"An arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds"

Wednesday 30 June 2010

Ceiling on the dance



From sister site Ears Alive: UK/European promoters - subtle, mesmerising Canadian ambient-glitcher Mark Templeton has a few dates still available on his UK/European tour next month (already visiting Berlin; Bolzano, Milan & Rome; Bristol, Cambridge, Hebden Bridge & London). Contact earslend@gmail.com for details.

Bio: 'Mark Templeton utilizes a background in acoustic music and instruments such as the guitar, banjo and accordion to compose electro-acoustic music using said instruments and a variety of effects processes. Since the release of his critically acclaimed Standing on a Hummingbird in 2007, his sound has been called "pastoral," but also "painterly" in an attempt to describe how his instruments are crumbled and reconstructed into new forms; a process further developed and realized on his 2009 release, Inland.

Templeton's works have been commissioned by organizations of contemporary dance, film and audiovisual disciplines. His live performances have at times been accompanied by Edmonton-based experimental filmmaker aAron Munson's visuals. In 2009 this ongoing collaboration resulted in the release of M. Templeton & aA. Munson: Acre Loss on CD and DVD.

Templeton has performed at international festivals and alternative spaces such as MUTEK Festival (Montreal), Unsound Festival (Krakow), Eat This Festival (Utrecht), Galapagos (New York), Send + Receive Festival (Winnipeg), Latitude 53 (Edmonton) and Suoni Per Il Popolo Festival (Montreal).'

Previous LMYE coverage.

MT home page / MySpace / SoundCloud.


Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

"yet another lunchbox"



One of the few New Year resolutions
LMYE has managed to keep this year is a commitment to hear more William Basinski. Immerse yourself in a rich recent live rendition (this one, it seems) of the vastly moving, breath-like Vivian & Ondine below, in full or via a hand-tooled hack...

With no apology for requoting, WB on V & O's genesis: "
'...I got back to work and found yet another lunchbox of ancient tape-loops to go through for possible inclusion in the new piece. I came across the main theme and thought...well, this is gorgeous; let's see if we can use this to coax Viv to come out. I went through the rest of them and found another dozen or so that mixed well used randomly, just under the threshold.

"The next night I performed the piece at Issue with their 16 channel hemispherical speaker system set to move the sounds randomly around the room as if waves in a pool. We all had a really good time. It was mesmerizing."






William Basinski > Vivian & Ondine [live extract] (from Vivian & Ondine [live])

Photos by sierus (top) & unknown (bottom: please advise!).

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Tuesday 29 June 2010

158 Bleecker?



Dubby menace, spiralling squirts & tones,
reflective Bitches Brew minors, & future sheen degraded into blurry, puffy washes - all flogged along by oil drum percussion once again, but framed now by a venue acoustic & studded with appreciative yelps: the sound of the Moritz von Oswald Trio Live in New York.

Was it their US debut (February 6 at Le Poisson Rouge)? I assume not, since that had ReComposed orchestral action. But I shouldn't be getting into this, as I've really no idea & Honest Jon's aren't saying...

Anyway, a resequenced (extracts #4, 1, 3 & 2, fellow trainspotters!) LMYE hack of samples from the forthcoming album - a companion to our earlier bodge of Vertical Ascent.



Absent any decent footage of MvOT in NY, two slants on their recent performance in Detroit:





Interview. & another (video, way longer).

Moritz von Oswald Trio > Live in New York [extracts] / [lo-res] (from Live in New York, Honest Jon's)



NB: photos by pablosanz.

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Friday 25 June 2010

Eleven cities



More of Jan & Romke Kleefstra's compelling collision of Friesian poetry with a kind of post-rock/post-jazz hybrid - the
language (& delivery)'s guttural muscularity again framed & focused by the yoked-together lulling somnolence & bubbling squawkscape of its setting.

Previous coverage (also here, in context of the great Machinefabriek...). SoundCloud.

