Nature Boy

Beguiling Being in Nature via “Farewell, Brother” from latest Rural Colours release, Afar, Farewell. Who’s doing all this Germanic-sounding Being-in-Nature? It’s offthesky finding fellow-feeling with Man Watching The Stars, known to his Mum as Brendan Paxton. Bristle-based bros Fluid Radio enthuse ‘…these five tracks quiver with a tension that evokes the twilight moment between daylight and darkness, and thrum with a grandeur borrowed from mountains and canyons,’ clinching the deal with ‘…what is most special about “Afar, Farewell” is its ability to enact this kind of ‘being-there’, of being in Nature, even if this turns out to be a kind of mythologised and yearned-for Nature rather than anything concrete.’ 

"Farewell, Brother" by offthesky & Man Watching the Stars by Man Watching the Stars

Hibernate supremo, Jonathan Lees, up yon in Yorkshire, pronounces it ‘one of the most breathtakingly moving albums ever released’ on his junior label, Rural Colours. Hyperbole aside, Afar, Farewell’s five helpings of sustaining guitar string-melt with nice fuzz around the edges go down very nicely, notably failing LMYE’s Enovian ignorability test, resolutely refusing to fade into the background, various textures and timbres – chief among which MWtS’s ‘experimental violin’ - colluding with Jason Corder’s chords to keep ears not only well-lent, but royally tweaked and twirled. Get it here or there.

Offthesky & Man Watching The Stars: Rime Of The Bloodsands Pyre by Rural Colours



While we’re at it, consider that this is just the latest in a stream of offthesky - 20+ emissions over the last decade, incl. collabs with blokes like Radere, Darren McClure, and Billy Gomberg, to name but three. Recently there was Offthesky Vs Kinder Scout’s The Curio Collection on Home Normal with ‘Dusty neo-classical/ambient exhalations from Jason Corder (Offthesky) in trio with cellist Danny Norbury and Home Normal's intercontinental CEO, Ian Hawgood (Kinder Scout). … Across six tracks they paint a slow moving and faded soundscape glowing with the soft peal of bells, creaking strings and crackling location recordings which mingle and diffuse with tender subtlety, the focus given to a blurry mid-ground while a shifting patina of vocal glossolalia and drones lend a dreamy momentum to the whole thing.’ Out of stock, but still downloadable and cloud-streamable:

homen034 offthesky vs Kinder Scout 'The Curio Collection' (album preview) by Home Normal



Around a year ago we had T’Beautiful Nowhere (Northern version ;-)) on Hibernate, apparently inspired by the Appalachians (Wot? not the Pennines?), deemed by some scribe at foxydigitalis to ‘…carry a sense of place that is reminiscent of the work of Richard Skelton (but with only occasional strings).’ Seemingly the typically geetar-totin’ Mr Corder had ‘initially set himself a loose rule to use as many acoustic instruments as possible, whilst limiting the use of heavy electronic processing techniques. Instruments including guitar, harmonium, cello, toy piano, violin, kalimba, vibraphone and voice were recorded in a cabin near Carter Lake, Colorado in the peace of a beautiful, yet remote space. It was this secluded environment that encouraged and an existential state of mind and the resulting material gleaned of ideas relating to isolation and the surrounding rural landscape.’ Everyone knows this is nowhere…

offthesky - the beautiful nowhere (album preview) by experimedia

Cutely appraised, incidentally, by the nicely downhome wasistdas up in Hebden Bridge (home of Hibernate – serendipity or some relation?), whose previously handwritten reviews are now video-mediated here.



























And more recently dropping from offthesky came The Lowern Decay on Wist Rec, or digital, again featuring the delicate fizz and scrim of processing with more nature-loving guitar tones peeking through. Ooh.

offthesky - Lowern decay (fragment) by Wist Rec

Not to neglect the other half, MWtS has previous: Elements 1, a compilation from Mumbai-based collective, The Future Elements, and Qoheleth, a collection of live improvisation performed and recorded in September 2012 ‘meant to capture bare expression, live composition, and spiritual reflection through sound,’ available for free download.

The Fires of Spring Incarnadine by Man Watching the Stars

Qoheleth (Album Preview) by Man Watching the Stars

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

Courting filly

Mustering magic again: prepare your ears for wonder & your jaw for slackness as The Necks embark on their annual UK & Ireland sojourn, with a stop-over in Philadelphia for another airing of their & Back to Back Theatre's Food Court show (extract below). Before then the motherlands get five dates (Belfast, Bristol, Dublin, London & Manchester - though not quite in that rigid order...) of triangulated, fly-by-wire sound sculpture. 

Raw materials: two one-hour blocks, one post-jazz 'piano trio', one intense collective commitment to hewing rapture from the moment.  

In the very deliberate absence of more or less any digital Necks residue (much as I live in hope of an eventual Bandcamping of their huge performance archive...), here's a little scrapbook of epiphanies & near-misses...

