About

What is Zenapolæ?

Zenapolæ (pronounced "zen-OP'-oh-LEE") is a privately owned and operated underground electronic music label that originated in the Greater Philadelphia Area of Pennsylvania (USA). The label was founded in 1999 by Zenas Bellace and Erik Smith - two people with a strong sense of D.I.Y. ethics and time-tested devotion to highly experimental electronic music. Erik has since retired from active participation with Zenapolæ. In 2007 Arnd Klotz join with Zenas to take up an active role in maintaining the label and website.

Meanwhile, Zenapolæ has made a move towards Europe. Its servers are now located in Strasbourg, France, and the label is curated by Arnd Klotz, from Tübingen, Germany.

The objective of Zenapolæ is to promote, support, and further experimentation and innovation in the musical arts and to serve as a springboard for artists working along musical lines which are typically very difficult to market commercially. The wide array of musical styles represented here reflects these aims. Zenapolæ artists hail from all over the world and work in many music genres including abstract, ambient, dark ambient, down tempo, electronic, experimental, IDM, microsound, soundscapes, scenic and atmospheric music.

We release all the downloads using the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial International License. You can find out more about this at the Creative Commons website (creativecommons.org). It's probably the only ideological statement that we'll make. We're not hardcore about it, but it's something we believe in and like to promote. We're not against anyone making a living, so we're pretty happy to support artists who chose a different route with their creations.



Contact Information

Please feel free to contact us to give feedback or site critique, or to submit your music for release on Zenapolæ.

Drop a mail to contact@zenapolae.com

If you submit music to Zenapolæ, please do not submit the same material to other labels at the same time. We invest time and effort in following your links, listening to your music, and considering a release, and it's kind of discouraging to learn afterwards that in the meantime you have agreed to release with some other label. Normally, we respond to submissions within a week, so we would ask you to please wait this period before contacting other labels.

Also, we may not respond to impersonal mails with just "Hey" and a bunch of links. A few words about you and your music would be nice ;-)


Our postal address is:

Zenapolae
P.O. Box 8863
Collingswood, NJ
08108
USA

Twitter: @Zenapolae
Here, we regularly announce new releases - follow us to stay informed.

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Recall...?

We may direct your attention to one of our past releases:

zen104 · David Kennedy: Mosaic

a dark ambient music created by "painting" on a canvas of sound

The idea for the album came around after a visit to an exhibition of John Cage“s art work at Glasgow University. There was no music at this exhibition but I was inspired to write these songs by the art work from Cage and I made an obvious connection that I could „paint“ simple drawings on to the „canvas“ of music. So I designed a „flat“ body of music and „painted“ on to this body simple and abstract ideas and shapes to create the final tracks.

(detailed description included in album zip)

Zenapolæ is pleased to present artists from



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