Aggro Dolce, by Karen & Peter

Aggro Dolce

by Karen & Peter

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Cassette + Digital Album
Pro-dubbed frosted ice white cassette (made from recycled materials) with pro-printed inlay and digital image UV on-body print, in a clear library case

Catalogue No: CN225

Includes unlimited streaming of Aggro Dolce via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 5 days

edition of 50

Purchasable with gift card

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Book/Magazine + Digital Album
19-page pro-printed booklet of Karen Schoemer's poems, to accompany the audio, featuring beautiful artwork by Peter Taylor

Limited to 50 copies world-wide

Includes unlimited streaming of Aggro Dolce via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

ships out within 14 days

edition of 50

Purchasable with gift card

£5 GBP or more
Streaming + Download

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.

Purchasable with gift card

£5 GBP or more
Full Digital Discography

208

releases

Get all 208 Cruel Nature Records releases available on Bandcamp and save 90%.

Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Bluestone, In The Ellington Conception, Mugged, Confidence Of Crisis, Electric Swampland Home, The Lost Letters, Cruel Nature, Robustly Armenian, and 200 more. , and , .

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1.	Aggro Dolce 02:36 video	buy track
2.	Taconic Gate 03:16	buy track
3.	Do you remember the factory that burned? 02:31	buy track
4.	En Hiver 02:56	buy track
5.	Weekend in the Berkshires 03:00	buy track
6.	Grief Forest 03:28	buy track
7.	Truth is in Sounds 04:14	buy track

about

READ THE EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW WITH SUN 13:
sun-13.com/2022/10/10/karen-peter-interview-the-writing-is-grounded-very-powerfully-in-the-music/?fbclid=IwAR3cKCsJBvpwK--uxSNiZzNIzFaeVl6ShJj173jQ_z0qvO0CujZGVfEyaPU

The past is a burden and a curio. An empty hillside covered with scrubby trees was once a factory. The scratch and pop of an old vinyl record is the basis of a new rhythm. Sometimes memory is what we remember: the sensation of recalling overwhelms its source. The seven songs on Aggro Dolce by Karen & Peter explore ways in which the past disturbs and warps the present, through collages of ransacked sounds, snippets of decontextualized conversations, repeated images and electronic repurposings.

In the fall of 2021, sound artist Peter Taylor and poet Karen Schoemer decided to create songs together, despite never having met. Both drew on the faded industrial landscapes of their respective countries. Peter was inspired by the Calder Valley in Yorkshire, with its history of coal mining and asbestos contamination; Karen had recently relocated to a rural town in upstate New York once known as “Factory Hill,” where remnants of 20th century fires and floods scar the landscape. Their independent investigations of disparate locales uncover commonalities that hint at wider, even universal, human conditions.

Karen Schoemer is a poet and former music journalist who frequently collaborates with musicians including Oli Heffernan, Mike Watt, Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby. She contributed words to Ivan the Tolerable’s “Out of Season” (2020) and words and vocals to The Long Year (2021, both released by Stolen Body Records). With Mike Watt she records as the duo Jaded Azurites. She is vocalist for the upstate New York band Sky Furrows, which released its self-titled debut album in 2020.

Peter Taylor has been making music as Mortuus Auris & the Black Hand/MAbH since 2008. He is also a visual artist working across many disciplines including photography, animation, illustration, miniatures and painting. He is based just outside of South West London by the River Thames.

"this quiet album of beautifully (almost) spoken word and artfully constructed sound from Karen and Peter is something special"
- The Organ zine organthing.com/2022/09/22/organ-five-music-things-brooklyns-stephen-becker-new-jerseys-gatherers-metz-with-joe-talbot-he-of-idles-the-beauty-of-karen-peter-berlins-tell-a-vision-tons-with-some-heavy/

"There’s hardly a dearth of post-industrial land/soundscapes in the tape scene, but Karen Schoemer and Peter Taylor’s engagement with their tarnished surroundings (upstate New York’s Factory Hill and the Calder Valley’s abandoned coal mines respectively) on Aggro Dolce explores how polluted land bleeds into the psyche, rather than just evoking the bleak scenery. Writer and journalist Schoemer’s narrative fragments echo the unpredictable coherence in Clarice Lispector’s prose. Her texts are haunted by a flood both literal and figurative. “This road wasn’t here, this alley wasn’t here, the stream became a reservoir, the flood came down the hill, past the Catholic Church,” she says on ‘Do You Remember the Factory that Burned’. She captures a world of impermanence leaving it’s imprint in the social. “One set of tones dissolves into another, Saturn’s velvet rings replaced by spider webs and tarot symbols,” (‘Truth is in Sounds’). Taylor, who works solo as Mortuus Auris & The Black Hand, contributes a soundscape of collapsing choirs and looming decay, adding to the web of loss that tethers these assemblages together. The duo interrogate the permeable membrane between place and self that Claire Archibald and Kinbrae opened up on ‘Birl of Unmap’ earlier this year. Taking a different vantage point but echoing the awareness that there’s more in our surroundings than the view"
- Spools Out, The Quietus thequietus.com/articles/32084-bardo-todol-dania-trans-zimmer-and-the-djs-moth-cock?fbclid=IwAR3BWEivp83WOylmVKcWW--21-3dUQ3aClTaWNQ7zBoVm7g9ZKmnFo9GTOs

"This is a perfect descriptive piece of art, the ‘soundtrack of our minds’ for anyone in the old Empire living through 2022. Our stupid lives, childhood traumas, pointless adult lusts pulsing through the bleak soundscape of the hypnotising hellish (or calming, entertaining bread and circuses depending on how you look at it) soundscape that keeps us stable and sane enough to say ‘everything is alright… enough’. But it sure as hell is not. And this photorealistic capture of this moment in time of the collective unconscious is what art SHOULD BE.
And it’s the most transcendent piece of art I’ve heard in decades, pointing THE WAY FORWARD for genuinely artistic, expressionistic music in the new century and beyond"
- Times Boredom
timesboredom.com/2022/10/05/karen-and-peters-aggro-dolce/

credits

released October 8, 2022

Words and voice: Karen Schoemer
Music: Peter Taylor

Recorded 2021 - 2022
USA/UK

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Cruel Nature Records Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK

Northumberland (UK) based independent label.

Channelling sonic diversity since 2013

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