Arm//Lost

You can't say Highpoint Lowlife isn't going out on a high: Thorsten Sideb0ard's monumental curatorial effort winds itself up for the final curtain with TVO/The Village Orchestra's beautiful epic Amid the Blaze of Noon. Has there been a better HPLL release than this juddery, tangential suite, its 14 parts jewel-glinting & city-smeared (the mighty Erstlaub, who's name-checked in one of the early chapters, might have a thing or two to say about that, of course...)?

"It’s almost a redundancy to point out the hidden depths to

cities. Better authors and thinkers than I have expended

time in tracing their esoteric underbellies: Sinclair,

Morrison, Home, Calvino, Ballard and Ackroyd are the

ones that had the most profound effect on me. I have a

recurring urge to record and document the city (the city as

an entity of entirety rather than a specific one, the ur-city

that lurks behind all the other, smaller facets - maybe like

a hologram, each small part also containing the whole,

something said more elegantly by Neil Gaiman than by

me) and also find myself constantly influenced by and

through by the concrete, metal and glass.

Amid The Blaze of Noon began as a performance at

Cafe Oto (as opposed to OTO?) in 2008. Organised by

Thorsten from Highpoint Lowlife, I decided along with my

long time collaborator and ex-Marcia Blaine girl Bryan

Kerr to create a performance based around the area

where the event took place. The plan was to spend the

day wandering through Dalston and Stoke Newington,

accompanied by our friend and collaborator Dave Fyans/

Erstlaub, with no destination in mind, recording all the

while.

The performance itself was almost incidental. A planned

conjoining of audio and video from the day coupled with

heavy processing, it worked to a degree, but technical

problems led to an awkward, uncertain display which had

moments of brilliance coupled with fragments of waste.

The recordings - by now some heavily processed, others

unadorned - persisted though. There was a plan to put

together a DVD of Bryan’s images with a new album based

around the recordings - but in the end this fell through, with

a single video for ALA the only testament to the plan (http://

vimeo.com/11467858). Instead I used the recordings to

anchor other work that I had already put together for a

work based around cities, as well as new music inspired by

or involved directly in the performance.

Albums - or ‘albums’ - are apparently an outmoded concept,

an anachronism in a time of single track mp3 lust. But for

me there will always be a place for a longer-form work, an

album to take from A to A ∴ in a fixed point in time, and

that tries to achieve a certain goal along the way."

Stream the entirety of Ruaridh Law's magical psychogeography tour (jumping off point: Dalston) below. Plus a re-up of those ALA visuals...

Meantime, Thorsten also resuscitates Chris Douglas's Dalglish. This splintering lope round an unobvious block, bringing the label full circle from its first non-compilation release, demands the attention that Douglas has so rarely had in 20 pioneering years.

Dalglish - 10 7.3.2009

The Village Orchestra - Amid The Blaze Of Noon

Liber Aleph//Idle Fear//ALA//Volume B//

Grayscale//STA//Fyans, Lost//Shouting

Gram//The Girl With The Star On Her

Arm//Lost in The Waste//Aklo (Red Hook

to Hackney)//Destroying Angel//Abney

Park Scrying//The Empire Never Ended

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Old topographies

Erstlaub remixed? My undiplomatic twin would probably rather have Fyans' piercing, magical menace unleashed on & infused in to others than the reverse. But no one asked him. Whereas Broken20 (our new label of 2010) has asked several fellow travellers from the Highpoint Lowlife/B20 stable, enlisting them to cross-pollinate his windblown specialness.

One of the most apt of the refixers is Moving Furniture's Sietse. His Orphax is a kind of kissing cousin to Erstlaub. No surprise, then, that his swirling, layered The Last Few Seconds Before Hibernation is one of the highlights of The First Few Seconds After Sleep, which seems like it's going to end up preceding the logically prior The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep (downloadable excerpt) - unless these ears somehow missed that one somewhere along the way (apologies if so)...

Another is Alastair Cook. See video (lovely rush-blur) for his Asleep (ditto) take on Sleep above.

The remainder comprise B20 potentate Ruaridh TVO (finessing his experimental & techno urges into a single outlet), plus Mandelbrot (20-minute buzz guitar epic), 10-20 (Walk & Reed Bed remixes further stand-outs) & the improbable Bob Techno.

Orphax in further B20 action - deploying "a certain melancholy" - with the latest in the label's jaw-droppingly excellent series of 'podcasts'...

Below, three compelling new Ersts - one valedictory, one later live, one with self-made video, each dense with riches...

