"An arbitrary succession of more or less irritating sounds"
A neglected trove of listening riches: 50 compelling tracks spread across three playlists chucked together over the past quarter. Each should have been shared here in our Lend Me Your Radio series already, but oops...
The many highlights include the first resurfacing of Richard Skelton's Harlassen in nine years (a blistering addition to his Archival series that amplifies & expands our conception of 'new' Skelton, also embodied by his 'Delerious' Inward Circles soundtrack), plus a reminder of his classic sound through a 10th anniversary collection; a ravishing Jacob Kirkegaard piece for Holotype; &, first up, a rich meshing of Robert Donne, Stephen Vitiello & The OO-Ray's sounds on Geographic North.
As always, please accept these lists as inevitably partial pictures of the period. No doubt other entirely worthwhile stuff should also have featured - but this is what grabbed these ears as they trawled through SoundCloud over the quarter.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
These ears have made few more welcome new acquaintances this year than Alex Alarcon's Sustainer. No real surprise, though, considering the pedigree of his ravishing Radiolas - released on Lawrence English's Room40, mastered by Stephan Mathieu.
Frosted with shortwave fuzz & punctuated by morse-like bleeps, these eight pieces constitute a hymn of & to communicating across the darkness - a set of aural messages in a bottle, pushed into the void out of hope & longing.
& now there's Taps too - a lovely, glowing exercise in a kind of muffled domestic Gamelan via Tessellate.
Blurbs: "There is a history of music stemming from time spent recovering from injury. On such example is Brian Eno’s story of creating ambient music, following a prolonged period being couch bound with a broken leg.
Sustainer’s Radiolas, shares a similar tale of horizontal inspirations. Whilst recovering from a serious health condition, Alex Alarcón aka Sustainer, began working with a very limited palette of equipment at arms reach. This mix of small recorders, pedals and other electronics become a processing chain through which he started to feed shortwave radio recordings.
Having worked with radio recordings previously it didn’t take long for these recordings to take on a very personal and cathartic aesthetic. “Years ago i used to record things with another shortwave receiver at my parents house,” Alex explains, “because it was near the sea and you could catch easily stations from north of Africa. Sometimes I was even able to reach marine stations from boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It was an incredibly inspirational feeling tapping into these streams of sound."
[Taps] "During the recording process, Alex searched for every resonant object in his home and found that metal, ceramic and crystal items were of particular use. These were struck with rubber-textile mallets and fed into a loop pedal via contact mics. Once these sounds and tones were collected, they were then carefully polished into fluid timbres, using various techniques.
He strived to create a record made entirely from the sounds of his environment, using his home as an instrument. He wanted to create textures that reflected the peace of home which could only be achieved there, since outdoor field recordings can be so noisy at times."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Not everything is on SoundCloud, though it can sometimes seem that way. So our 'Radio' round-up of releases that attract these ears is splitting up, with a separate exploration of new material only encountered on Bandcamp alongside a dig into the monthly SC playlist (try this one & this if you're after our as yet undocumented latest...).
This Japan & live performance-oriented first LMYB features Andrew Tuttle, Chihei Hatakeyama, Cinchel, Laica, Machinefabriek, Marcus Fischer, Matt Christensen, Michel Banabila, sleepland & Stephan Mathieu.
If you're interested, LMYE is on Bandcamp here.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
