Nowe:le starts off with a bubbling glitch track from Maciek Szymczuk. "Uruk" simmers with electrical signals, some popping and crackling like exploding molecules, while other currents string themselves together into a swirling, darting melodies. "Uruk" is a petri dish dance party seen through an electron microscope. The microscopic fascination continues with Shapethrower's "Awar Fedbk," which throbs with barely restrained energy as particles thrash against one another behind the thick fuzz of a swelling drone. FilmFilter spazzs out for seven minutes all over "NonStopFilm," (hence the name of the track, evidently) and I'm left fidgety and tired. Yume only gets a minute to calm me down and does just that with the bell tones of "Born in Spring."

Phasmid's first offering on Nowe:le is "The Heroine of Goat Bells," a track which mixes whimsical xylophone melodies with chirpy location recordings of birds in action against a primly stuck bass drum. A good mixture of that psychedelic ambience which we were told to look for. Curious George gets a sampler. Their second, "Mehr Licht," is luminous, filled with patterned xylophone against a spattered beat backdrop. Yume, the most represented artist on the compiliation with three tracks, offers an excursion through the inner workings of a grandfather clock with "C4." The thin creak of the wood is a backdrop against which tiny gears whir and hollow pipe ring gently as they swag in the perpetual motion of the artifact. "Ruby Glass Factory," the remaining Yume track is a field recording of, well, what sounds like a ruby glass factory.

Zenial and Palsecam team up for the indescribably named "I=B0000-B7FF, CRC." I can't tell you what the name means, but it sounds like an open faucet slowing filling the metal sink in the galley of a submarine. As the boat moves beneath the water, the pressure on the hull shifts the metal inside the ship, causing tones and drips to change. Can you chart a course simply by listening to the stress in the metal around you? The grand collaboration of the record is "There's No Way," an offering from Zenial, Palsecam, and Maciek Szymzcuk. The irony of the title is that this track is a stellar combination of the singular elements which these three artists have already brought to this collection. Very reminiscent of work heard on Raster-Noton or ~scape.

Alphabet1 gets to close out the proceedings with their "Six Sigma (blackbelt rmx)." A melancholic slide guitar weeps in a stone grotto while a sharp little drum rhythm tries to coax it from its sad state. The guitar expires and the happy little drum rhythm continues its dance, eventually resurrecting the guitar with an unearthly groan. And they dance off into the sunset together.

Labels tend to release compilations early in their career, giving listeners a sampling of the possible environments and intentions of their sonic raison d'etre. Vivo has already marked themselves on my map as being a diverse label, dedicated to releasing music from Poland, Japan, Finland, Iran and other distant lands. Their Nowe:le compilation, while crafted from familiar elements of ambient and electronic music, is hauntingly foreign. Rich, diverse, and yet ultimately cohesive, Nowe:le is a record which transcends its more banal task of introducing us to Vivo's ideology and direction. Nice.
Mark Teppo/ Earpollution

The tag line on the back of this disc reads "the psyhedelica ambience to the coldness of computers into ethnical ex-perimetronics via the Texan desert". On this compilation Poland's Vivo Records brings together artists from Japan, the US and Poland in what sounds like a pretty promising set to base other like collections in the future. Opening with Maciek Szymczuk's track Uruk the listener is immediately bathed in a vibration of quiet, sensitive harmony with just the right amount of hiss and crackle. Japanese soundsters Filmfilter and Atsuo Kumagai offer their unpredictable Nonstopfilm which sounds like a muted, contorted remix of Squarepusher, with some aural two-stepping The beat is, the beat is, the beat is furious and flavorful. At about midpoint the track shifts to include moan and groan grinding and tinkly bells and offbeat meandering. Let's do the time warp again. The first of three tracks by US-based Yume is Born In Spring which is a very, very quiet lullaby, almost an aphorism. Their track C4 is a haunted, winding soundtrack to perhaps a lost forest. It crawls ans creeps with the subtle essence of a music box in the background. This could have been sound editing scrapped from the Blair Witch Project, it has an assumed horror. Poland's Zenial / Palsecam vs. Maciek Szymczuk offer There's No Way, in the class of those on imprints such as ~scape, Mille Plateaux and Raster-Noton. It's uplifting presence is warm and glowing and filled with all sorts of microsoundscapes. Phasmid offers two tracks here. Mehr Licht is a slow boiling ambient wash meets sleepy lounge beat rhythm. The collection also includes warped tracks by Shapethrower and Alphabet1.
(TJN) Igloo Mag

The faint metallically jangling breezes of "Born In Spring" (1:14) by Yume are rendered incidental by their unfortunately short existence. Against slowly throbbing drums, Phasmid's xylophonic meanderings traipse around "The Heroine Of Goat Bells" in multiple streams. Boiling like some enigmatic micron-stew, "I=B000-B7FF.CRC" from
Zenial / Palsecam softly radiates placid though percolating unusualities.

Yume's teasingly translucent "C4" precedes the dreamy ghost-dub-clickiness of Zenial/Palsecam vs. Maciek Szymczuk's "There's No Way"... so nice! Phasmid and Yume contribute another piece each, then Alphabet1 joins with finale "Six Sigma (blackbelt rmx)", where warbling guitar-drawls are injected with a distant energy and more-immediate e-beats.

An eclectic mix of not-too-edgy experimentation brings v/a sounds from around the world into one impressive package. A veritable grab-bag, NOWE:LE will surely contain several somethings which catch your ear. An averaged-out B+ from mine.

P.S. I must add my graphic-design gripe re: the designer's nearly-illegible font choice for the artist names (as if nonsense-words and Polish names don't trip my eyes enough already... ugh!) I had to copy and paste them from vivo's site just to make sure I had them right...
Viva vivo!
AmbiEntrance