Kleefstra|Pruiksma|Kleefstra - Sompe rûkt nei jongesbloed



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Thursday 24 June 2010

Climactic mercury



A softly gonging,
dub-inflected cover of Sonic Youth's signature tune of breathy sexual tension Shadow of a Doubt (Spot) is a welcome chance to briefly highlight the last constituent of Anticipate's great trio (after Ezekiel Honig & Mark Templeton) - the mercurial, multi-personaed Klimek.

Hear his cavernously slowed, found voice-laced take below, along with the self-evidently
far less dubby Roller Coaster Dub - an outstanding (& downloadable) shimmering vamp from his Solid State Transmitters collaboration with Polish quartet Kwartludium.



More goodies embedded - but unshareable, regrettably - at Klimek's SoundCloud. They include an exceptional dark jazz workout under the name Foton Kwartet (not a group I know, but that's no guarantee of anything much...) & an epic, loping live encounter.



shadow of doubt - draft - (SONIC YOUTH cover) by klimek

SOLID STATE TRANSMITTERS - Roller Coaster Dub



Oh, & don't miss out on the riches of Klimek's stuffed YouTube channel. Here's four examples, including a pair of stand-outs from his masterpiece -
Dedications:









Top artwork by Drew Allan.

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Wednesday 23 June 2010

Rabbit hole



Kosmische! & then some... LMYE pin-up
Xela & new name in these parts (though you've doubtless been down with them/her/it since way back when) Analog Concept lead Air Rings Vol. 2, a stirring, sprawling, spurting new synthtopian quartet on Digitalis. On limited edition (125!) cassette, naturally...



Digitalis' commentary is too inspired (the drone-zone rabbit hole especially) not to highlight: "
xela buries the grimness of recent efforts and goes positively cosmic, layering an endless array of synths into a beautiful, cacaphonous mess. matt carlson channels rainbow-era riley and blasts off from there, heading deeper into the drone-zone rabbit hole. cliffsides camps out mid-80s and arpeggiates laser beams through an 8-bit dream arena. and analog concept? russian cosmonauts can only dream of these fucking stars."

Oh, & bring on
Kind of Blå - the label's forthcoming Xela + Svarte Greiner/Keith Fullerton Whitman split LP!

Xela > In the Blinding Light They Came [excerpt] / Analog Concept > Ambient Conception [excerpt] (both from Air Rings Vol. 2, Digitalis)



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Thursday 17 June 2010

Nuanced accretion


No time, as ever, but less appetite to let outstanding new drones from a Danish duo (two Danes operating separately, that is, not as a pair - though that'd be a fine idea too: the Valby Universal Choir, perhaps?) go unacknowledged. p joergensen & Jannick Schou each summon slabs of nuanced, accreting intensity across a range of gently metallic timbres - Schou also with Clem Leek in tandem on one piece...



pj's tasters include a predictably tender, shimmering treatment by Will Long - recent
Celer post here.

pj mix. Past coverage (also here); past JS coverage (& even more, & more).

p jørgensen > July-julee remix (excerpt) - remix by pawn

p jørgensen > Degenerated crests (excerpt) - remix by will thomas long by

p jørgensen > Modstand

Jannick Schou > Part 2 (Session 1)

Jannick Schou > Pimlico (w/ Clem Leek)

Jannick Schou - Part 3 (Session 1)



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Sunday 13 June 2010

If it ain't broke



So Highpoint Lowlife has almost run its course (page down to "bit of a big announcement"...), dismayingly. But one of its final releases is set to rank among its & the artist's finest. Since a mesmerising 10-minute video down-payment on The Village Orchestra's Amid the Blaze of Noon first emerged last month, these ears have come back repeatedly for more of its sonic psychogeography - drawn by the fierce emotional heft, the mounting, glinting intensity.

Moreover, & not by total coincidence, Ruaridh/TVO has unveiled a new label. Based on the intruiging idea of "releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz", rather than genre, Broken20's first release will be another of TVO's excursions into his wilful experimental side - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

This captures a recent performance around the theme of memory, recording & data delay. Extracts (final two especially compelling):



Broken20 also involves co-conspirators Production Unit (a fellow alumnus of the fine Marcia Blaine School for Girls) & Erstlaub. Both part of the HPLL roster too, each contributed to TVO's last deviation from his other techno lord persona - the fragmented epic I Can Hear the Sirens Singing Again - & each features in the label's valedictory lap too.

PU unleashed the rattling, haunting Ghost Tracks EP recently. He & TVO are also combining talents in the utterly improbable, utterly compelling Zither Attack Formation 1 (NB: may not be official title :-) - out on the fine Moving Furniture this autumn.

Erst, supplier of another of the final three HPLL albums, also contributed the first Broken20 podcast (On Becoming Invisible) lately - a highly recommended dark ambient/drone/post-rock work-out - & is due to release more of his rumbling intensities on the new label as well.

NB: Thorsten Sideb0ard, HPLL's guiding light, "will be moving on to focus on writing and drawing a graphic novel entitled “74″, set in a near-future post-industrial northern UK city. The book takes a similar form to The Wire television show where the main character is that of the city itself, and where the chapters/seasons focus on the differing individuals and communities who make up the life and colour of the city, communities such as skateboarders who find much freedom in the abandoned concrete and industrial sttures of a once thriving city centre; A burgeoning club and music scene build around the abundance of unused venues and warehouses and lack of police intervention; anarchists and anti-capitalists looking to build a viable and alternative life to that of the mainstream; and of course, the criminal underground and those seeking to evade censorship and the law!"

Axel < Production Unit

Grey < Production Unit

Erstlaub > On Becoming An Island [Arrival Mix; lo-res] / The Village Orchestra > Cornucopier / Tribute to Martin Crane / Second Set of Rooms [Live at Miso; lo-res] / The King in Yellow [lo-res] / Arkham, Mass. [lo-res] (all from Outside the Circle Looking In, self-released - absolutely mandatory...)

Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Saturday 12 June 2010

Rare panorama



Crepuscular, dreamy shimmer: new Celer (one of LMYE's artists of 2009) on the fine Basses Frequences (Aidan Baker, thisquietarmy, Nicholas Szczepanik...) - a measured initial taste of Panoramic Dreams Bathed in Seldomness.

Past coverage.



Celer > How Dear This Ear Of Reason, Beneath The Backlit Sun [sample] (from Panoramic Dreams Bathed in Seldomness, Basses Frequences)



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Friday 4 June 2010

Shimmering frame



Among the first artists featured back in our 2007 dawn (here, in fact), Mark Templeton's densely dreamy fragilities have become increasingly core, non-negotiable listening for LMYE - one of our 20 artists of 2009 & a lynchpin (alongside two more wonders, Ezekiel Honig & Klimek) of Anticipate, one of our five top labels of last year.



All of his releases - including the delicate, classic Standing on a Hummingbird, the fuzzy Inland & its Sea Point cousin, & the warmly glowing Acre Loss - are essential. Thanks to his notable willingness to share music (via this media page & this SoundCloud), hear or download tracks from each below.

His audio-visual collaborations with aA. Munson build a shimmering frame around his almost wry experimentalism, meanwhile (video orgy below...).

An unusually dark drone -
Safely Into March ("commissioned piece for Postcards From Gowanus exhibit and radio narrowcast, New York City, March 2010") - surfaced recently. Grab this darkly brooding, subtly spacious giveaway without hesitation!

Mark Templeton > Safely Into March (self-released) > Hummingbird launch live set (Play My Tape) > Lisbon (from Summer Tour Remix Volume 1, Anticipate) > Rest Near Grey (from Tracks in the Snow, Serein) > Further To Speak (from OIO, Serein) > As the Day Grows Longer (from Holden Into Ryley, Anticipate) > Please Take Me /
Sleep In Front Of (from Inland, Anticipate) > fade from the outset / lai wah (from fields awake, v + h) > Roots Growing / Tentative Growth (from Standing on a Hummingbird, Anticipate) > continue later / drama section (from Frail As Breath, robotopera) > it's ok to fall (from Acre Loss, Anticipate)

MT also features in both this great Anticipate mix & this one.



Safely Into March



Tentative Growth from aAron munson


Mark Templeton > Zoobizarre live set

Mark Templeton > live session




Mark Templeton > Avonmore live set



Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Exuberant bullseye


So much to love in Oh (& O too, what little of its 70-track grandiloquence has come my way - hear & d/l Ah! below) that its lovability is as good a jumping-off point as any. I don’t expect this year to bring a more exuberantly joyous album, one more obviously giddy with the thrill of wielding its almost flamboyantly pruned palette of thwacks, crashes, trills, tones & squirts.

Those thwacks & crashes are Oh’s bullseye, its inner circle. It is remorselessly percussive. Even beatless vamps like the early kastell sediment featurette sequence are squealingly, pingily physical (enhanced by such ravishing, Monolake-class sound it wouldn’t be surprising to find Rashad Becker was involved…).

So it’s a total departure from glitchy ur-Oval? Hardly –- although less revolutionary in his new guise, Popp remains as impeccably post-modern as ever. But where his earlier version insisted on lifting the veil, the happy accident turned working method of his glitches highlighting all of the partiality & chance of the music’s construction, to these ears Oval’s return is all about jouissance.

Oh is deeply playful. Not just in that little yelp half-hidden in locria or, more obviously, in the concluding happyend 2 (or, to cast the net wider, in the all but perfect poptronica of Ah!’s faux-naif melodies). But fundamentally as well.

It is a ‘true’ play of surfaces – glistening, showy (hey’s drums! grrr’s ratcheting!), shameless.

This too is a deep connection with Oval’s past. That’s the point, I suppose. Throughout his long trip from pioneer to connoisseur Popp has been more than anything a master manipulator of texture. He still is.

Colin's right, of course. Performance is the essence of the new Oval. Not that the glitchy version wasn’t a form of performance too. But the striking difference between them – which we’re all marvelling/puzzling/fretting over – is one of choice.

Glitch is a celebration of relinquishing choice. Not just making room for chance & randomness, but foregrounding it & making something beautiful or at least compelling out of it.

Now Popp has taken back much of the decision-making in his music. Or, alternatively, has started wanting to put on display a kind of rhetoric of composition.

Before what was displayed was if not anti-composition then certainly a space in which the accidental is the deliberate’s equal. No longer: Oh feels very proudly ‘composed’ (though no doubt all sorts of happy accidents feed into it, that clangy, pinging palette in particular…).

There’s a connection here to Marc’s question of whether Popp is merely moving “from micro to macro…breaking up music into much larger chunks than he was previously”. As I read it, the suspicion that something more is going on is well founded.

That something more is Popp’s romantic/heroic turn – or rather a gesture in that direction. It’s not so much a matter of macro versus micro or real against artifice as it is composer/manipulator/performer versus system.

Oh’s not the apparently disembodied product of a system in the way that 94diskont or, er, systemisch are. I’m reluctant to say it’s fully composed & performed (this is looping, computed electronica, after all). But its tropes all lie in that direction.

Why? Joshua has put an acute finger on it, surely: “electronic music has thoroughly absorbed the sorts of glitchery he introduced…”

So the logical next move is deglitching – albeit that compositional & even improvisational tics (Oh’s pruned-back palette has several – like that snappy quasi-percussive ping that many of the EP’s later tracks are built around) are a kind of glitch too…

NB: above is an edit of the first two of LMYE's contributions to a disquiet-hosted discussion of Oval's Oh that is live this week. Please join us!

Oval > Ah! (from O, forthcoming on Thrill Jockey)


Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
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