Grin & scowl

The prospect of a Machinefabriek & Richard Skelton collaboration is so unexpected & so delicious I alternate between an idiotic grin at the thought of it & a self-lacerating scowl for having missed it this spring. It’s not quite what you’d expect, though, this dream-team collision. Perhaps Skelton’s sound is too distinctive to blend with anyone else’s? Perhaps Rutger is too sensitive a collaborator to try?

In any case, the pair’s Daas (extract below) bears fairly few traces of Machinefabriek. There’s some subtle knocking & scuffling behind the strings (the fine Greg Haines one of the players, winningly) in the first five minutes that might be down to him, & then a languorous long fade into a glitchy final smattering of notes. That isn’t anything you’d hear on solo Skelton, admittedly.

Not that it isn’t lovely. On the contrary, it’s deeply lovely - aching & yearning. But then, as you hardly need LMYE to spell out if you follow his work, Skelton only makes music of great beauty & potency.

Nonetheless, it’s only on the much longer & older Flotter (also extracted below) that we get an inkling of what a blended version of the pair could sound like. & even that's almost certainly just the power of suggestion – this dense, magnificently gathering piece, which dates back to a 2006 self-release, hints at a richer, more overtly emotional Machinefabriek informed in some roundabout, trans-North Sea (& now Irish Sea too) way by Skelton...

But is it? Probably not, though it’s unlikely you’d come to collaborate with someone you’ve never heard & whose stuff means nothing to you – even if you’re as much a serial pairer-up as Rutger (whose latest encounter with clarinettist Gareth Davis, part of the brooding, honking Drape, features as a bonus below).

Previous coverage (& here, & here) [MF] / (& here, here, here & here) [RS]

Machinefabriek / Skelton on Spotify / Skelton streams via Type

Machinefabriek (featuring Richard Skelton) > Daas [extract] / Machinefabriek > Flotter [extract] (both from Daas, Cold Spring)

Drape - Part 3 - Machinefabriek (featuring Gareth Davis)

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

Brother, can you spare two hours?

You’d like to think a more remarkable recording than Kenneth Kirschner’s mammoth delicacy 7/17/10 will emerge this year. Or you would if you shared my greed for the unheard, the next thing...

But it almost certainly won’t – what could live with the florid bravado, the bonkers impracticality, the sheer, willful provocation of a track that wants no less than 125 minutes from you? Especially one this other-worldly & skittering, the glassily beautiful, somehow tidal sound of the celestial spheres tipped on their side & swung slowly, deliberately round the room - like a thurible trailing a kind of sonic incense.

Below is a brief, lo-res extract hacked out of the opus - a kind of violation of its singular spirit, admittedly, but also a pragmatic taster (& an aggregation necessity...). Still, you really should find a spare 293MB & the small matter of 2 hours, 5 minutes & 10 seconds for a full immersion: when you commit time to it those moments (around 1:42:06 & especially 1:55:18) where the skittering spheres begin a final return & rushing after the piece's vast trek across darker tones & moods summon real power.

"I really had the sense the piece "wanted" to be that long, so I decided to put my doubts aside and let it win," Kirschner says. "The piece is really about that slow transformation of subtle little parameters. It's very hard to come up with decision criteria for what to cut where. I certainly did take out some stuff that was downright bad, and made a few more little trims here and there. But I really felt like it was resistant to being cut down, which is why it ultimately got so out of control."

Background: "Back in May, I sat down and sampled a bunch of glassware found in my apartment -- drinking glasses, storage containers, basically any kitchenware made of glass. These sounds initially ended up in my piece 5/25/10, which resulted principally from the systematic misuse of a granular pitch shifter/harmonizer (Melda Production's very nice little MMultiBandHarmonizer). This piece ended up being a bit of a disappointment to me, though, because out of 44 initial fragments, only 4 ultimately came together to form a coherent narrative. Thus I wanted to make some use of all those remaining sounds, and they ended up being the foundation for 7/17/10," he explains.

"I fed them into Audiomulch, layering multiple sounds together while running them through granulators and delays (specifically Audiomulch's Nebulizer and UAD's Cooper Time Cube). Using Audiomulch's Metasurface, I then did a series of very slow morphs through a large number of parameters on all the various effects, and it's the slow transformation of the sounds through those parameter spaces that makes up the piece. As always for me, the raw sounds were then moved into Digital Performer for editing, where the final piece was put together."

Previous coverage (also here & here) / Discogs / 12k artist page

Kenneth Kirschner > 7/17/10 [extract] (from 7/17/10, self-released)

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

Fuller absorption

(Apologies - another re-up for aggregation, but the last for now.)

From the first it sounds special, precious, profound - & unlike almost anything else out there. Neo-classical drone? Yes, sort of. A classical palette is put to work bobbing on gargantuan bass swells that seem to last forever (& often do clock up serious, sustained minutes) – but the ‘real’ instruments involved seem to be all summoned snippets & loops. It’s a kind of classical hauntology in which traces of strings & horns are woven into epic drones, reconstituted adagios...

Kyle Bobby Dunn brings a rare intensity to bear in his music. Not in a balls-out, late Coltrane or Ben Frost mode, but rather an exceptional single-mindedness. There’s a real bravado to his very narrow sound range & its epic sustains.

Close-up it’s busier, layers of tremulous detail interlocking & fading. People talk, rightly, about The Necks’ magnificent, long-range builds. KBD, although commonly working in 10 to 15-minute chunks rather than an hour at a time, feels like their match - even if the comparison is off-beam in many ways (live improvisation versus composition, group versus solo, drums versus beatlessness...).

To take a far more obvious comparison (unsettling mood, slow-motion unfolding, uncloying beauty), he also holds his own with the drowsy, indolent Stars of the Lid...

To these ears Fervency & its ravishing expansion, A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn (out earlier this year on LMYE's revered Low Point & streamable in full below), remain his triumphant peak. Pieces like the radiant trio Empty Gazing, Small Show of Hands & Promenade (a Fervency original) achieve a consummateness of tone, of pace, of shape that is very rare. Several others are almost as memorable.

But nothing of his that's made it through to LMYE (yet to track those early releases on Housing & some others down yet, admittedly) is less than enthralling. Although the two long pieces making up the recent Rural Routes No.2 seem austerer, less instantly enticing than older material, they still unfold into richness - the more romantic Senium III especially. Dissonant Distances, meanwhile, draws on a refreshed & quite refreshing palette - more abrasive, certainly, but also fascinatingly studded with found fragments (voice, guitar, room sounds?).

Empty Gazing

Small Show Of Hands

Promenade

The Tributary (For Voices Lost)

Kyle Bobby Dunn - A Young Person's Guide To

"Low Point label proprietor, Gareth Hardwick, has been kind enough to release the 'Fervency' recordings on CD with extra material and second disc of music for guitar, piano, horn, viola, and cello. These are pretty old works for the most part - things starting in 2005 up 'til modern day 2009.

I worked again with various musicians on this but took very minuscule bits of their sound offerings and reworked them into mostly elongated pieces. There are some shorter works that feel longer -- 'Empty Gazing' and 'Last Minute Jest' are featured."

Kyle Bobby Dunn - Dissonant Distances

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

Full absorption

From the first it sounds special, precious, profound - & unlike almost anything else out there. Neo-classical drone? Yes, sort of. A classical palette is put to work bobbing on gargantuan bass swells that seem to last forever (& often do clock up serious, sustained minutes) – but the ‘real’ instruments involved seem to be all summoned snippets & loops. It’s a kind of classical hauntology in which traces of strings & horns are woven into epic drones, reconstituted adagios...

Kyle Bobby Dunn brings a rare intensity to bear in his music. Not in a balls-out, late Coltrane or Ben Frost mode, but rather an exceptional single-mindedness. There’s a real bravado to his very narrow sound range & its epic sustains.

Close-up it’s busier, layers of tremulous detail interlocking & fading. People talk, rightly, about The Necks’ magnificent, long-range builds. KBD, although commonly working in 10 to 15-minute chunks rather than an hour at a time, feels like their match - even if the comparison is off-beam in many ways (live improvisation versus composition, group versus solo, drums versus beatlessness...).

To take a far more obvious comparison (unsettling mood, slow-motion unfolding, uncloying beauty), he also holds his own with the drowsy, indolent Stars of the Lid...

