Still under the gun (& staying there for another four weeks), but to keep our collective hand (& ears) in: a quartet of compelling pieces harvested a while back, slackly stacked in draft... Featuring Marcus Fischer (whose lulling Unrecognizable Now project - including a fine album for Kesh, Two Rooms - will be covered here soon-ish...); Celer (among whose inevitable torrent of releases since our last post his unexpected - & unexpectedly frisky - series of collaborations with Machinefabriek are particularly notable &, again, due coverage here 'shortly'); & Nobuto Soda&Chihei Hatakeyama, both in what I'm guessing are new partnerships (with Danny Clay&Asuna, respectively). By happy coincidence, the Hatakeyama/Asuna was due to be released today. Other sources have it already out at the start of this month, but as that would mess with the synchronicity let's agree it didn't happen... Anyway, back in what passes for full in late September.
Resonant lyrical waxing from previously unheard-of boy from Brazil, Gimu
(‘g’ as in genre, not gold), an experimental ambient/drone musician
based in Vila Velha, Brazil, who portrays himself modestly as ‘...only
an old guy who's always making music.' Modesty becomes him, and the 'old'
bit doesn’t count against you in this particular corner of the musical
universe, at least not the last time I looked. He does seem to be
‘always making music,’ though, as a slew of releases surfacing on bandcamp through 2011-12 will testify.
First up is They All Left One by One, They All Left the Radio On on Leonardo Rosado’s Heart and Soul with mastering by Jannick Schou, who doubtless contributes much to its wider-then-a-mile architecture. It falls readily into, while transcending, the dark ambient drone category - a bleak creaking cavernous space, through which stream what might be the etiolated transmissions of the eponymous abandoned radio. The sound design has more than an echo of The Caretaker's classic Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (about which it's well worth reading k-punk's consideration of this album and its sound in relation to The Shining and the Hauntology meme of recent vintage).
Netlabel Pocketfields hosts Heights and Abysses trailed by the self-deprecating Brazilian with some reflections on his working methods: 'I never really know how to explain things about my music, details. There’s a lot of persistence in them. It’s not a case of sitting down, waiting to feel inspired, etc, etc. I struggle, I try hard, I experiment until I think a piece sounds nice, beautiful, touching, etc.’ "Highly Expected (Pending) Doom" is a great teeming slab of drone goodness that well evidences the worth of this persistence.
The Inexplicable Iceberg Blue is Gimu's noisiest Heckerian maximalist manifestation, all a-buzz with a huge harmonized ultraviolet post-shoegaze wall of gruzz. Nnnnniiiiice!
A quieter incarnation is to be found
on A Prayer for Time, originally a cdr from cuddly drone-lovin' Mancs, Heat Death,
since rolled out on Gimu’s bandcamp. It sees the same short motif
looped over for the course of three tracks, each progressively more drowned in cavernous
noise than the last - somewhere between the recursive endlessnessism of Saito Koji and Jannick Schou’s noise-flecked shimmer.
There have been collaborations too. Beams is a more varied collab with SF minimal
guitar plucker, Kwajbasket ‘…combining the guitar
of kwajbasket and the drones of gimu,’ that rivals anything done by the likes
of recent prolific tandemists, Pleq, Spheruleus, Hakobune, et al.
A deliriously pulsing, proggy-in-a-good-way Leyland Kirby remix of Cedric Stevens serves as a footnote to not one but two recent-ish posts - one referencing another LK remix, of John Cale, & another featuring the Stevens original.
From The Syncopated Elevators Legacy (Discrepant), a hefty retrospective/crate-delve that also features remixes by LMYE luminaries Sylvain Chauveau, Fennesz & Motion Sickness of Time Travel. All feature in Experimedia's SEL previe/review ("bubbles of early 21st century electronic futurism, the kind that starts with a steaming, industrialized landscape vibe before panning up to a crystal clear, multi-colored skyline...") below. Also below, some enticing indications of Stevens' post-SEL direction - the exquisite, groaning 'guitar drone' of the recent Stardust/Monsoon Loop 7" (again, on Discrepant) & a dense, buzzing live tampura excursion to Benares Crescent. There's also the vault-excavating The Politics of Weakness(originally on Subliminal Toy Crash) & a richly murky new SEL-era discovery, Celestial Sundiving.
All this also serves as a roundabout way of noting that LMYE is going fairly dark for the next six weeks. Apologies to labels & artists who have sent music over for review, but an offline project is nearing its non-negotiable deadline. So posting is likely to be minimal to the end of next month - will try to make up for that with an epic final quarter...
