Dalliance #3

Dalliance #3 by Albient on Mixcloud

Dalliance #3 is the third in a mix series under the loose stewardship of LMYE, designed for dalliers with a more oblique alliance to dance forms. Compiled by MaxMister 'al', the Dalliance mission continues a tenebrous trajectory across dance-derived genre perimeters, poking about at the interstices between techno, ambient, dub, bass, and IDM. Some of those in alliance in Dalliance #3 are 'clouded and 'tubed below. Lend a third ear!



Ilya // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Industry Part 1 clip by Shifted - UK

Symbolism In Transition by modernlove

8. Perc - Snow Chain by Perc

PRG018 - Terence Fixmer and Claudio PRC - Planetary Phase by Prologue



OVR - Post-Traumatic Son (Marcel Dettmann Construction 1) by Underground Revolution





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

Merrylands NSW 2160

Picking up where we left off on the topic of a great Australian artist with a raft of essential forthcoming releases, Pimmon claims today's 'track of the day' with a further addition to Room40's storming run in its 10th anniversary year (Chantler, Steinbruechel, Hatakeyama, the 10 giveaway) - an affecting depth charge of beautifully modulated yearning, Passing, Never to Be Held.

Oh & yes, the rest of The Oansome Orbit (out at the start of October) is just as compelling: a further taste, an edit of the darker, sharper-edged - & more typical - companion piece Holding, Never To Be Passed, is also below.

Passing, Never to Be Held by pimmon

Holding, Never To Be Passed [edit] by pimmon

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

Turn to stone

Footnote to yesterday's track of the day from Fennesz: a preview of Seven Stars' "certain lightness" - from the luscious but ultimately somewhat unsatisfying Liminal & title track (for all its jazzy brushwork) to the more wholesome Shift & July (the former a deep, gripping drone, the latter a beautifully resolved arc out of knotty abstraction) - for the non-Spotty...

Blurb: "Seven Stars was recorded in Vienna in January 2011. I recorded and mixed the album within 3 weeks. Liminal and July were existing pieces which i have reworked. (I wrote an early version of Liminal in a hotel room in Bali in 2010). There is also a version of Liminal that I have been playing live for some time. My friend Steven Hess, with whom I have worked before, happened to be in Vienna at the time of the sessions, so I invited him to join me in the studio. Christoph Amann recorded the drums using a selection of his great microphones including his amazing new Josephson.

I wanted to make a record that has a certain lightness about it and at the same time explore new territory using drums on one track. This might be something I will continue with in the future."

Note also confirmation that Fennesz's third collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, Flumina, is due out this summer on Touch.

fennesz - seven stars (album preview) [via experimedia]

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

Karl Philipp Fürst Schwarzenberg

No disrespect to The Liminal, obviously, but to these ears the most compelling recent sliver of Fennesz isn't his recent hymn to the must-read site but rather today's track of the day - his hissingly vaporous, faintly mournful follow blind piece for the recent Morning Line 'pavilion' in Vienna.

(It's one of several lovely responses to the installation: hear Terre Thaemlitz & Carsten Nicolai's contrastingly maximal & minimal contributions below too. A further six in the full set, & more - including Lee Ranaldo, Chris Watson, Mark Fell & CM von Hauswolff - from earlier installations (Seville curated by Florian Hecker, Istanbul by Russell Haswell...)

Blurb ("topographic spatializations"!): "follow blind builds on a sonic world of highly processed guitar sounds and drones, a sort of signature sound Fennesz has persistently developed and honed over the past decades. Its condensations, accelerations, and topographic spatializations also form the basis for the composition for The Morning Line. Layers and parallel trajectories of superimposed guitar drones with various frequencies are combined to form an overtone melody or seem to blend into each other in their overtone ranges. Yet that melody changes constantly as the visitor moves through the installation, and so a sort of meta-music emerges that is perceived in forever new ways relative to one’s position in The Morning Line. The sounds slowly roam the structure of the pavilion; the pace of the changes is experienced as depending on whether the perceiving body is in motion or takes up a static position. The dimensions ofThe Morning Line and the large number of speakers allow the sounds to form epic surfaces."

