A brisk rummage through neo-classical riches, from Danny Norbury's profound, impassioned bowing to Johann Johannsson 's melancholy grandeur via touching, tingling Nils Frahm & crystalline Greg Haines (NB: painfully quiet until about half-way in...).
All are playing shortly in alluring Arctic Circle events, by the way - this one (DN) & this (JJ/GH/NF).
After his fine Anaxagoras on the tasty (though lapsed) Music for Our Future giveaway compilation, the frequent excellence of Peter Kirn's other stuff is hardly a surprise. But its range - from warmly enveloping ambientronica punctured by glassy shards to pinging, intricate percussive workouts & squelchy glitch, & from all of this to briefly lush piano vamping gradually overgrown by inventive, stringy tendrils - is still striking, & its depth & invention (particularly on a couple of live performances shared via SoundCloud - primarily the longer [though still edited] Montreal one, but also the extract from Hell's Kitchen) quite notable... SoundCloud.
Fairytale fashion mix (with Sarah Grant) "Sounds are mixed and arranged by me, produced from sample playback Sarah triggers by manipulating an all-felt interface, working with sounds from Shikhiu Ing."
Train69 liveset "Live PA Ableton music set, May 2009. As played in Montreal at St. Catherine Theater, and edited on Amtrak (hence the name).
Samples here include New York Consort of Viols playing my music, Laurence Pangaro briefly on the rebec, some playing of my own, a drum set made of Vidvox's David Lublin making stew last summer (and other programming done as part of the wonderful mind meld at Duncan Laurie's studio in RI), various custom Reaktor things, some Synplant oddness."
The perfect shimmering depth charges of Pop Ambient 10's Sound of one lip kissing may indeed be the best everMarsen Jules track. But the lush enveloping & breathy accumulations of the new Yara & recent Lazy Sunday Funerals remasters on Oktaf (stream both in full below, including three bonus tracks for trainspotters like LMYE) run it pretty close at times - fairly flawless voicings of the stately, reflective MJ sound...
In some moods I might think it'd be improved (refined, even) by a little less perfection, a bit more grit & urgency, or extremity. Maybe. At its weakest it can be cloying.
But ultimately that's a prescription for something else, another music from outside the distinct, hermetic Jules/Juhls universe. SoundCloud (GRM excerpts certainly worth your time too...) / Discogs
At the risk of descending into histrionic podium gush, LMYE is thrilled to host an exclusive new mix by one of our Artists of 2009, LJ Kruzer. Since we're doubly honoured to also carry the man's own words about LJ Kruzer versus archive.org, we'll interpose only long enough to commend this strikingly deft & subtle piece - the taste of its selections & the quiet bravado of its layering resonating throughout its 36 minutes.
Oh, & to alert you to SoundCloud streams of recent LJK remixes (including wide-screen dubbiness from TVO, featured here again yesterday) & Bandcamp riches (all via "respected node of musical ingenuity" Uncharted Audio) below...
Previous coverage (& here & here). LJ Kruzer > LJ Kruzer versus archive.org "This is a companion piece to my Electronic Picks mix for spannered.org, but deliberately contrasts from it by being compiled mostly of free mp3s I recently found on the Internet Archive rather than bought ones. Both mixes were made for a possible client, and both got rejected – the first because it contained too much techno, the second because it contained too much free music. Is 4/4 techno really so démodé now? And does freely available Creative Commons music from netlabels devalue (financially speaking) all music in people’s minds?
As for the first question, I don’t really care – now I’m a dad I see it as my duty to become as ignorant as possible of youth culture. As for free music diluting moneyed music, I don’t think so - but perhaps it’s a difficult question to answer definitively. If it has any impact on the music industry, it will just be to force labels to produce objects that people are willing to pay for. Slightly off-topic, but related – am I alone in thinking £6.99 for an mp3 album is a cheeky fucking rip-off?Back to the mix, quite often three or four tunes are all playing at once. The LJ Kruzer stuff in there (slight variations on album tracks) is only because I noticed it was nicely in the same key as some of the pieces I was using, and that’s about it.