To these ears Fervency & its ravishing expansion, A Young Person’s Guide to Kyle Bobby Dunn (out earlier this year on LMYE's revered Low Point & streamable in full below), remain his triumphant peak. Pieces like the radiant trio Empty Gazing, Small Show of Hands & Promenade (a Fervency original) achieve a consummateness of tone, of pace, of shape that is very rare. Several others are almost as memorable.

But nothing of his that's made it through to LMYE (yet to track those early releases on Housing & some others down yet, admittedly) is less than enthralling. Although the two long pieces making up the recent Rural Routes No.2 seem austerer, less instantly enticing than older material, they still unfold into richness - the more romantic Senium III especially. Dissonant Distances, meanwhile, draws on a refreshed & quite refreshing palette - more abrasive, certainly, but also fascinatingly studded with found fragments (voice, guitar, room sounds?).

Empty Gazing

Small Show Of Hands

Promenade

The Tributary (For Voices Lost)

Kyle Bobby Dunn - A Young Person's Guide To

"Low Point label proprietor, Gareth Hardwick, has been kind enough to release the 'Fervency' recordings on CD with extra material and second disc of music for guitar, piano, horn, viola, and cello. These are pretty old works for the most part - things starting in 2005 up 'til modern day 2009.

I worked again with various musicians on this but took very minuscule bits of their sound offerings and reworked them into mostly elongated pieces. There are some shorter works that feel longer -- 'Empty Gazing' and 'Last Minute Jest' are featured."

Kyle Bobby Dunn - Dissonant Distances

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

Andelevesarewe Anlauesargh Anlewesearche

Clearly, any chance to hear new music from Richard Skelton should be taken (which reminds me: must get that Machinefabriek collab as a matter of urgency...). So, stream six minutes of keening, tremulous "fragments" from a new, seemingly more orchestral - or lushly stringed, at least - 2-part release in his Clouwbeck guise on Sustain-Release below.

In all probability, no Mercury Prize will ever acknowledge Skelton's profound, unclassifiable work (the Uranus, sure, but not the gruesome festival of self-congratulatory necrophilia with the pretension of passing itself of as a showcase for the best of British new music).

No matter. That's just 'the industry'. He is the best of British music - not alone at the peak, of course, but certainly unique & incredibly special.

Previous coverage (& here, here & here).

Clouwbeck ~ From Which the River Rises

Clouwbeck ~ Wolfrahm [re-up]

Clouwbeck ~ A Moraine [re-up]

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

"yet another lunchbox"

One of the few New Year resolutions LMYE has managed to keep this year is a commitment to hear more William Basinski. Immerse yourself in a rich recent live rendition (this one, it seems) of the vastly moving, breath-like Vivian & Ondine below, in full or via a hand-tooled hack...

With no apology for requoting, WB on V & O's genesis: "'...I got back to work and found yet another lunchbox of ancient tape-loops to go through for possible inclusion in the new piece. I came across the main theme and thought...well, this is gorgeous; let's see if we can use this to coax Viv to come out. I went through the rest of them and found another dozen or so that mixed well used randomly, just under the threshold.

"The next night I performed the piece at Issue with their 16 channel hemispherical speaker system set to move the sounds randomly around the room as if waves in a pool. We all had a really good time. It was mesmerizing."

William Basinski > Vivian & Ondine [live extract] (from Vivian & Ondine [live])

Photos by sierus (top) & unknown (bottom: please advise!).

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

Too cool for school

If it weren't for the absurdity of having to face exams for the first time since the last millenium, LMYE's UK arm (the Barcelona branch is too cool for school, of course) would be tempted to trek around the country in Tim Hecker's wake these next few days...

Highlights include the extravagantly talent-laden shows with Simon Scott & Ryan Teague on May 15 (Cambridge) & with Simon & Machinefabriek on May 18 (London).

Instead, some prime cuts from Hecker's immense kranky pair Harmony in Ultraviolet & An Imaginary Country.

Tim Hecker > Blood Rainbow / Chimeras / Radio Spiricom / Visiting An Imaginary Country (extracts from Harmony in Ultraviolet & An Imaginary Country, kranky)

Spotty Hecker list.

Previous Hecker coverage (also here, here & here); Scott (also here); Machinefabriek (also here, here & here).

Nivalis (edit) by Simon Scott [re-up]


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