Team Handed We Go, Into The Night

Inverted Memory

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Cloud formation

A sort of scrapbook of new treasures, & a kind of mix - an LMYE-curated selection sifted out of our SoundCloud (one of them, anyway) over the past couple of days & stuck up as an experiment (in capture, in non-writing, in satisfaction, in limits)...

I30 > Live at Triple Door (May 2010, Seattle) (via studio irisarri)

"Live performance as I30, opening for Jóhann Jóhannsson's Seattle concert at The Triple Door in May 2010. This is our interpretation of Arvo Pärt's "Für Alina," unedited. I30: Rafael Anton Irisarri - Notebook computer + bowed guitar / Phil Petrocelli - Drums + percussion / Kelly Wyse - Piano"

greg haines > with everything that breathes (rough mix)

Damian Valles > Winter Clusters

Tone Color > just passing by...

"Track 2 / Side A: A selection from the limited edition cassette release, 'Fixtures'. Out very soon on the Australian imprint, Left (field) Recordings. http://www.myspace.com/fromtheleftlabel"

Rob Theakston > I Am Waiting for You to Stop Being Mad at Me (Off the Sky Reconstruction)

relmic statute > Live4

Pillowdiver > Harrisburg Pt.1 (remix for Jasper TX) [re-up]

"since the double CD is sold out, I thought I'd share this here..."

Erstlaub > Sleepwalking Into The Underworld (via sideb0ard)

"New DVD project by Erstlaub on Highpoint Lowlife. Taking pre-orders now at http://highpointlowlife.com/ and DVD discs should be shipped within the week."

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Attack formation

Broken20 ("releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz" - a first look here) seems to be gaining ever more traction. After an almost daily accumulation of potent mixes (Erik XVI's jaw-droppingly brilliant "valium-paced four to the floor" The Fading Splendour of a Technological Future setting some kind of high water mark) & welcome 'precursor' rereleases, a full-blown album from the label overlord will be surfacing any minute now - frisky excerpt below...

So too will new gear from the great Erstlaub - classic wind-blown, metallic austerity drone, but with a sweeter kernel than this most exacting artist normally allows himself (again, excerpted below...).

Meanwhile, Ruaridh/TVO & Production Unit's Rose and Sandy droney zither excursion is now called Cat's Cradle (out in a month on the fine Moving Furniture). It's hard, though, not to feel wistful for the Zither Attack Formation name that was in earlier circulation - though how seriously that was intended remains unclear.

In any case, the music remains improbable & beguiling - & a quite legitimate heir to Laraaji's Days of Radiance, the obvious comparison.

The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep (Excerpt) by Erstlaub

"A tiny little slice of 'The Last Few Seconds Before Sleep' which I'll be performing for the first time in public at the N-ilk festival at the Botanic Gardens, Dundee on September 11th, 2010.

The full 40ish minute piece will be released on Broken20 later in the year. Built entirely using a Nord Modular G2, recorded using a couple of delay units in one pass."

"Just before sleep, in the Limbo between the conscious mind and the great abyss, I become aware of a tiny sound. A minute burst of white noise lasting just a few seconds in linear time, this is the gap between worlds. Aware but powerless to act, I know this sound inside out, a minute piece of sonic cartography that contains all the information in the universe, the whirring of a vast organic hard-drive as the processor performs a memory dump between logic and something much bigger and weirder. delay lines feedback to Omega Point, choirs of particles stream towards event horizons, linear time holds no sway here this vast but tiny sound contains all of time and space and possibility."

Rose and Sandy play Cat's Cradle (Excerpt)

"I don't know exactly what the instrument is. It's probably a kind of zither; that's how my dad described it to me when he first told me about it.I was immediately fascinated by his description: a set of strings on the left side that was blocked into eleven chromatic 'chord banks', each adjustable between major, minor and suspended fourth via little levers at the front that literally tightened the string by a semitone; on the right, three octaves of notes backed by an image of a piano keyboard for guidance.When I finally set eyes on it, I was in love; it's a truly beautiful object, about three feet wide and two deep, with surprisingly detailed religious iconography inside each of the sound holes.And then there was the sound - like plucked piano strings, but with resonance that's amazing even for an acoustic instrument.A single note can hold for a couple of minutes if there's an adequate surfeit of background noise.

It came into my father's possession as a loan from some nuns he knew through his church work.I know.One older sister at the convent had played it at times of worship, but since she had passed away it wasn't used, so they wondered if he had a use for it. It was a kind of extended loan of the sort that often occurs in the weird system of quasi-ownership that persists in these circles.I hinted heavily until such time as the freehold drifted towards me.
I was told that the usual technique was to only pluck the melody on the right hand side and let the chords on the left thrum by themselves through vibration. It was a beguiling notion, and it does work, but there are so many other options, including prepared techniques, hitting notes in different ways, and adjusting which part of the string is struck, that I tended to run the whole gamut.