Trawling through archive.org made me realise how much brilliant electronic music is being made all over the world by enthusiastic individuals, music that maybe isn’t getting the recognition it deserves because it isn’t lucky enough to get on the old hype machine that feeds our tastes. Still, I guess that’s just a fact of life, and maybe even physics – there’s only ever room at the top of the tree for a few people at a time.
The characteristic lush menace of one of LMYE's Artists of 2009, Scanner, on display in this soaring yet poised soundtrack extract from his tenure at Le Fresnoy National Centre for Contemporary Arts...
Willful experimentalist & techno lord The Village Orchestra/TVOneeds more words than time permits now. But the Outside The Circle Looking In giveaway launched today - a 14-track fiesta of rarities & unreleased material - demands some immediate recognition all the same...
...even if it has finally made me realise that the exquisite, somehow yearning vamp long loved as Shouting Gran (also now part of a longer piece on TVO's coming Amid the Blaze of Noon - out later this year) features no old dears. Oops.
Circle "...consists of tracks that have been available for limited download elsewhere, or appeared on relatively obscure compilations, plus one exclusive unreleased track.
The idea behind doing this was to tie up some loose ends, make tracks that I really liked that were ‘lost’ available again, and to draw a line under the previous years material in order to set the stall out for the various releases I have planned for this year."
A beguiling quartet of new (?) pieces inspires a down-payment on that promised look at Relmic Statute - sometimes stunning delicacy, softly sustained accretion, textural sleight-of-hand, drowsy lateral attack: all worth your time, even the piece unpromisingly/tongue in cheekily billed as made "to accompany afternoon tea and green tea for me and my friends"... Previous coverage.
DJG - Apophenia [jus wan remix] Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
"This music works by releasing carbon dioxide gas into a batter through an acid-base reaction, causing bubbles in the wet mixture to expand and thus leavening the mixture. It is used where the batter lacks the elastic structure to hold gas bubbles for more than a few minutes. Because carbon dioxide is released at a faster rate through the acid-base reaction than through fermentation, music made by chemical leavening is called ‘quick compositions’. The tracks are made up of an alkaline component, one or more acid salts, and an inert starch (cornstarch in most cases, though potato starch is also used). Sequenced feedback is the source of the carbon dioxide, and the acid-base reaction is more accurately described as an acid-activated decomposition, which can be generically represented as; NaHCO3 + H+ → Na+ + CO2 + H2O.
Acid in music can be either fast-acting or slow-acting. A fast-acting acid reacts in a wet mixture with baking soda at room temperature, and a slow-acting acid will not react until heated in an oven. This music, that contains both fast- and slow-acting acids is double acting. By providing a second rise in the oven, double-acting music increase the reliability of baked goods by rendering the time elapsed between mixing and baking less critical. Common low-temperature acid salts include cream of tartar and monocalcium phosphate. High-temperature acid salts include sodium aluminum sulfate, sodium aluminum phosphate, and sodium acid pyrophosphate. This includes both." Mokira > Polivoks jam (Dröndjävul #2)
"This is a track 100% made on the soviet analog beast Formanta Polivoks (and a spring reverb and delay). Four channel overdub.
Not that special, I don't even touch any knobs. All the modulation comes from the LFO and the two loopable envelopes.
Still (now when I'm slighly tipsy) I think it turned out to be somewhat interesting. Took like 30 minutes to record and "mix"."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Muslimgauze, possibly? Perhaps, but in an arguably narrower range. Few other artists' fecundity matches that of Celer, one of LMYE's 20 artists of 2009 - & almost none maintained the same quality across a raft of often very long releases. The five years they operated as a duo & solo artist Chubby Wolf are embedded in countless hours of mostly ambient drones (characteristically softly lulling, sometimes much darker) - see Bandcamp array below, or their mammoth discography (Discogs). With poems & photos part of their output too, they seem to have been seized by an epic creativity until Danielle Baquet-Long's death last year (at a tragically young age - an awful further parallel with Bryn Jones/Muslimgauze).
It's painful to consider the excellence of Celer's 2009 output in particular (albums like Breezes, Brittle, Capri, Four Pieces & Poulaine are among their finest, reflecting a clear refinement & maturing of their art over time - to these ears at least). But very little of their vast output, including the several free releases, isn't fully worth your time.
Hear a host of examples from across their work below.
