Past Weekness

Updating LMYE's 'My Weekness' series with a recent-ish October week of these ears' listening enthusiasms...

"coming back to music making & exploring other worlds" 

Finally picking up on this quite gorgeous, lulling Leonardo Rosado piece '180828 nocturnal 0.1' "after a long hiatus"...

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"creaking, ancient structures, buzzing rainforests & gargling subaquatic worlds" 

Finding much riches in 'foraging collagist' Chris Ruffoni's St. Olave’s Granite Labyrinth... 



From The Slope of Our Directions (Them There).

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Spending time with Music For Sleep's gripping Migration...

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Hanging head & ears in shame at missing Our Grey Lives' extraordinary Cacophonies until now...  




"an all-new – generally abstract, at times abject, occasionally euphoric – sonic landscape, lacking the ‘face’ but bearing traces of the source" 

"considering every song-channel as an instrument of a larger whole the essence of the original album is distilled, through a maze of analogue & digital effects paths; smoke & mirrors nuclear fallout from the planned demolition, by detonation, of an erased antecedent" 

PS unearthed in MISC. DJs - THE STORY SO FAR mixtape: "Selected bangers – ambient & not so – from our first five releases, squished together by technology for home-listening/raving/educational kix. 100% miscellaneous" 

Starting the day with the romantic blurscape of Benoit Pioulard's Slow spark, soft spoke - now in an extended edition...

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"percolating patterns of fiberglass synthetics & fluorescent melody, assembled into minimalist bio-domes of refracted light & hanging gardens": H. Takahashi's ravishing Escape

from Escapism (Not Not Fun)

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Magnificent new Pascal Savy for AUDIO. VISUALS. ATMOSPHERE - stately, poised, haunting..

From Colour Fields tape:

"...hypnagogic frames balancing wind, wave & star. Symmetric pearl timbres..."

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Some thrilling, fragile moments among the 'reinterpretations' of Antonymes' The Licence To Interpret Dreams.

Returning particularly often to Talvihorros' stabbing, swelling take on The Gospel Pass, Ian Hawgood's celestial Endlessly expansion & p jørgensen's hushing of Landscape Beyond An Open Window......

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Radiant, instructive Hotel Neon mix for the 'this exquisite pain' series...

"dense, heavy, analog textures & decay"

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

Thirty-three & a third

You may know the drill by now: in a sincere though inevitably clunkily artificial attempt to spread recognition as widely as possible without devaluing it too much, LMYE’s co-authors each independently pick 15 releases that particularly mattered to them during the year – but under two faintly hair-shirted constraints: no more than one selection per artist & one per label. 

Duplication across our 2014 line-ups was very limited. Only Lawrence English’s Wilderness of Mirrors (a highlight of another stand-out year for his Room40 imprint, our 2012 Label of the Year), Fennesz’s Bécs (eMego), Stephan Mathieu’s Sacred Ground (Schwebung) and Janek Schaefer’s Lay-By Lullaby (12k) featured on both initial drafts. 

This year we expand the resulting master list to a Festive 33-1/3. In particular, we throw in two epic collections that were too significant to exclude, even if they weren’t strictly speaking new music: Chris Dooks’ The Motherlode & The Otherlode (Broken20) & Kenneth Kirschner’s Imperfect Forms (Tokafi). 

In addition, a wry part-vote for Le Berger’s Interwoven Sonic Tapestry – formally released at a minute to midnight (EST, presumably) today “to ensure avoidance of any 2014 and / or 2015 'top' lists” – rounds out our initial 2014 roll-call. 

Mandatory health warning: plenty of other artists & other labels than those featured here made great music this year. As previously, we’ll acknowledge the broader universe of releases that resonated with us in a follow-up post…

Anjou – Anjou (Kranky) [jl]
Thomas Ankersmit – Figueroa Terrace (Touch) [jl]
Andrea Belfi – Natura Morta (Miasmah) [jl]
Nicolas Bernier – frequences (a / fragments) (LINE) [jl]
Alex Cobb – Marigold & Cable (Shelter Press) [jl]
Robert Curgenven – SIRÈNE (Recorded Fields) [jl]
Dalhous - Will To Be Well (Blackest Ever Black) [al]
Deaf Center – Recount (Sonic Pieces) [jl]
Loren Dent - Anthropology Vols. 2 & 3 (Infraction) [al]
Chris Dooks – The Motherlode & The Otherlode (Broken20) [jl]

