Rocky Mountain High

Feeling the immensity of Radere’s I’ll Make You Quiet, evoking the emotional ambiguity of existential re/dis-location - the wonder and overwhelm-ment of a towering newness while dwelling on the melancholy of a temps perdu. Perhaps...

I'll Make You Quiet by Radere

Kudos to Futuresequence, known mainly among the ambient and experimental community music for their online magazine and mixes, which has come into its own as a label in 2012. Starting with SEQUENCE, a steepling series of (mostly free) download (triple-CD length) comps, numbering 1, 2, 3, featuring a host of the great and the good (and a few of the fairly decent and merely passable) of contemporary ambient, drone, and leftfield electronic -  a litany of names too numerous to enumerate/nominate, it has lately moved to single-artist releases, this from Radere being their first. Programme notes: on moving from Philadelphia to Colorado, he was apparently struck by the intimidating grandeur of the Rocky Mountains, this sense of awe (as in ‘Aww, gee’?) resonating over the vast expanse of I’ll Make You Quiet.

Sometimes, I Can't Make Full Sentences by futuresequence

So anyway, Carl Ritger, as he’s known to his Mum, has previous, not only the aforementioned SEQUENCE1, but also on Rural Colours (Maple Drip), Full Spectrum (A Season in Decline) and Basic Sounds (Lost at Sea, I'm Never Coming Back).

Says Carl: ‘Radere is the primary vehicle for my experiments with sonic ephemera. Inspired by the notions of stasis and chance, I have explored the fusion of acoustic sound sources and digital processing techniques for the better part of the last decade. My work largely avoids synthesis in favor of organic loops and live instrumentation; blurring guitars, cassette recordings and electronics into a densely textured wash of sound, burnished with carefully sculpted distortions and location recordings.’

I'll Make You Quiet departs eloquently from his hitherto long-form textured drones, setting clearly defined boundaries around individual tracks. We learn of the approach he adopts, that he ‘…weaves found sounds into the mix. Recordings of a set of house keys, an electric toothbrush and a tape recording of a flock of crows all make their way into these arrangements, as well as his signature processed guitar and electronics. Each track on the album was recorded primarily in single-take sessions, an intimate approach that reflects Carl's interest with the unpredictable; sounds created out of chance, and an embrace of the temperamental nature of analog tape rather than digitally rendered files.’

Your writer’s first close encounter with Radere was via the monumental, “Good Evening, Ghosts,” a track I liked so much I bought the company (actually, just joshin’, I just stuck it in an albient mix (posted here)



Turns out “Good Evening, Ghosts” forms the base material of a spin-off EP (via bandcamp). Trailer: ‘Before I'll Make You Quiet came Good Evening, Ghosts; a distillation of the album's essence and inspiration, the track became a starting point for what was to come. With a graceful yet mountainous temperament, Radere builds dense swirling patterns of echoing harmonics around surging drones and worn textures. Passing through a series of shifting phrases, Good Evening, Ghosts possesses an air of suspense and wonder within its ambient folds. Such rich material is primed for remix/realignment by other like-minded artists. Benoît Honoré Pioulard, Jannick Schou, Sun Hammer and Anduin expand the unique source, enveloping it within their own approach and style. The result is four distinct artefacts which feel both inherently connected and a departure from Radere's piece. Completing the release is the full length original track, and a track of raw field recordings which forms the basis for much of the tracks on I'll Make You Quiet.’





And a Radere excerpt also nestles snugly in a wooze-tastic albient mix lately posted.

Slings the Wooze by Albient on Mixcloud

All things Radere-related here.

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

Countless congruity

Re-up for aggregation...


Two alluring, affecting new-ish collaborations - with Steinbruechel (Seam) & Marcus Fischer (Two / Twenty-Two) - add further lustre to Cory Allen's lovely body of work. While both exhibit what Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet) nicely terms "gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient" (in his predictably insightful reflections around Two / Twenty-Two: see below), Seam is distinctive for its happy marriage of intensely detailed, almost gritty microsound with a huge bass rumble. Two / Twenty-Two, in contrast, deploys a larger, messier palette (twangs & groans, even...) to shape a more urgent, more 'narrative' sound - especially in the second part, Seventy-Seven. 


A fair few Allen streams here. Several albums on Spotify too...


Blurb: "Fourteen months and countless folders of audio files later, Steinbrüchel and Cory Allen offer their first collaborative album entitled «Seam». An intensive and process driven work period resulted in an album that integrates the two artist's individual soundworlds. Each sound was processed and multiplied by both artists, forming a sound archive of individual threads. The compositions were then sewn and stitched together using the collection of the archive. Connecting each composition is an inbetween thread which weaves the album's tracks together.


The «- -- - --» audio process was extended into the design and production of the physical packaging. The cover design is based on a system which reflects the track order and the artists' contributions to the creation of the compositions."


steinbrüchel + cory allen - seam 06


steinbruchel + cory allen - seam 02














Way beyond blurb (Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet): "The Internet is a congruity engine. The ceaseless churn of online databases aligns any two or more things found to have in common any one thing. 

Cities with similar names require clarification from mapping systems. Faces of people with similar names appear together in image searches, forcibly conflated into one extended family. 

Congruity is especially powerful regarding individuals with the same birthday. Factors such as seasonal attributes and development relative to classmates are widely accepted to explain perceived similarities between individuals otherwise born years, even centuries, apart. 

Two / Twenty Two by Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer occurred because the two musicians acted on their shared February 22 birthday. Both live in cities considered artistic outposts in otherwise rustic states (Allen: Austin, Texas; Fischer: Portland, Oregon), both have professional experience in visual design, and both explore gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient. All coincidence, certainly. Allen and Fischer stacked the deck in congruity’s favor by providing each other with a set of samples from which to devise new music. The result is two rough fragile recordings. They have the burnish of delicate objects that survived significant tumult. As for the tremulous piano in track two, perhaps it’s a nod to Chopin, who was, according to various databases tracking such things, also born on February 22."

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.

Captured winds

"An edit from Ridgelines, forthcoming on Aeolian Editions" - on these bare bones Richard Skelton signals the latest, enticingly outlying instalment in his Landings project of reflections on landscape & memory. Drones have always formed part of his distinctive, keening sound, but never so centrally as in the rumbling yet floating Cappanawalla - named for the Atlantic-facing western Irish mountain. 


Surely the least acoustic Skelton these ears have encountered, the piece is a fascinating departure. In its airy, soaring way, seemingly very Aeolian...  


Ridgelines is also a small chapbook published last month Skelton's Corbel Stone Press. It comprises "two text works, one for Black Combe, