Idle tractors

It's disconcerting to discover from Poland's Monotype that Lydia Lunch is still with us (though it's surely impossible that she's not made at least one record called Medusa's Bed already?). But it's more confounding still to have missed Gau, the beguiling debut from CMKK - a 'supergroup' from the LMYE pantheon, comprising serially promiscuous Dutch collaborators Jan & Romke Kleefstra, & Machinefabriek, plus Celer. 

"Without any plans we just went for it and ended up with hours of material that was later edited to the 48 minutes that is 'Gau'" - Machinefabriek. 

Blurb: "In March of 2012, nearing the end of a tour together through the Netherlands and Belgium, Celer, Machinefabriek, and Jan and Romke Kleefstra gathered in a country studio, spending an afternoon improvising to record Gau. Recorded by the old hardcore rocker Jan Switters at the Landscape studios in Gauw, situated in the countryside in the midst of Friesland, the place was surrounded by green fields with idle tractors, few trees, buzzards and only massive farmhouses dotting the horizon. From the almost four hours of original studio recordings, later mixed down in Rotterdam by Machinefabriek, this 48 minutes, titled 'Gau', represents the highlights of an afternoon with coffee and orangecake in the isolated Frisian countryside. 'Gau' is a Frisian word that means in a hurry or fast, but is also the Frisian notation of the village name where the studio is located."

CMKK - Gau (excerpt) [MP3 here]

The quartet hinges on Machinefabriek, of course. Besides his rewarding but unobvious recent pairing - each's epic fecundity notwithstanding - with Celer, Rutger already participated in the great Piiptsjilling with the Kleefstras (& Mariska Baars). 

Jan & Romke in turn continue to mine rich seams of salty Friesian impro with a host of other partners & contexts...

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

Apparent extinction

A pair of scintillating 'reinterpretations' by artists behind two of this year's more demanding & rewarding releases. Though one is rather more aligned with the original's glitchy momentum than the other, there's a billowing, layered intensity to both Rashad Becker & Cindytalk's takes on Pure's delicious the.end.of.vinyl - a 1999 Mego classic recently made available as a freebie download by Cronica (or cough up an appreciative Euro for it on Bandcamp ...). 

Each of these run-outs (ahem) comes from a Cronica-curated companion compilation of responses to Pure's locked-groove explorations - No End of Vinyl, naturally...

Blurb: "Fourteen years after the original release of “the.end.of.vinyl”, Pure’s first digital-only release, ten artists gather in its evocation, reinterpreting Pure’s compositions and infusing them with their own reflections on digital musics and the future of its media. 

“the.end.of.vinyl” was one of the early releases on Mego, the Vienna-based label that in the end of the millennium showed us what the music of the future could be. In 1999 its title resonated with post-analog angst, recalling the transformation (maybe even the demise) of the music market and of the cultures that it had helped to breed. It announced and perhaps confirmed an end that is still latent. 

“No End of Vinyl” started to be conceived as a set of discs that would fix onto vinyl the (mostly) digital compositions. Somewhere along the process, a dissonance between the nature of the pieces and that of the format started to become clear and a decision was made to revert to the “old” format of the Compact Disc. In a moment when analog formats seem to be going through a stage of resurgence or a final surge of vitality, we arrived to an album about the endings of a medium, released in what once was thought to be its successor and that has been coming to its own apparent extinction much sooner than vinyl has."

Various Artists - No End of Vinyl (excerpts)

Pure - the.end.of.vinyl (excerpts)

Rashad Becker - Dances III

rashad becker - traditional music of notional species vol. 1 (album preview)

Cindytalk - My Drift Is A Ghost

Cindytalk - As If We Had Once Been

cindytalk - a life is everywhere (preview)

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