Farfisa & charcoal

Ahead of a long & very keenly awaited album, Constants, due some time this year on Room40, two slightly tangential but totally rewarding routes into 2012/3's Chris Herbert - still, or perhaps ever more, a marvel of detailed sound construction & manipulation, with a rare ability to make abstraction moving...

The first is an unmastered & possibly extended version of the release's exquisite, subtly cymbal-splashing coda, Nunki, which Herbert doubted back when first posted would "survive in such a lengthy form" - though the track listing below at least shows that the piece's potential purging ("if at all") has passed. 

The second, Disjecta, is a "collage of material that didn't make the cut for various reasons" - though the 13 listed tracks do include the presumably connected/featured disjxet. Of Herbert's description of this rejected material - "some of it is bananas, some of it is great but just didn't fit" - these ears detect little fruit but rather a richly nutritious harvest... 

The suggestion that in Constants "there's a lot more going on under the hood emotionally and technically" will make the many who appreciate his earlier work hunger all the more for this "aesthetically consistent development - I'm not veering too far off the track for this one, I'm sticking to my influences and fairly narrow pool of obsessions."

"Constants sounds prosaic and neutral but it has (for me) pleasing connotations on several levels. Someone once said "I think people should essentially make the same album again and again, just get better at it", with a couple of caveats I would agree with that. 

It's also (and this sounds so absurd it almost physically pains me to draw attention to it) quite a personal record in many respects, there's been a lot of life changes since the last album and to some extent this has coloured my world view in trying to dedicate time and resources to things that matter most.  It's preposterous to invoke all of this of course but in some way on some level it is about the steady presence of people and ideas that I care about."

running time (approx) 69:13
zona
william / vactrol
spirit copy
sea holly
former shoreline
as blue as your eyes lover
cinders
news from the sun
disjxet
ninths
microlensing
favours
nunki

Nunki (unmastered final) by chris herbert



While we're lunching sur l'Herbe (sorry), have some chewy SoundCloud experiments, rewarding live workouts & a stream of the mesmerising classic Mezzotint too...

live architecture test: submerged, fractured by chris herbert

two point source by chris herbert

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