Modern Talking
Geronimo's Cadillac

Despite making a impression with rough-hewn techno records on TAANSTAFL and his own Tallmen imprint, ca relative newcomer to the genre. Arriving in Berlin to continue studying jazz guitar - a craft he'd been learning in New York from legendary jazz musicians Ornette Coleman and Lawrence D. 'Butch' Morris - it was a long night in Berghain that steered him toward electronic music.Mitchell hasn't altogether discarded his jazz learning, having successfully applied for and won a grant from Musicboard Berlin - an organization that allocates state funding for creative music projects - based on a his pitch for a new project in which the Kansas native plans to combine jazz and Delta Blues with the Detroit and Berlin sounds that have shaped his musical outlook as it is today.'Mississippi, Detroit and Berlin share common stories to me because they have all seen, and still see very hard times and they have a strong musical history connected to folk music,' says Mitchell. 'When I listen to John Lee Hooker, I hear Jeff Mills and Robert Hood. One chord, maybe two, one foot pounding on a wood floor, sometimes at around 130 bpm. John Lee Hooker lived in Detroit for an extend period of time, worked for Ford Motor Company and somehow the machine funk that would later inform Drexcyia was already being investigated by Mr. Hooker.'The 'Blues In Roots' series will take the form of three 12s released over the course of 2014, with an organic fusion of Mitchell's Delta Blues-inspired instrumental musicianship and the tough raw techno production he has mastered in his Tallmen.785 guise, creating a sound that traces a natural musical lineage from Berlin & Detroit all the way back to early 20th century southern USA. 'In the south, they had a wood floor and a guitar, in Detroit and Berlin they have synthesizers, samplers and drum machines. That is where these two seemingly divided worlds collided, and gave me the inspiration to make my music rooted in this specific angle.

Angular, jabbing, psychedelic post-industrial/post-punk from early ‘80s Holland, drawn from hard-to-find and obscure tapes releases by Emotional Rescue and Mannequin Records​"Taken from two 12” EPs, a split 7” and a flexi 7”, all released in 1982, the music within Word & Numbers captures striking compositions, part of, but some way removed from their contemporary post-punk bands coming out of the Dutch “Ultra” scene of the time.Developing out of a series of concerts in Amsterdam, Ultra expanded to Eindhoven, Nijmegen and Haarlem, with artists and musicians creating their own work spaces and studios. Driven by the DIY mentality of the punk movement, this uniquely Dutch take on the post-punk ethos embraced avant-garde thinking and experimentation that disseminated in ideas and from that, sound.Coming from Haarlem, Nexda – consisting of Ivo Schalkx, Karin Hueting, Martienden Nijs – played music on handmade drums, metal, organ, saxophone and voice. Releasing a series of cassettes on their and Wim Dekker (Smalts, Minny Pops) Studio 12 label, the latter’s link with Wally Van Middendorp’s Plurex label, resulted in the release of Nexda’s two EP – 246, 121 and 657 (PLUREX 0026) and Second (PLUREX 0031) - with artwork of Ivo Schalkx, are included here, both in their entirety. Capturing the bands’ heavy percussive backdrop, raw, dub baselines contrast with questioning, mainly spoken word lyrical poetics, saxophone underplay and occasional Pablo-style melodica. The avant nature of the music is apparent and enticing, where experimentalism and artistic expression was sought over commercial success and technique and song form were less important than the process of exploring ideas.The none-descriptive titles match song structures that jettison the traditional verse, chorus, verse; weaving across the 8 songs so that they can be heard as one, as much asshort bursts of individual statements."