Every google search I've tried brings up similar-ish things, but nothing quite like this. It could be unique, but I doubt it; I'm guessing it's just a little obscure.

As soon as I heard it, I determined to collaborate with Rose on a project not dissimilar to his Accrual venture, whereby live instrumentation (guitar, in the case of Accrual) was used as the solitary sound source and processed live.All of the work you hear was created in two impromptu sessions where we agreed a key, hit record and just started playing.The only edits are start and end points, plus a splicing of each of the five pieces together to make a single track.

We've called it 'Cat's Cradle'.It represents a few different notions:Firstly, the many strings mirror the manifold web of twine used in the child's game of the same name; second, we've both become fathers in the recent past and I wanted to reflect the multitude of joy, worry and responsibility that "the cradle" brings; thirdly, there's the air of puzzle in much of my dealings with the instrument, be they of its origin or my (at times clumsy) playing. Imperfection and the sense of an ever-evolving process seemed to dominate its aura, so the naive complexity of the tactile folk game seemed to fit well.

I had originally done something vaguely along the lines of automatic writing for liner notes, whereby I just let me mind wonder as the music was played back in realtime, but it didn't chime too well. In the end, it could be summed up in one line: "We pass the cradle back and forth.I hope I never make a mistake."

We hope that the sound could be recreated in a live environment, as that's essentially how it was created, but there's a drawback:somebody (i.e. me) will have to tune the 114 strings..."

TVO - BC7 Memory (excerpt)

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If it ain't broke

So Highpoint Lowlife has almost run its course (page down to "bit of a big announcement"...), dismayingly. But one of its final releases is set to rank among its & the artist's finest. Since a mesmerising 10-minute video down-payment on The Village Orchestra's Amid the Blaze of Noon first emerged last month, these ears have come back repeatedly for more of its sonic psychogeography - drawn by the fierce emotional heft, the mounting, glinting intensity.

Moreover, & not by total coincidence, Ruaridh/TVO has unveiled a new label. Based on the intruiging idea of "releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz", rather than genre, Broken20's first release will be another of TVO's excursions into his wilful experimental side - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale.

This captures a recent performance around the theme of memory, recording & data delay. Extracts (final two especially compelling):

Broken20 also involves co-conspirators Production Unit (a fellow alumnus of the fine Marcia Blaine School for Girls) & Erstlaub. Both part of the HPLL roster too, each contributed to TVO's last deviation from his other techno lord persona - the fragmented epic I Can Hear the Sirens Singing Again - & each features in the label's valedictory lap too.

PU unleashed the rattling, haunting Ghost Tracks EP recently. He & TVO are also combining talents in the utterly improbable, utterly compelling Zither Attack Formation 1 (NB: may not be official title :-) - out on the fine Moving Furniture this autumn.

Erst, supplier of another of the final three HPLL albums, also contributed the first Broken20 podcast (On Becoming Invisible) lately - a highly recommended dark ambient/drone/post-rock work-out - & is due to release more of his rumbling intensities on the new label as well.

NB: Thorsten Sideb0ard, HPLL's guiding light, "will be moving on to focus on writing and drawing a graphic novel entitled “74″, set in a near-future post-industrial northern UK city. The book takes a similar form to The Wire television show where the main character is that of the city itself, and where the chapters/seasons focus on the differing individuals and communities who make up the life and colour of the city, communities such as skateboarders who find much freedom in the abandoned concrete and industrial sttures of a once thriving city centre; A burgeoning club and music scene build around the abundance of unused venues and warehouses and lack of police intervention; anarchists and anti-capitalists looking to build a viable and alternative life to that of the mainstream; and of course, the criminal underground and those seeking to evade censorship and the law!"

Axel < Production Unit

Grey < Production Unit

Erstlaub > On Becoming An Island [Arrival Mix; lo-res] / The Village Orchestra > Cornucopier / Tribute to Martin Crane / Second Set of Rooms [Live at Miso; lo-res] / The King in Yellow [lo-res] / Arkham, Mass. [lo-res] (all from Outside the Circle Looking In, self-released - absolutely mandatory...)

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Quadratic polynomials

"...the set of complex values of c for which the orbit of 0 under iteration of the complex quadratic polynomial z_n+1 = z_n² + c remains bounded. That is, a complex number, c, is in the Mandelbrot set if, when starting with z₀ = 0 and applying the iteration repeatedly, the absolute value of z_n never exceeds a certain number (that number depends on c) however large n gets.

For example, letting c = 1 gives the sequence 0, 1, 2, 5, 26,…, which tends to infinity. As this sequence is unbounded, 1 is not an element of the Mandelbrot set.

On the other hand, c = i (where i is defined as i² = -1) gives the sequence 0, i, (−1 + i), −i, (−1 + i), −i…, which is bounded and so i belongs to the Mandelbrot set..." [source]

All the shuddering, churning way to the 13-minute epic Twilight / Delay's arias of feedback, Mandelbrot's Effect / Delay (Highpoint Lowlife) - tipped here the other day - smartly slaloms in & out of a whole set of post-rock tropes.

Not just the "quiet - loud - louder - FUCKING APOCALYPTIC" schema Keung quotes with evident approval or the similar 'prettily chiming/ferociously distorting' one. Its working of a host of crescendoing repetitions & fuzzy warpings add up to rather more than a PS to Explosions in the Sky - thankfully...

In this, HPLL's comment about electronic syntax & language is right on-the-money. Even if the palette is different, the sensibility clearly processes & shapes this more propulsive way.

Blurb: Mandelbrot is the sometime solo project by Keung Mandelbrot. After the release of 2006's 'All Our Actions Are Constantly Repeated', the original lineup of the band slowly dissolved as each pulled in their own direction. Amidst the changes, Keung found himself focusing more on exploring further the array of 9v devices his guitar was being channelled through, and this tracks on this album slowly came about during that summer.

Each of the four movements recorded were captured in one take - 10 fingers, 6 strings, 18 pedals, and no overdubs, creating a massive pulsing noise that resonates between harmony and dischord, combining influences from David Pajo's seminal 'Papa M' project, to the density of Sunn O))'s bowelshaking sound, yet processed and shaped into the syntax and language of something altogether more electronic sounding.

Album is released digitally, plus in a limited physical run of 100 CDrs, packaged in slimline DVD-r cases.


Mandelbrot > Nervous / Delay (from Effect / Delay, Highpoint Lowlife)

Mandelbrot Set > Astronomy and Allied Sciences 1b (from Magnetism, That Electricity.., Highpoint Lowlife)



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"drugged out rodents"

Granted, an Aidan Baker or thisquietarmy version (or for that drone-metal matter Mandelbrot - launching new HPLL album on Thursday night, by the way...) might have been preferable for a bit more edge. But this Banjo or Freakout remix of the Allez-Allez spin-off Walls - in which BoF is also a partner (please keep up!) - still generates enough blissy reverbed traction to remind us how fine Burnt Sienna & the Pantha du Prince/Field remixes were & stoke our clamour for the new album (stream)...

Previous coverage (also here, here, here & here).

Quietus interview.

Walls > Hang Four [Banjo or Freakout remix] (from forthcoming Hang Ten EP / original on Walls, both Kompakt)



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Withdrawn dowager

Willful experimentalist & techno lord The Village Orchestra/TVO needs more words than time permits now. But the Outside The Circle Looking In giveaway launched today - a 14-track fiesta of rarities & unreleased material - demands some immediate recognition all the same...

...even if it has finally made me realise that the exquisite, somehow yearning vamp long loved as Shouting Gran (also now part of a longer piece on TVO's coming Amid the Blaze of Noon - out later this year) features no old dears. Oops.

Circle "...consists of tracks that have been available for limited download elsewhere, or appeared on relatively obscure compilations, plus one exclusive unreleased track.

The idea behind doing this was to tie up some loose ends, make tracks that I really liked that were ‘lost’ available again, and to draw a line under the previous years material in order to set the stall out for the various releases I have planned for this year."

Previous coverage (also here, here, here & here).



The Village Orchestra/TVO > Shouting Gram [re-up] (Outside The Circle Looking In, self-released)

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Dusty roses

The new Floating Points? All the long & improbable way from future garage to neoclassical-inflected quasi-ambient, Roof Light covers a prodigious amount of ground. The stately, crackling Trenches, Riverbeds And The Weigh Path Sill may be his best track, though its breathy 12 minutes could probably do with an edit. In an utterly different vein, the frisky, clicky Cherise is a tasty, spacious treat too..."I just really like all kinds of music".

"Some records this year on - Styrax (LP+EP middle of 2010) and Highpoint Lowlife (LP end of March +2X EP'S in April ) L2S (EP in April) and MJ Cole's Prolific label (EP April/May) FACT podcast around May/July and a few remixes here and there."

Plenty more tracks streaming here.

Trenches, Riverbeds And The Weigh Path Sill by Roof Light

Cherise by Roof Light

DFRNT - Close Your Eyes - Roof Light version by Roof Light

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