Kyle Bobby Dunn - Kyle Bobby Dunn & the Infinite Sadness (Students of Decay) [al]
Lawrence English - Wilderness of Mirrors (Room40) [al/jl]
Lawrence English & Stephen Vitiello – Fable (Dragon’s Eye) [jl]
Fennesz - Bécs (eMego) [al/jl]
Chris Herbert – Constants (Room40) [jl]
The Inward Circles - Nimrod is Lost in Orion & Osyris in the Doggestarre (Corbel Stone Press) [jl]
P Jørgensen – Gold Beach (Low Point) [jl]
Kangding Ray - Solens Arc (Raster-Noton) [al]
Sima Kim - Debris (Soft Corridor)
Kenneth Kirschner – Imperfect Forms (Tokafi) [jl]

Le Berger – Interwoven Sonic Tapestry (in the key of) (self-released) [jl]
Stephan Mathieu – Sacred Ground (Schwebung) [jl/al]
Neel - Phobos (Spectrum Spools) [al]
Duane Pitre & Cory Allen – The Seeker & The Healer (Students of Decay) [jl]
Abdulla Rashim - Unanimity (Northern Electronics) [al]
M. Sage - A Singular Continent (Patient Sounds) [al]
Pascal Savy - Adrift (Eilean Records) [al]
Janek Schaefer – Lay-By Lullaby (12k) [jl/al]
Shifted - Arrangements in Monochrome (Part 1 & 2) (Avian) [al]
Nicholas Szczepanik - Not Knowing (Desire Path) [al]






TCF - 415C47197F78E811FEEB7862288306EC4137FD4EC3DED8B (Liberation Technologies) [al]
Tegh - Night Scenes (Inner Ocean) [al]
Mike Weis – Don’t Know, Just Walk (Type) [jl]
Cody Yantis / Nathan McLaughlin / Josh Mason / Joe Houpert – Line Drawings (Desire Path/FET Press) [jl]



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

No Place like Rhizome

There’s no thinning at the front or diminishing presence in the surface of Pascal Savy’s Receding, despite the title, and for all the fancy philo-: Savy speaks of  'some psychological and existential questions which I try to convey below the surface of music,' which is all fine and chin-strokingly brow-furrowingly dandy, but is there not perhaps a hint of more to hum in the bathtub than previously? Last there was Liminal (view from here elsewhere), before there was Fragments, before that The Silent Watcher. Now, Twisted Tree Line, 3” CD-r + postcard ltd. ed. series sister to Somehow, subject of a still-warm LMYE mini-profile), brings a noise manicured by a more sonically savvy Savy.

pascal savy - throughout [from the EP 'receding']

Previous Pascal

pascal savy - lying drifting [from the EP 'liminal']

And previouser

Oblique by Pascal Savy

Receding seems, if not a move forward, then certainly a shift in articulation for Savy, with a sleight of hand that makes accessible more, and chewier (albeit dissolving), harmonic tidbits from out of the sonic soup. This is space music – in the sense of being about creation of a space - evidently gradually self-revelatory in process, a kind of psycho-active inner-outer topography, realized through symbolism and abstraction (so Savy says). Smells like semiotic spirit! (the eponymous receding perhaps referring to an organic-inorganic, nature-artifice, physical-spiritual… binary shift? A certain ceding, rather than a recession? Dunno - you decide…). It uses a couple of piano samples recorded in a disused windmill, but the piano isn’t really there. It’s a removed piano, an ex-klavier, a ghost johanna… bereft of life, floating in pianoid limbo (note: after recording, piano parts processed, deconstructed and partially removed, leaving an “empty shell” where notes one resonated, haunted by traces of their former incarnation… y’know, all that decay and disintegration jazz). In effect the recording operates as a sonic illusion, the notes heard in erasure, seeping in the interstices - between tracks, or the folds and rhizomes of the whorls and wooze around them. Plucked and bowed guitar, processed sine waves, FM synth, a self-oscillating analogue filter, a turntable, monome and handheld recorder with found sounds from a French church and Kew Gardens complete the audio-arsenal, each piece all a-fizz with shimmers and shards manoeuvred over nocturnal hum, odd reversals and pitchshifts, sundry crepitus, fremitus, and susurrus.

For the record, the compositional process behind it was informed by conversations about the concept of rhizome, phase differentiation and deterritorialization (so we're told). Holy Deleuze & Guattari, Batman! I don’t know much about Mille Plateaux (apart from this lot), but I know what I like! And I do know that Receding interestingly occupies that zone of ambiguity inhabited by musical works managing the feat of being at once bleak and comfy, uneasy and alluring. Nniiiiiice!

Last word to the artist: ‘In my view, this music is like an illusion, a play with reality so the piece can potentially act as a gateway towards different form of realities or a new relationship with consciousness.’



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