bleed Air – Further.

Two releases from the wonderful superpolar Taïps label, both from much earlier this year which I never got around to writing about. Each comes from the brilliant brain of anonymous Cologne-residing bassist / electronic artist bleed Air, whose work I’ve written about here before.

Temporary Second Residences comes from bleed Air’s side project five Bubble criteria, a pseudonym that shares little in common with the main alias apart from a curious use of capitalisation. It offers a suite of 15 (mostly) instrumental, post-rock pieces each built from unswerving drums delivered at a meditative pace over which are draped highly melodic guitar lines and occasional vintage analogue synth tones. The one time the tracks veer away from the fully-instrumental template is on ‘How Was Your Day Today?’, when Michael Cramm from Cologne’s Van Zoyd pops up to offer some spoken word musings.

The ethos behind the album was to collate pieces recorded while on the road, each one from a different place (not disclosed) during the last decade. The introspective phrasing and somewhat melancholy outlook feels very familiar to the sense of displacement and disconnectedness that I often feel when I travel with my day job. I imagine it will become an album I revisit time after time on planes and trains. Appropriately, this review was written on another plane, on another trip across the Atlantic.

My personal favourite piece is ‘Violin Spider’, one of several to feature warm and fuzzy analogue synth textures alongside guitar, while ‘Sabaudia’ features a nice detour into a jazz-guitar passage which is then replaced by a sweet wandering melodica melody. I hear nods to a whole bunch of artists here, but for some indefinable reason I’m chiefly reminded of Appliance and Tortoise.

Sticking with bleed Air, their eponymous debut album is the other release I never wrote about – either when it was first released in 2020 or when it received a nice lathe cut vinyl and cassette repressing earlier this year (the vinyl is sold out; a few copies of the cassette reissue are available). It features a female duck on the front cover. I like ducks.

Marco, superpolar Taïps’ creative mastermind tells me it’s the label’s biggest seller to date. It’s not hard to see why. It is a collection of vaguely Kosmische electronic tracks with a neatly inquisitive tonality, something that the guitar work in the five Bubble criteria album also shares. It’s a suite stacked to the rafters with filter sweeps, contemplative arpeggios, wonky beats and fat Moogy bass notes, which very occasionally leans into lo-fi territory.

‘I TEL’ is one of my favourite tracks here. Featuring beats straight out of an organ rhythm generator, rich long held synth tones and a twinkling melody that sparkles like the ice in the drink I was just served by a BA cabin crew member, the glue that holds ‘I TEL’ together is a low-slung bass guitar passage from bleed Air. To me, it sounds like something I heard on a compilation of soundtracks by Can’s Irmin Schmidt from years ago, only dear Irmin would never have allowed anything he composed to wander off quite so freely. Elsewhere, the resolute ‘Mars Yard’ feels like a track recovered from a box of unreleased Warp tracks, artist unknown, all mid-1990s post-electro beats and post-techno wiggly arps.

To bleed Air’s credit, this purported mixtape is neatly diverse in its reach. Each track has its own distinct personality but a common instinct that stops this feeling like a sprawling endeavour. I’m just sorry I missed it the first (and second) time around. As a robotic voice intones on ‘Mindfuck’, this is embarrassing.

The sold-out vinyl and cassette reissues of bleed Air by bleed Air were released April 6 2026. The original album was released September 4 2020. Temporary Second Residences by five Bubble criteria was released May 1. Both releases were via superpolar Taïps.

Words: Mat Smith

If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?

A new split cassette from anonymous electronic artist and bassist bleed Air and Shenzhen legends Hualun ruminates quietly on that enquiry. The beginnings and conclusions are not clear. There is an A-side and a B-side, one by bleed Air and one by Hualun, but the labels glued to each side of the cassette shell might as well be interchangeable.

But there is a starting point to the story of this collaboration. Because it is a true collaboration. It is not simply two artists each throwing together music to fill a side of a tape, with little that obviously connects either side of the ferric oxide frontier. This began with an idea and a response: Hualun would make some new music, and bleed Air would respond to it. Idea and response. Two distinct creations. One unique source.

And yet it was agreed that bleed Air’s response would occupy the A-side, meaning that you hear the response before the idea. The net effect is one of reversal: even though you know it not to be the case, the relative positioning makes you feel like Hualun are in fact responding to bleed Air. If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?

These two sides are, then, inextricably and umbilically linked. They both occupy a contemporary vantage point overlooking some of 1970s German electronic music’s finest moments, completely in tune with the sonic adventuring that the likes of Conrad Schnitzler and a select pioneering few bravely undertook.

There are three pieces that open Hualun’s side that form a beautiful and engaging triptych. ‘Snow Bath’ carries a fragile outline of a melody that evolves slowly over the course of the track, giving rise to a sense of gentle, fluttering motion and a languid, purposeful but relaxed poise. ‘Strand Man’ floats forth on horn-like textures, being funereal yet joyful simultaneously. Your attention is directed to those thick, resonant notes, but just behind them is a constantly shifting backdrop full of the minutest details. A sense of euphoric resolution arrives at the very end, just before it collapses into white noise. A surprise comes in the form of ‘Folks’, which is constructed from gentle cascades of guitar and electronic melodies. The piece is almost Beverly Glenn-Copeland-esque in its mesmeric, warm and loving presentation.

bleed Air’s side – the response to all of the above, remember – begins with ‘GhostEP’, built from wraith-like electronic transmissions and background static from a broken radio. These (im)pulses are then replaced by placid synth melodies that are sweetly moving, arranged either like classical motifs or fairground organ music, even as they are threatened by grinding machine sounds. One of my favourite pieces follows. ‘Travelogue’ features deep, spacey atmospheres uncoiling at a sedate and graceful pace. Resonant, swelling melodies give this a widescreen, sci-fi soundtrack quality; stirring, despite its minimal presentation. Elsewhere, the plaintive, echoing piano of the evocative ‘Ajar’ creates the image of sitting silently in a cafe, looking sadly through the window at the world going by and feeling completely detached from everything.

Both sides end in similar territory. bleed Air’s ‘Gap Map’ and Hualun’s ‘Before The Storm’ are stylistically inseparable. A white noise gale blows through these tracks, punctuated by a haunting (haunted?) melody. We are left with many questions. Who is who? What is what? Are they the same artist performing the same track? Or two artists standing in front of a mirror, so alike and yet so divided by the original idea and the reflected response?

If a tape loops infinitely, where does it start and end?

GhostEP by bleed Air / Dead Man by Hualun is released September 1 2023 by superpolar Taïps.

Words: Mat Smith

Further.

Tag: bleed Air

superpolar Taïps: five Bubble criteria – Temporary Second Residences / bleed Air – bleed Air

bleed Air / Hualun – GhostEP / Dead Man