Gilded bitch

p jørgensen's third Low Point is - please brace for the obligatory intro clunk - a new high point. Like recent work from Cory Allen (covered here earlier this year), it captures an artist in rapid, thrillingly ambitious transition from their original largely digital, controlled sound into a broader electro-acoustic palette foregrounding 'real' instruments/textures & improvisation.

LP's characterisation of the piece as melancholy & intricate is pretty unarguable. The ravishing Capetillo cover captures its refracting beauty perfectly - a kind of rippling deep stasis that leaves these ears frantic to hear where the long arc of Peter's development goes next...



Artist/label blurbs: "this album has been a long time coming, as i initially started composing the opening and closing tracks back in late 2010 while touring the uk. 

this vinyl release features beautiful contributions from christoph berg on strings, jeppe skjold on reeds & anders provis on drums & cymbals. cover photography by acclaimed photographer christina capetillo. linernotes & coverdesign by architect & director morten meldgaard. mastered for vinyl by taylor deupree."

"Gold Beach was painstakingly recorded, processed and assembled over the course of the last four years.

Unlike Jørgensen's previous works, electro-acoustic compositions subject to heavy computer processing, the most notable departure on Gold Beach is the prominent use of unprocessed acoustic instruments, including double bass, violin, clarinet and saxophone.

The framework to Gold Beach was created by Jørgensen and his group of musicians carrying out a series of both structured and improvised sessions, which were then subject to additional recording, editing and further composition. Whilst some sessions stand more or less untouched from their first takes, others were subject to heavy editing, though the feeling of instant composition is maintained throughout."

Full stream:

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

On the wall

 
Several artists hitting new peaks of maturity & even, though some might hesitate over the term, profundity touch down in Bristol on Saturday. If you're remotely within reach of St John the Baptist, don't miss this second Sound Architects show.

Denmark's great p jørgensen, who  starts his UK tour the night before with a doubtless essential live set on Resonance FM, will feature alongside Simon Scott, Andrew Hargreaves' Tape Loop Orchestra & Christoph Berg's Field Rotation (all courtesy of the south-west's invaluable Fluid Radio). 

p j's new Four Pieces for Moreschi is so dazzling & so deep that LMYE's normally capacious reserves of hyperbole can scarcely do it justice. Part of an outstanding split with Low Point's Gareth Hardwick (whose Sixteenth February Twenty Twelve also merits the blurb's claims of "quiet drama and almost endless fascination"), it takes him into strikingly concrète territory via a suite of four "decidedly different pieces of processed musical interludes and field recordings". 

Even with the PR-atron cranked to maximum, Low Point is spot on about the piece: "Jørgensen’s work here is comprised of four very distinct parts of a larger whole. Beginning with dense, almost engine-like sheets of sound, Four Pieces could almost be some kind of sentient machine that organically grows as it progresses over time. Glassy and bell-like textures move into breathy and atmospheric zones, finally giving in to gentle and subdued melodies – a mere whisper of what came before and all the while maintaining a textural fragility which keeps the listener holding ones breath in anticipation of what is to come."

Like the split, Scott's Below Sea Level (on 12k) is one of the year's key releases (coverage here). TLO's forthcoming In a Lonely Place (due soon on Facture) may well be another, while FR's forthcoming self-released compilation of remixes of his Zeitreise should also be compelling...

_Sealevel.1 by Simon Scott

Tape Loop Orchestra - I Died When She Left Me

 

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

Aide-memoire

A hopeful refry of LMYE's ultimately unsatisfying earlier attempts (also this) at 'curatorial' posting: an aide-memoire compilation of 10 mostly new releases (plus one for luck) that I've yet to hear but want & mean to, by artists I - &, in some cases, we - rate or am interested in hearing - fixed here against the relentless onward rush of time & tasks, preserved for chewing over later...

Featuring Jannick Schou / Biosphere / Sean McCann / Kreng / Noveller / Nicola Ratti / Rafael Toral / Ben Vida & Keith Fullerton Whitman / Xela / The North Sea / Holy Other

NB: all streams taken from Experimedia's exemplary album previews...

jannick schou - act of shimmering

biosphere - n-plants

sean mccann - chances are staying

kreng - grimoire

noveller - glacial glow

nicola ratti - 220 tones

rafael toral - space elements vol. iii

ben vida + keith fullerton whitman - aggregatepulseripper (damaged iiii)

xela - my memories of gallifrey

the north sea - last great november

holy other - with u

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

Frozen shoe

Fleeting, completist footnote to this week's Jannick Schou extravaganza: the flipside of the limpid Piano Sketch #1, the circling, swirling, soundtrack-like Silence of Empty Houses - part of a "super limited edition" on Heat Death next month...

Silence of Empty Houses

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

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.

Globen flakket

Celestial shards: a thrilling new piece, at once somehow both ravishing & lacerating, from the apparently limitless Jannick Schou - arguably the best thing about Aarhus (though this, this & this take some beating...) - ahead of the imminent physical release of his Against A Backdrop of Blue Hills, They Were As Beautiful As A Lullaby...

frozen

Against A Backdrop of Blue Hills They Were As Beautiful As A Lullaby Sampler (via Dead Pilot records)

Just Passing By (Rural Colours) / Autumn (dotContemporary)

Discogs / MySpace / Bandcamp / Cylon (alter ego)

Past coverage (also here, here & here).

Just Passing By

Pimlico (Jannick Schou & Clem Leek) [re-up]

Piano Sketch#1 by Jannick Schou

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

Factory vent

Small Things on Sundays return with another frisky, frothy set of salsa/cumbia workouts...

Or not. More's dark somnolence & wintry sweeps may not soundtrack your sun-singed BBQ. But transporting tracks like the appropriately vast Cavernous (the album's highlight, to these ears), the industrial throb & collapse of Powerstation (stream both below) & the thrumming, dank closer From a Distance resume the rich challenge of the earlier 4am (full stream).

Blurb: "Small Things on Sundays continue to explore sounds between dark ambient and drone. This time the duo digs deeper into the darkness with more industrial and powerful sounds.

”More” is a journey into apparently desolate sites or constructions devoid of human activity. The music is a sonic interpretation of these places. It could be the vibrations of machines in empty buildings or the distant waves crashing in on the shoreline. It could be the wind audible in an old factory vent or the hissing sound underneath the car-tires on a rainy motorway, its still hard to tell which is the original source.

If you should draw a parallel to film-making, Tarkovsky would be obvious as an inspiration. The desolate passages and slow panning by the camera in long sequences with no obvious story seems comparable to what we try to achieve.

On 'More' ........ distorted, re-sampled and mutated, again and again, until a new expression is obtained."

Previous coverage. SoundCloud. Transformation / Decay - 3-track freebie (including the beautifully paced, somewhat Aidan Baker-ish Sara Said, re-upped below) via Menthe de Chat...

cavernous by small things on sundays

powerstation by small things on sundays

Small Things on Sundays > Sara Said (re-up; from Transformation / Decay, Menthe de Chat)

SToS's Henrik Bagner also operates as On The Wrong Planet. First Visit - again on Striate Cortex - seems like an austerer pleasure, though the stand-out You Can't Make Me Forget chucks an engaging riffiness & even the hint of a string passage into its eddying vortex.

you cant make me forget by on the wrong planet

Bonus:

Penumbra (Nearly There) by Damian Valles

Previous coverage (& here).

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