Plenty kicks to be had on route 36, and the mysteriously numerical ambienteer’s 3six Recordings Showcase Mix. Those who keep an eye on LMYE, however remotely, may recall that Dennis Huddlestone (for 36 is he) featured (for Hollow) in our end-of-(y)ear Festive 50. Tracks from various releases are included in this his showcase mix:
First exposure to Mr Six (‘3’ to his mates) was the Hypersona album, a freebie in 2009. Not wishing to appear to subscribe to the notion that value must be linked to monetary exchange to be affirmed, it nevertheless struck as surprising good at the time, particularly the track “Inside”:
There's various 36 around, including unreleased pieces. And there are tapes...
Admirable curation by Keith Kenniff (Helios, Goldmund) of an album to benefit Japanese relief efforts. This instant compilation on his Unseen label, featuring a raft of ambient/neo-classicists (Biosphere, Taylor Deupree, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Sawako, Ryan Teague...), will already be out next week - with a physical release to follow.
Hear two lovely, unadorned contributions by Clem Leek & Kenniff as Goldmund below, plus a stand-out remix of Goldmund's 25 Thousand Miles (from Corduroy Road) by another participant, Rafael Anton Irissari. To these ears the subtly textured soundscape Irissari summons around the older, but similarly sober & restrained, piece - a very human patchwork of rustles & scrapes distilled from the original's accompaniment - makes it especially moving.
Stephen Vitiello & Lawrence English: two greats from the LMYE pantheon for the price of one - The Christening of the Blackbird's slo-mo modular sear leaves these ears longing for time with the rest of the pair's new Acute Inbetweens (Cronica, out tomorrow), & anticipating a shoe-in for the albums that mattered most to us in 2011 come the year's end [2010].
The midnight mass of Vitiello's improvised MOSS grouping with Molly Berg, Olivia Block & Steve Roden (12k, out last week) might well have to be accommodated too - extract below, along with a really fine trio of recent-ish SVs...
Blurb: "Since their initial meeting in Australia during 2006, Stephen Vitiello (USA) and Lawrence English (AU) have enjoyed a long distance collaboration orbiting around the joint passion for field recordings and modular synthesis.
Exploring the points of convergence and divergence between electricity and environment, the duet's “Acute Inbetweens” is a collection of works derived from hazy environmental memory, imagined landscape and field recorded actualities. It's a blurring mist of encountered spaces, recreated by means voltage controlled.
Like the spatial inspiration that guides the record, “Acute Inbetweens” pace is tempered and during certain pieces borders on a sense of timelessness. Pieces such as “La Voix est absente” unfold with a pacing of the lauded opening Lotus flowers at Sinobazu-no-ike pond, individual elements revealing themselves in subtle arcs of sound, swelling into a rich harmonic whole. By contrast “Exposure in Relief” is a more robust and pulsing work in which micro melodies spiral into one another.
“Acute Inbetweens”, sharp moments diffused in time."
A pair of wry, angular pieces that move crab-wise but get - eventually, in their own sour-sweet time -somewhere worth getting. Neither the other-wordly rattling & spooky loops of Carine Musatti's Temporary Item.s nor Chuck Blazevic's chatteringly twangy, sometimes more abrasive dreamsploitation was much known to these ears previously. They'll be sought out now...
Imperfect by design. That’s what Out of Forgetting is. Linking his spoilt poesis to a theme of ‘destroyed memories’, Szymon Kaliski composes by blending ‘badly played’ (his words) instruments and field recordings in pieces providing for both planned and improvised musical gestures. The young man from Poznań brings to his debut - on Audiobulb man David Newman’s digital-only label, Audiomoves – a kind of homespun Mitteleuropa take on 12k-style post-digital electro-acoustic minimalism, cloaked in crackle and sad wisps of piano pathos.
In seven brief well-tempered works woven of tremulous tones, respiring sustains, and piano plonk, this minimal mover of sound captures and releases his timbres, gently maltreated, commingling aleatory forays into introspective vignettes. Although minimalist in spirit, Out Of Forgetting does not want for sonorities, with various ebb and flow undercurrents in dark waters, gently thrumming, micro-pocked and crisped with crackle like a softly smouldering fire, and various fractured sound tokens of memory slippage. The monochrome cover shot of a cup, ashtray and unlit cigarette, with lugubrious titles compound a certain just-so flatness of musical habitus; motifs are almost deliberately simplistic, as if wanting to be honest and eschew all pretentious conceit. There’s a feeling of restraint and withholding, as if each gesture carried a small cargo of repressed emotion behind them.
"A point to" emerges in a field of static and a lugubrious two-chord piano motif, that gets increasingly (ill-)treated, somewhat in the style of Matthew Cooper/Eluvium’s Concert Silence. "As Unimportant" brings forth swathes of tone colours and choreographs them into arcs and dives with maybe a ghostly familiar of early Tim Hecker attending. "Or Delicate" has piano droplets falling in a fog of drones in a sad simple sequence that, Basinski-esque, finds fellow-feeling between abstraction and intimacy.
"Of Decay" is initially so perfectly textured it feels like Stephan Mathieu may have passed close by – that is until some distracted mix-fidgeting comes late in the day to mar the event. "In Twelve Scenes" comes with a reverb-doused plucked string resonance that forms the spine of the piece around which spiral snatches of speech and silence sprinkled with interference. “For Patterns” ruminates over doleful piano bleeding into reverb/delay-doused drones.
Though this is Kaliski’s first release, it shows an ability to make modest parts amount to more than their sum, proving himself fit to be filed next to others of a similar stripe. A propos of which, you can find a mix of Szymon-selected tracks at the estimable play my tape.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
