A bit like a low-rent Pop Ambient, it’s become an annual tradition for LMYE to pop a peck of its Festive picks into a homespun cloud-mix (see 2010 and ’11), but with JL going over to the spotty side, you might wonder if rdio killed the mixcloud star. Well, we're keeping the cloud flag flying in this wing of Earslend Mansions with an alternative Furtive 30 version (n.b. leaning towards al picks as missing half of JL’s).
albient furtive30version (track list) Lee Gamble - Digbeth Heathered Pearls - Left Climber Damian Valles - Movement III Kyle Bobby Dunn - Diamond Cove (And Its Children Were Watching) Drape - Solo in High Dreary Gimu -You're No Longer On Sertraline Hydrochloride Erstlaub - Marconi’s Shipwreck Kane Ikin - Compression Waves Silent Harbour - Aquatic Movement Stephan Mathieu & Caro Mikaleff - Radioland [Panoramica] Alex Cobb - The Immediate Past Pausal - Fertiliser/Horticulture/Mower Jefre Cantu-Ledesma - Blood Variations II 36 - Deluge En - Elysia Ian Hawgood - The Shattered Light Radere - Good Evening, Ghosts (Version) Fescal - Alchemical Wanderings Thomas Köner - Novaya Zemlya 2 Robert Hampson - Antarctica Ends Here
Mix note: composed mainly of edits of long tracks seguing from one to another, sympathetic fades and felicitous overlaps were sought, 1 part design to 2 parts indeterminacy; final section diverges, running 2 tracks in parallel rather than in series to play Köner lows off against Hampson highs, the similarity of theme of geographical extreme providing further pretext for convergence. Track sidenote: seeing as ’tis the season to be jolly and all, those with ears properly lent will find a seasonal note provided by Fescal, whose Ambient Drone recon of “Silent Night” starts at 1:13:30. Quick Yuletube:
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Resonant lyrical waxing from previously unheard-of boy from Brazil, Gimu
(‘g’ as in genre, not gold), an experimental ambient/drone musician
based in Vila Velha, Brazil, who portrays himself modestly as ‘...only
an old guy who's always making music.' Modesty becomes him, and the 'old'
bit doesn’t count against you in this particular corner of the musical
universe, at least not the last time I looked. He does seem to be
‘always making music,’ though, as a slew of releases surfacing on bandcamp through 2011-12 will testify.
First up is They All Left One by One, They All Left the Radio On on Leonardo Rosado’s Heart and Soul with mastering by Jannick Schou, who doubtless contributes much to its wider-then-a-mile architecture. It falls readily into, while transcending, the dark ambient drone category - a bleak creaking cavernous space, through which stream what might be the etiolated transmissions of the eponymous abandoned radio. The sound design has more than an echo of The Caretaker's classic Selected Memories From The Haunted Ballroom (about which it's well worth reading k-punk's consideration of this album and its sound in relation to The Shining and the Hauntology meme of recent vintage).
Netlabel Pocketfields hosts Heights and Abysses trailed by the self-deprecating Brazilian with some reflections on his working methods: 'I never really know how to explain things about my music, details. There’s a lot of persistence in them. It’s not a case of sitting down, waiting to feel inspired, etc, etc. I struggle, I try hard, I experiment until I think a piece sounds nice, beautiful, touching, etc.’ "Highly Expected (Pending) Doom" is a great teeming slab of drone goodness that well evidences the worth of this persistence.
The Inexplicable Iceberg Blue is Gimu's noisiest Heckerian maximalist manifestation, all a-buzz with a huge harmonized ultraviolet post-shoegaze wall of gruzz. Nnnnniiiiice!
A quieter incarnation is to be found
on A Prayer for Time, originally a cdr from cuddly drone-lovin' Mancs, Heat Death,
since rolled out on Gimu’s bandcamp. It sees the same short motif
looped over for the course of three tracks, each progressively more drowned in cavernous
noise than the last - somewhere between the recursive endlessnessism of Saito Koji and Jannick Schou’s noise-flecked shimmer.
There have been collaborations too. Beams is a more varied collab with SF minimal
guitar plucker, Kwajbasket ‘…combining the guitar
of kwajbasket and the drones of gimu,’ that rivals anything done by the likes
of recent prolific tandemists, Pleq, Spheruleus, Hakobune, et al.