Since the Fennesz clip is somewhat unsatisfying (much too short & watch out for the brutal chopping-off at the end), you too may be sad enough to download it here for looping...

Hear the new-ish Seven Stars (Spotify) & blurb/buy it (Touch).

Christian Fennesz_follow blind_2011

Terre Thaemlitz_TML #25_2011

Carsten Nicolai_morning line quanta_2011

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

Tragedie van een Liedjesschrijver

No, really - 'track of the day' won't be every day. But it's back again today to highlight the definitive version of Orphax's blistering, beautiful Samen aan het water, an LMYE favourite that features on his first pressed CD - the forthcoming six-track De Tragedie van een Liedjesschrijver Zonder Woorden (Moving Furniture).

Haven't changed my view of this intense piece as zennishly reflective & judderingly unsettling all at once. But it seems to have gained some powerful restraint & stillness in mastering. Either that, or these ears have shed some restraints in the meantime...

Blurb: "Track from the upcoming album "De Tragedie van een Liedjesschrijver Zonder Woorden" that will be released on Moving Furniture Records in October.

This is a repost of this track, but now it is the mastered version, which has been done by Jos Smolders. De Tragedie van een Liedjesschrijver Zonder Woorden is an album with some very personal pieces of music written over an extended period of time in which some major things changed in my life. It is an album about love, stress (due to finishing a Masters study in geology), struggling with sickness and eventually finding peace of mind.

Some points have gone, but others are still valid."

Samen aan het water (master) by Orphax

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

Optional to view

Disclosures: 'track of the day' isn't going to be every day & its notion of what constitutes a track may not be yours. Regardless, this preview of Billy Gomberg's Give or Give In C60 cassette for Digitalis demands attention.

The tape's first side (called Rude Divides, seemingly...) punctures a brooding, burbling backdrop with nicely loping trills & fills. But things turn really exceptional on the flip (the beautifully titled Shown Up In Your Chest Like Silver) as affecting tones pierce a murky fog in a kind of sonar navigation of the depths. Even just seven minutes of this (out of a full 30) deliver a nearly hallucinatory & entirely diverting immersion.

strictly lower-case blurb (to reassure us we're in the tape underground, presumably...): "billy gomberg operates out of brooklyn, utilizing whatever tools and instruments he can get his hands on to create sprawling compositions. these two 30 minute treks of synthesizer & field recordings morph in countless and often unexpected ways. irregular drones and muddy rhythms inhabit strange, interplanetary dance zones, pumping along until a spectral wave of tones overrides everything and slows it down to a crawl. gomberg has an innate skill in combining so many fine details into a deliciously cohesive whole. edition of 75. chrome."

More at SoundCloud (also here, here, here, here - the first a mesmerising (& free!) download from a forthcoming release on rest + noise, the last also downloadable & arguably even better - & much more ...) & Vimeo.

UPDATE: Billy notes that Give's first side was recorded during this appearance at the Qwartz awards & gives further background to the release.

billy gomberg - give or give in (album preview)

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

Clatsop County

Track of the day: not exactly a new feature, but an alternative way of highlighting great musicians' work through a quick engagement with a single diverting track. Today's debut entry combines two very fine artists who should have had more airtime on LMYE to date - p jørgensen & Chris Herbert.

Herbert's subtle, enveloping remix of pj's Astoria would eventually feature, as the volcanic Fissures ("all these little jagged rivulets and glassy edges with a persistent ooze underneath", as he puts it), on Soundtrack_Remix for Under the Spire. This version floating alongside the release (one of 50 albums that particularly mattered to LMYE in 2010) was a very nearly complete work in progress, though rather shorter than the eventual 12:12. To these ears, its warm, faintly metallic hum swells into a delicate, memorable bloom of tones & shakes.

Many more treats on the pair's SoundClouds (here & here), of course - including an equally fine Herbert remix of Gareth Hardwick & some previews of the outstanding S_R. You'll also want to stop by Herbert's YouTube channel (not least for this new upload).

Oh, & there's also this LMYE hack of extracts from pj's debut...

p jørgensen - astoria (Chris Herbert remix, excerpt)

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

Shape of clouds

Ahead of an imminent-ish look at a great Australian artist whose raft of essential forthcoming releases includes one for Room40, it'd be rude not to acknowledge another essential forthcoming release by another great Australian artist - & R40's label head.

Is The Peregrine Lawrence English's best since the magnificent, monstrous Kiri No Oto? Or even his best, bar none? Probably not a particularly productive line of enquiry, but the first couple of tasters suggests it will immediately claim a leading place in his pantheon.

The stream & video below capture it summoning real profundity & profound beauty from a soaring, layered vastness. I can imagine returning to The Peregrine repeatedly for many years & continually finding new wonders in it...

Blurb: "The Peregrine was realized in sound during the first half of 2011. Based upon J.A. Baker’s book of the same name, the album is contingent upon the descriptions of land, environment, and movement contained within the text and further develops Lawrence English's experimentation in harmonic distortion and saturation.

"I first discovered The Peregrine some years ago whilst visiting with David Toop in London. The book had popped up on David's radar and whilst chatting in his loft, I happened to pick it up. The page I opened to described the sound of a Barn Owl on the hunt. Before I finished that paragraph I knew I needed to own this book and find out more about the somewhat mysterious English author J.A. Baker.

I feel The Peregrine epitomises a kind of obsessive rendering of landscape and environment. Throughout the book, Baker places central focus on the micro and macro worlds which surrounding him. He expends as much attention on the shape of clouds or the murmur of a river as on the bird, which inspires him to write. At no point does the idea of humanness come to dominate – in fact human kind merely appears as haunting images that, as Baker summarises, ‘stink of death'. Elegantly misanthropic. Even the author remains oddly mute – we never discover anything about him, not what he does, how he lives or even where he sleep or eats. He is merely a conduit through which land is rendered.

This record is a homage to The Peregrine. Having not spent any great amount of time in East Anglia where the book is set, I have used Baker's descriptions and suggested mappings as a guide to the character and composition of the LP. The Peregrine has profoundly affected my work and it's for this reason I felt compelled to create this piece.

I hope it conjures up for listener just a few of the lasting impressions the book has left on me and in the process I dearly hope others can discover J.A Baker's evocative writings – thankfully now back in print!"

Lawrence English - The Peregrine (album preview)

December 24 - Frost's Bitter Grip - Lawrence English

While we're in R40 territory, the label also has compelling releases from Chihei Hatakeyama & Steinbruechel ahead. Stream tasters of both - Chihei's lovely swelling meditations, Steinbruechel's deeply subtle interplay of drone & thrum - below.

Chihei Hatakeyama - Alchemy

Chihei Hatakeyama - Renitency [via pdis_inpartmaint]

Steinbrüchel - Narrow (edit)

Steinbrüchel – N-Variations [via pdis_inpartmaint]

Oh, & finally: can't wait for this concert with LE's Lonely Women's Club plus the legendary Tony Conrad & compelling Nicola Ratti...

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

Thin air

Gorgeous, intense but not lachrymose reflectiveness? Check. Limpid post-classical quasi-ambience? Check. Stately, filmic unfolding themes? Check. Gloriously overblown, portentous titles? Check again.

Yes, Stars of the Lid are back. Well, sort of - A Winged Victory For The Sullen is SOTL-er Adam Witzie discovering "after almost 20 years of struggling to create interesting ambient drone music", in tandem with composer Dustin O’Halloran & premier league sidekicks like Hildur Gudnadottir & Peter Broderick, "...what I am doing."

Blurb (straight faces, please...): "‘A Winged Victory For The Sullen’ is the first installment of the new collaboration between Stars Of The Lid founder Adam Wiltzie and L.A. composer Dustin O’Halloran. The duo agreed to leave the comfort zone of their home studios and develop the recordings with the help of large acoustic spaces, hunting down a selection of 9ft grand pianos that had the ability to deliver extreme sonic low end. Other traditional instrumentation was used including string quartet, French horn, and bassoon, but always juxtaposed is the sound of drifting guitar washed melodies. The recordings began with one late night session in the famed Grunewald Church in Berlin on a 1950s imperial Bösendorfer piano and strings were added in the historic East Berlin DDR radio studios along the River Spree. One last session on a handmade Fazioli piano in a private studio on the Northern cusp of Italy, before the final mixes took place in a 17th century villa near Ferrara with the assistance of Francesco Donadello. All songs were then processed completely analogue straight to magnetic tape. Their secret to harvesting new melodic structures from the thin air of existence was for the duo to push themselves to dangerous territory, realising that clear thinking at the wrong moment could stifle the compositions. The final result is seven landscapes of harmonic ingemination. In ‘Requiem For The Static King Part One’ – created in memory of the untimely passing of Mark Linkous – they have taken the age-old idea of a string quartet and then shot it out of a cannon to reveal exquisite new levels of sonic bliss. Of the 13 minute track ‘Symphony Pathétique’, Wiltzie says ‘after almost 20 years of struggling to create interesting ambient drone music, I feel like I have finally figured out what I am doing’. Notable guest musicians include Icelandic cellist Hildur Gudnadottir, as well as Erased Tapes label comrade Peter Broderick on violin. A Winged Victory For The Sullen is not a side project – it is the future of the late night record you have always dreamed of.

CONTEXT: On May 24th 2007, in Bologna, Italy, Adam was on tour and playing with the late Mark Linkous & his beloved Sparklehorse, on what would be their final European tour. That night Adam invited friend and colleague Francesco Donadello to see the concert, and Francesco's guest this evening was composer Dustin O'Halloran (Sofia Coppola’s ‘Marie Antoinette’ O.S.T.). Through a strange twist of backstage conversations surrounding passport cache conundrums, and love of Italian gastronomy, a curious friendship began that now has brought forth an offspring of truly curative compositions for the world to savour."

a winged victory for the sullen - steep hills of vicodin tears

A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Requiem For The Static King Part One [via erasedtapes]

we played some open chords and rejoiced, for the earth had circled the sun yet another year (teaser) [via adambryanbaumwiltzie]

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

Hidden friend

Welcome new sounds from the singular Ex-Easter Island Head: Music for Moai Hava will be unveiled live in Liverpool next month in a collaboration with the a.P.A.t.T. Orchestra performed before the actual Moai Hava statue. Time to head north...

More EEIH goodness lies ahead too, in the form of the finalised follow up to their outstanding Mallet Guitars One - for these ears, a key release of 2010. Hear undulating, pealing live workouts of, yes, Mallet Guitars Two (which bears all of the first's twangy pungency, but seems shaped with more light & shade...) below.

Ex-Easter Island Head - Mallet Guitars Two (live extract) [lo-res]

Mallet Guitars Two (Live) by Ex-Easter Island Head

Mallet Guitars One (buy) by Ex-Easter Island Head

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

Big Long Now Then Now Then

LMYE and Pausal engage in an orgy of reciprocity, as Pausal check LMYE checking Pausal, giving further pause to check further Pausal.

Pausal: "Autumnal" by Students of Decay

You'll recall it was their Autumnal cassette on SoD last time we checked the Pausal pulse, and in the meantime Alex has snuck out a visually-seasoned slice of "Side A".

Pausal - Autumnal Side A (edit) from Alex Smalley on Vimeo.

The lads now have a blog, through which we learn of another new track here, while hearing of Thorsten Sideb0ard of Highpoint Lowlife's latest project. Thorsten was a smart enough cookie to give us their debut Pausal ep for free (later reissue covered by your scribe pre-LMYE in another place). Alex writes: "The Pausal track ‘Afar’ has been contributed to the final ever Highpoint Lowlife release ‘Physic or Surgery’. We have followed this label for years and will miss it’s output greatly, it has been an honour to work with them and now be included in their final release. ‘Physic or Surgery’ is a compilation of all the different artists who have been involved with the label over the years, it also comes with a PDF comic created by the label owner Thorsten SidebOard. Be sure to follow his work in the future here."

Physic Or Surgery Mixtape by sideb0ard



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

Witches brew

Note to self: hear more Witxes, soon. Maxime Vavasseur's "roaming, roving & raving" variety of fine drone Lyonnaise needs a hefty post of its own, but in the meantime spare 60 seconds for the warm flood of his One minute for the stars - a delicately shaped stand-out from a diverting eponymous compilation on SEM.

One minute for the stars by witxes

Gallic inscrutability means no blurb for OMFTS. But the consistent running times & similarly formatted predecessor tell the story clearly enough: a challenge to an arresting line-up (Kenneth Kirschner, Robert Lippok, Philippe Petit, offthesky...) for a self-contained/externally constrained piece that runs for a minute exactly & somehow responds to the theme of stars.

Not everything in the resulting 36 minutes is essential. But the core is a trove of disciplined, brisk treasures. Some nuggets below, followed by a couple more from the sunny original...

One minute for the stars by katecarr

One Minute For The Stars (unmastered version) by Hidekazu Wakabayashi

One Minute For The Stars by Man Watching the Stars

One Minute For The Sun by sebastien druot

One Minute For The Sun by Man Watching the Stars

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

Hybrid Juxta Posers

Bristol’s Swarms mix post-rock/shoegaze with post-dubstep, making common cause with the juxta-posing likes of Clubroot and Mount Kimbie. Meanwhile Berlin’s Dadub site themselves at the inbetween of Ostgut Ton/Berghain techno and Raster-Noton ambient-tinged minimal tech a la Kangding Ray. It’s part of the exponential genre hybridization characterizing contemporary electronica, but this is where quality control identifies one or two blends that are more than simply fiddly-dee and modish, and actually provide for listening pleasure.

Swarms’ Old Raves End (Lodubs) is not all comfy listening, with a tad too much Burial-beloved helium-diva vox manipulation early on, but as it proceeds, there’s much to enjoy in its melding of postrock/shoegaze chops with dubstep and d’n’b. The remarkably unlovely suburb of Stokes Croft must have been the site of something distinctly blissful for the lads, commemorated as it is with this beauty:

Stokes Croft by Swarms

More gauzey texture and low flow follow:

Time Lapse by Swarms

Sterling by Swarms

Bison by Swarms

Meanwhile, in Berlin, Italian techies Dadub patch the recursive pulse'n'atmo of that zone’s techno’s kick-thrum into the ambient dub motherlode in surely the most vibrant recent example of what's become an increasingly moribund by-numbers sub-genre, with their ambient-dub-techno transmission, Monad VIII on well worth watching Stroboscopic Artefacts (see esp. Lucy).

Hadean // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Ilya // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Amnion // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

Biopoiesis // Monad VIII [Stroboscopic Artefacts] by Dadub

“Dadub built Monad VIII upon the concept of systems. It’s an EP where molecules, hyper-structures, sonic cells shuffle together to form a subaqueous dub landscape. This is a vision of creation as a fluid, self-organizing structure. It soundtracks the earth submerged underwater in ‘Hadean’ and charts the cradled development of human life with ‘Amnion’. The crux of Monad VIII is ‘Ilya’ an odyssey dedicated to Ilya Prigogine, whose research into dissipative structures and complex systems won him a Nobel prize and inspired Dadub to explore the limits of the Monad to an almost quantum level. Dadub have created an experiment into the creative process which has produced four systematically ecstatic results.”

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