My Weekness

Some of these ears' listening enthusiasms from the past week...

"like a soundtrack to a solemn, ancient ceremony - with not-necessarily human participants" 

Kicking off November's Lend Me Your Radio with Aidan Baker's "steady, pulsing & eternal" Steep Uphill Climb - from Deer Park (Muzan Editions)

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"music that enters your room as sunlight...that moves slowly through your room...a slow journey into silence": Martin Hoogeboom & Oberlin's Light/Well (Thirsty Leaves)

Especially keen to hear moody alien's 12-minute Light vs Well remix...

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Much atmosphere & invention in this Precocious Mouse set from Thursday night - 'Type', live at Demerara Records' Vanishing Point Solo

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Sending LMYE love - False Colors (Appropriate Savagery Remix) by J. De Sosa on Vaagner  

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"spellbinding, uniquely decayed renderings of solo piano pieces, it forms a poetic farewell to the 20th century & a reluctant embrace of new technological possibilities" 

Believe the hype [for Akira Rabelais' Eisoptrophobia...]

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"a take on sound as a representation of memory" 

Ultra-ready for Ultrafog's How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer (Motion Ward)...

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These ears never need much persuading towards new Piiptsjilling (Machinefabriek / Jan & Romke Kleefstra / Mariska Baars) - but champing at the bit for the quartet's 'concentrated yet playful improvisations' with Sylvain Chauveau, Annelies Monsere & Joachim Badenhorst

FEAN

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Sara's choice

Talking of subtle Danish experimentalists, why isn't Small Things on Sundays' sumptuously bleak Recalling (via netlabel Audio Gourmet) lauded across their homeland & beyond? It's long overdue some recognition here, at least.

Like the great Aidan Baker in a spacelock, the EP - stream in full below, along with their earlier 4AM - deals in a kind of dark weightlessness (Floating In Space...). It's never forbidding, but even at its warmest draws on a monochrome, chilled foreboding. A soundtrack to an ascent up the north face gone wrong, perhaps.

Discogs / MySpace / SoundCloud.

Previous coverage (also here).

Small Things on Sunday > Floating In Space [Pulse Mix] (from Recalling, Audio Gourmet)

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

Dappy hay

Could there be a better way to celebrate Canada's just-ended National Day than by revisiting an artist who exemplifies national reasonableness & avuncularity? Apologies for the clumsy set-up but, well, yes, there could.

One of the many admirable aspects of the country's incredibly rich experimental music 'scene' -almost certainly not anything unitary, but rather a host of separate little pockets of people doing interesting stuff - is how forcefully it gives the lie to the Canuck stereotype. In LMYE's canon of wonderful music from Canada, which runs all the way from Loscil's scintillating Vancouver microsound to Mark Templeton's fragile Edmonton delicacies to Godspeed (& countless spin-offs)'s furious Montreal roar & Tim Hecker's vast, draining soundscapes from the same city (I think), reasonableness & avuncularity are in thankfully short supply.

So too with the the great Aidan Baker. I cherish his music for its unreasonable duration & quantity, its unreasonable fixation on a limited palette of sound, & its anything but avuncular intensity.

See here for an earlier piece (& here for occasional collaborator & current European tour partner thisquietarmy).

After the solo music, the rewarding wider-screen trio settings of Whisper Room & his earlier ARC guise: haven't quite got there with his Nadja yet (though here's parts of a couple of their sometimes magnificent 'covers' of solo tracks like Wound Culture & Beautiful Beast on Belles Betes [Beta-Iactam Ring], to be going on with; NB: blame BIRR's samples for the brutal endings...).

Whisper Room's dense Birch White (Elevation) is highly recommended. ARC's more 'tribally'-inflected stuff too, though it can be difficult to find (but Glassine II due soon, according to A Silent Place).

Hear an earlier near-kraut, spacious version of Whisper Room live & ARC's blissful pulsing & clanking - also with some notably kosmiche flavour (including an occasional riff-out too many for these ears, though don't let that put you off...):

Whisper Room > live at the ambient ping [extract] (from last.fm; possibly originally from Unravelled Brown Cassette Tape Lying on the Highway - Live at the Ambient Ping, Arcolepsy)

ARC > Buddleia (from Sans Titre, 2001-2004, taalem)

ARC > Arise > Four (from The Sun is Bleeding & Has Black Hands, Kokeshidisk)

Sans Titre also features Aidan Baker > acstcfive; Sun is Bleeding > Untitled > Clairvoyance

Interesting interview here, by the way (but can he really mean it when he says that, Whisper Room, Nadja, ARC & solo notwithstanding, "it would be nice to play in another band"?!).

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Absorbed pantheon

He's the lynchpin of a doom metal band that I'd take quite considerable pains to avoid. His singing is weedy, at best. &, at the risk of mining a rock-bottom superficiality low, he looks unnervingly like Cat Weasel.

& yet.

& yet Aidan Baker has claimed more & more of my attention this year. Increasingly, he ranks alongside, or even ahead of, his collaborator Tim Hecker in my pantheon (both Canadian & global versions). His near-endless output seems to meet its match in my near-limitless appetite to hear it.

Baker's superbly soft, dense, shimmering sound, the deeply reflective, melancholic atmosphere he shapes it in, his vast, majestic sense of space & time, his evident intensity, commitment & unswervingness, his lack of classifiability (drone? ambient? post-rock?) - all of this feeds into my certainty about his uniqueness & importance.

In a rational world, it'd be Baker not U2 getting stick for his tax arrangements & over-weeningness. In this one, however, he & we have to settle for sonic riches instead...

> K/The Shape of Your Damage/Skein of Veins/Summer Chill (all extracts from I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed, Important)

> Figure 1 (from Figures, Transient Frequency)

> Under The Snow [2008-03-07 Montreal] (lo-res)

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