it got here on this album. I made those songs in Los Angeles, in The Netherlands and while traveling with mostly my liveset which is a Akai MPC1000 as a sequencer and just three synths, my Roland JV1010 and a Korg EX-800 and an x0xb0x. Combined with some tape and simple effects.
All this music was made in the years 2016-2019. I remember being in snowy mountains around Los Angeles where I worked on some tracks for a short documentary about New York disco music sound systems and the opening track on my album was made at that time but never used. I composed “Sad Piece” for someone last year and a lot of tracks were made around the time I was composing music for the film Jawline (a film about social media kids) that premiered on Sundance in 2019. The record is kind of a mixed bag like that with loose ends which never came out on any records and which were intended for film. Now it seemed exciting to present them again for people to use for films.
It’s of course kind of a joke to present a course in film making based on this music, but I like to give the music away to people and let them use it to create something. That is also in the end the thing with this package, people can use it for whatever they like, as long as it’s not a commercial project.
Influences in this all are groups and composers like Tangerine Dream, Arvo Pärt, Enya, Larry Heard, Slowdive and Philip Glass, and I listen a lot to old new age cassette tapes, Sounds Of The Dawn posts amazing collections of these online. But I also listen to modern musicians like Kate NV, Molly Nilsson, Dean Blunt and many others. And it inspires me to see film or series and to make music to that directly or indirectly, like I really made my first Palmbomen II album seeing X-Files episodes and that was a fantastic inspiration.
At this moment I’m finishing building some studios to record and master and color music. We just bought an old large seventies Harrison mixing console, the same exact type Thriller was made on but also many of the Abba albums. This one specifically was from film composer Harold Faltermeyer who made the “Axel F Theme” (Crazy Frog for younger readers LOL) on this exact mixer.
