A neglected trove of listening riches: 50 compelling tracks spread across three playlists chucked together over the past quarter. Each should have been shared here in our Lend Me Your Radio series already, but oops... The many highlights include the first resurfacing of Richard Skelton's Harlassen in nine years (a blistering addition to his Archival series that amplifies & expands our conception of 'new' Skelton, also embodied by his 'Delerious' Inward Circles soundtrack), plus a reminder of his classic sound through a 10th anniversary collection; a ravishing Jacob Kirkegaard piece for Holotype; &, first up, a rich meshing of Robert Donne, Stephen Vitiello & The OO-Ray's sounds on Geographic North. As always, please accept these lists as inevitably partial pictures of the period. No doubt other entirely worthwhile stuff should also have featured - but this is what grabbed these ears as they trawled through SoundCloud over the quarter.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Weeks into the new year but still, er, partying like it's 2013 (fretting ludicrously over inclusions even now, more like...), we finally get round to highlighting 50 more releases that particularly mattered to us last year. Listed below, they provide a companion to & expansion of last month's Festive 30 - & together form this year's Improbably Late 80 (successor to last year's here & there).
Though you'd probably appreciate never hearing more of it again, please note that these releases were selected after shedding the 'no more than one pick per artist or label' hairshirt in which each co-author was clad when determining our initial group. Like them, these 50 have their ownplaylist - tracks below are from the 18 releases unavailable for that list.
Disclaimer: inevitably, 2013 brought many more great pieces of music than the 80 we've managed to highlight. But these were the ones that really resonated with us during the year...
36 :: Shadow Play (3Six) Aquarelle :: August Undone (Students of Decay) Anne Chris Bakker :: Tussenlicht (Somehow) B/B/S :: Brick Mask (Miasmah) Ben Fleury-Steiner :: Clearings (Rural Colours) Bengalfuel :: Keewadin (self-released) Celer :: Climbing Formation (Entropy)/Radish (Commune) Chris Abrahams :: Memory Night (Room40) Chris Watson :: In St Cuthbert’s Time (Touch)
Cindytalk :: A Life is Everywhere (eMego) CMKK :: Gau (Monotype) Dadub :: Untitled EP (Stroboscopic Artefacts) Dalglish :: Niaw ot Vile (PAN) Daniel Menche :: Marriage of Metals (eMego) David Sylvian & Stephen Mathieu :: Wandermuede (samadhisound) Duane Pitre :: Bridges (Important) Erstlaub :: Twenty Paces Outward in a Spiral (Broken20) Fabio Orsi & Pimmon :: Procrastination (Home Normal) Faures :: Continental Drift (Home Normal)
Gabriel Saloman :: Soldier’s Requiem (Miasmah) Ithaca Trio :: Music for Piano & Patience (Home Normal) Je Suis Le Petit Chevalier :: Dark Morse (Shelter Press) John Davis :: Ask the Dust (Students of Decay) Kangding Ray :: Tempered Inmid EP (Raster Noton) Keith Berry :: Towards the Blue Peninsula (Infraction) Koboku Senju :: Joining the queue to become one of those ordinary ghosts (MIE Music) Kwaidan :: Make All the Hell of Dark Metal Bright (Bathetic) Machinefabriek :: Attention, the Doors are Closing! (self-released)/Vergezichten (Alien Transistor)
Mark Templeton :: Jealous Heart (Under The Spire) Miko Vainio & Joachim Nordwall :: Monstrance (Touch) Mountains - Centralia (Thrill Jockey) Nils Quak :: Infinite Folds (self-released)/Und Unsere Häuser Sind Särge (SicSic) Phill Niblock :: Touch Five (Touch) Pillowdiver :: Bloody Oath (Dronarivm) Quiet Evenings :: Impressions (Aguirre) Rachad Becker :: Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. 1 (PAN) Rafael Anton Irisarri :: The Unintentional Sea (Room40)
Richard Chartier :: Interior Field (LINE) Ryuichi Sakamoto & Taylor Deupree :: Disappearance (12k) Simon Fisher-Turner & Philippe Petit :: A Ti Dou Li Dum A Ti Dou Li Dum Ti De (hellosQuare) Stephan Mathieu :: Un Coeur Simple (Baskaru) Stephen Vitiello & Molly Berg :: Between You & the Shapes You Take (12k) Svarter Greiner :: Black Tie (Miasmah) Tobias Hellkvist :: Turquoise (Small Fragments) William Basinski :: Nocturnes (2062) Yann Novak :: Blue.Hour (Farmacia901) Yann Novak & Richard Chartier :: Undefined (Farmacia901)
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Still under the gun (& staying there for another four weeks), but to keep our collective hand (& ears) in: a quartet of compelling pieces harvested a while back, slackly stacked in draft... Featuring Marcus Fischer (whose lulling Unrecognizable Now project - including a fine album for Kesh, Two Rooms - will be covered here soon-ish...); Celer (among whose inevitable torrent of releases since our last post his unexpected - & unexpectedly frisky - series of collaborations with Machinefabriek are particularly notable &, again, due coverage here 'shortly'); & Nobuto Soda&Chihei Hatakeyama, both in what I'm guessing are new partnerships (with Danny Clay&Asuna, respectively). By happy coincidence, the Hatakeyama/Asuna was due to be released today. Other sources have it already out at the start of this month, but as that would mess with the synchronicity let's agree it didn't happen... Anyway, back in what passes for full in late September.
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!
