THE BLACK BOOK | Various Artists (iDEAL Recordings) – 3xLP
Joachim Nordwall celebrates twenty years of his most excellent Ideal Recordings label with this triple LP bursting with a whopping 19 exclusive tracks from the absolute cream of underground noise/electronics/avant/drone/skewed techno and beyond.
The story of iDEAL starts out in London 1998, when Nordwall was living the hardscrabble life: working in an underwear shop near Liverpool Street station; living in a filthy Bayswater apartment; scoring industrial records from the Music and Video Exchange; getting drunk in cheap pubs, and dreaming of starting a new record label and platform. He called it iDEAL, and 180 releases, 20 years later, it has become an invaluable node for non-standard, wayward expressions of modern electronic noise in all its mutable variation.