Ian Hawgood's Love Retained is laced with poignancy. These 10 sketches - "simple pieces...tracked to cassette, & contain[ing] no editing or mastering, so you know, filled with 'mistakes'" - are deeply affecting. Their restraint & directness amplifies the sense of frailty around their "beautiful & freeing"incompletion. Hawgood originally intended to pass the mostly piano tracks on to potential collaborators. But he came to use them unadorned: "looping on low levels at night, or when the mind wonders/wanders." The release - numbered homen100, formally out on Christmas Day & with a photo by Melanie Hawgood - is also intensely valedictory. Due to depression, Hawgood "will likely not complete a new album ever again." As a result, it marks "my first & last solo release on the label [Home Normal] I founded with my friend Ben many moons ago, & also marks me fully stepping down from the label after returning for a bit in 2016." Profits will go to Mind.
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So endlessly creative & so relentlessly collaborative are Jan & Romke Kleefstra that it's disconcerting to find that LMYE's favourite Friesians have gone over a year without a formal release. But the hiatus is over, thankfully. A trio of new & imminent albums starts with the long-gestated first offering of their venerable Tsjinlûd collective - a book ('full colour hard cover, with black & white contents, containing photography, drawings, paintings and poetry by all seven Tsjinlûd-members') & CD package. Mixed, edited & graphic designed by the great Machinefabriek - the Kleefstras' partner in Piiptsjilling- it is freighted with their characteristic drowsy, somehow ceremonial atmosphere but takes on a chattering, hall of mirrors quality through the collective's salty suite of North Sea voices. In addition, the brothers' trio with fellow Tsjinlûddite Anne Chris Bakker has new cassettes due soon on both Low Point (previously responsible for KBK's lovely Griis) & Tombed Visions. A richly, darkly droning instalment of the former - some of which was previously on Ambientblog.net's 10th anniversary collection a year ago - emerged yesterday...
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Three deep responses from Billy Gomberg, Eleh & Anne Guthrieto last week's Trumpageddon. Eleh's is "offered as a point of focus; a means of finding temporary solace from social & political turmoil", while the fraufraulein pair similarly "found solace in creating a musical diary of sorts in this immediate moment of grief."
The soothing, swelling11.9.16 forms part of a forthcoming LP-only series, Home Age. The darker, more restless fraufraulein pieces - Gomberg's sonorously clanking, Guthrie's more anxious & scattered despite its lovely horn - are the core of 7C, a fundraiser for EarthJustice, NAACP & NARAL. Self-released today, it also includes a duo improvisation & a long field recording from marches & protests in New York. "The work is raw and immediate, not a polished album that we have refined over months, but we feel that it is important to start contributing to dialogues & organizations, & communicating with those who listen about where we are in this process. Right now, we are at the beginning."
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In less than two years Danny Clay & Greg Gorlenhave already produced so much staggeringly good work together - both on Gorlen's Cascading Fragments & Sifting through Shards, as well as for Mmm Sound & for Canti Magnetici & its related Kirlian Recordings - that these ears are shamed to have only come across these plaintive, dappled delicacies very recently... From the plangent, keening Brittle & Marigolds (their most recent output - an edition of 80 tapes on CM & a digital self-release on StS) to last year's lovely, stately Conch, the pair conjure something ravishing out of their palette of "junk, found tapes, & home made cassette loops", as Gorlen puts it. You could mention faint warping, a gaseous, blurry mood, the occasional felted piano refrain, a far-off grumbling guitar. But none of this begins to capture how affecting, how frail & human this music is.
NB: images from Canti Magnetici&Mmm Sound. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