Oh, & if you're coming to Bristol (their first night this time round), get in touch. 

The Necks - Live at ISSUE Project Room (Night 1, Set 2 extract)

The Necks on Moshcam

NB: photos by John Tapia Urquiza (top & middle) & Holimage (bottom). Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.

Lend Me More Shorts

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.     

Marcus Fischer - A Fifth Season

CELER - Voluminous Files of Multi-colored Lines / AM Arrest and Conclusion

Danny Clay, Nobuto Suda  - in search of may apples - Part 1

Chihei Hatakeyama + Asuna - Scale Compositions (album preview)

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

Brazilian Waxing

 

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).

An'On, An'On, An'On by Gimu by Heart And Soul Publisher




















There’s a similar Caretaker-influenced post-hauntological air to A Silent Stroll On Sombre St. on newly inaugurated label, Constellation Tatsu, based in the resplendently named San Luis Obispo, CA. According to obsessively tape-documenting blog, Weed Temple, Gimu here '...crafts dusted, melancholic atmospheres that linger in the shadows, bordering on unsettling dark ambient. Ominous melodies loop and fall into and out of focus, plodding ahead in the sea of vintage crackles and modified found sounds. Music from the bottom of the woods.'
In fact, more than The Caretaker it’s a touch of the Leyland Kirby, with the self-conscious over-staging of grand melancholic gesture - the heartbreaking work of staggering etc playing about its elegiac arcs and dives. The nearest reference point that comes to mind for the thrilling abraded trajectory of the likes of “The Glorious Colours Of Leaves In The Fall” and “The Silver Passage Missed” is a cross between an obscure release of several years back on U-cover (remember them?) by Koen Daigaku and recent work by Willamette - though Gimu’s sound is rather more sprawling and unkempt than the latter, and all the better for it.

Most simple of the lot yet, but possibly most effective/affective to this listener, A Season in Your Soul, originally a cassette on Sacred Phrases and now on bandcamp, is a veritable blub-fest of heartstring-tug tape-saturated synthstring swells that bring out the throat in serial lumps as each hymnal heave hits home: ‘Orchestral and nostalgic, these tracks, in their composite simplicity, bring on the sense of a life once lived in grandeur. Obscured and muffled, the drones have a markedly ancient tone about them that alludes to the multi-layered, yet monochromatic, nature of the piece.’

gimu - a season in your soul // SP-29 by sacredphrases

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!

The Inexplicable Iceberg Blue (Part 2) by Gimu

  

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.

Gimu - A Prayer For Time 3 by heat death records

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.

New Album: Kwajbasket & Gimu - "Beams" (Excerpts) (click on title for further information) by Gimu

And finally US ambienteer Darren Harper cosies up to the Noise from Brazil for Field & Fern; Mountain &Sea via Rural Colours. 'Not deterred by the greatgeographical distance between them, Gimu and Darren utilized the internet as ameans for idea exchange, and musical composition. The resulting work is bothevocative and haunting. A unique blend of each artist’s individual musicalperspective; as well as an unexpected fusion of the ambient, modern-classical, dronegenres.'

Dawn by Gimu

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

Serpent patching

A deliriously pulsing, proggy-in-a-good-way Leyland Kirby remix of Cedric Stevens serves as a footnote to not one but two recent-ish posts - one referencing another LK remix, of John Cale, & another featuring the Stevens original. 

From The Syncopated Elevators Legacy (Discrepant), a hefty retrospective/crate-delve that also features remixes by LMYE luminaries Sylvain Chauveau, Fennesz & Motion Sickness of Time Travel. All feature in Experimedia's SEL previe/review ("bubbles of early 21st century electronic futurism, the kind that starts with a steaming, industrialized landscape vibe before panning up to a crystal clear, multi-colored skyline...") below. 

Also below, some enticing indications of Stevens' post-SEL direction - the exquisite, groaning 'guitar drone' of the recent Stardust/Monsoon Loop 7" (again, on Discrepant) & a dense, buzzing live tampura excursion to Benares Crescent. There's also the vault-excavating The Politics of Weakness (originally on Subliminal Toy Crash) & a richly murky new SEL-era discovery, Celestial Sundiving.

All this also serves as a roundabout way of noting that LMYE is going fairly dark for the next six weeks. Apologies to labels & artists who have sent music over for review, but an offline project is nearing its non-negotiable deadline. So posting is likely to be minimal to the end of next month - will try to make up for that with an epic final quarter...

Cédric Stevens - The Siamese Level (Leyland Kirby Remix)

The Siamese Level (playground emulation) by Cedric Stevens


The Siamese Level from Martina Ampuero

Cedric Stevens: The Syncopated Elevators Legacy

cedric stevens - the syncopated elevators legacy (album preview)

Monsoon Loop by Cedric Stevens

Cédric Stevens - Stardust (7'' preview)

benares crescent (live @ la filature) by Cedric Stevens

Celestial Sundiving by Cedric Stevens

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