Sasha Renkas ‘Safe Place’
(ambient pop album)
Betonkust ‘Concrete Coast’
(electronic goth pop album)
Palmbomen II ‘Make A Film’
(new age film compositions)
Cindy ’I’m Cindy’
(shoegaze italo album)
Antenna ‘Quiet fx’
(ukrainian soft house album)
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.
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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.
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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.
Hello, I’m Kai, also known as Palmbomen II. Even though times are strange, I want to announce a new album I’ve worked on for our label World Of Paint; Cindy – ‘I’m Cindy’.
Cindy Savalas is one of the songs on my self titled album that was released on Beats In Space in 2015. Following it’s release, I made a music video for Cindy Savalas, where Cindy came to life through the portrayal by Blue LoLãn. I felt a connection with this character and went deeper into developing who she was and the world she lived in. The result was the creation of the album Memories Of Cindy, where my goal was to reveal more about Carmel Vista, the hometown of Cindy.
Afterwards, I imagined Cindy having her own ‘lost’ album, as if she had once released a record that was kind of forgotten... until now. I wanted Cindy to have her own shoegaze/italo disco album containing both ballads and dance songs, with Cindy being the pop singer of her own songs.
In early 2019, I recorded about thirty pieces of music in my home studio in Antwerp, Belgium, that fit into Cindy’s world. A month later in Los Angeles I recorded vocals with Blue. Together me and Blue explored more about Cindy and who she was. We ended up with a collection of songs that became Cindy’s album. Cindy sings about her mom, her boyfriend Justin, her cat and other personal sides of her life.
Then in the summer of 2019, I shot a series of music videos which go along with these themes and explore Cindy’s search for Justin and who he is. I continued my search by making a larger 3D animated world around Cindy, and I tried to see where in the realm between animated 3D and reality Cindy actually lives - what of her life is real and how does she live between these worlds?
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Cindy ‘I’m Cindy’ is distributed worldwide by Clone and available digitally through our Bandcamp page.
See the full video album in the YouTube playlist above, or see the full video album page.
My name is Sasha. I was born in Ukraine, (then a part of the Soviet Union). I currently live in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. In the mid-2000s I started writing pop-oriented music and releasing it under the name Renkas. After a while, I started searching for a more care-free and direct approach to making and recording music. That’s when I began the Antenna project. I got my sounds from the unexpected errors and limitations of hardware equipment from the ‘80s and ‘90s, recording tracks on the fly.
Under my Antenna project, I played live sets, DJed, and released music on labels like Clone, Pinkman and Beats in Space. Then I decided that it was time to take a break and work on a full-length album. I recorded hours of jams in my studio in Rotterdam and then took a small set-up to Kiev, so as to edit and finish the tracks there.
My friend Kai Hugo, who I’ve known for many years since we both released music with NON Records, approached me with the idea to start a music label. This became World Of Paint. ‘Quiet fx’ will be the first release. Together we worked on the visual concept of the label and created the videos for my album.
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Antenna ‘Quiet fx’ is distributed worldwide by Clone and available digitally through our Bandcamp page.
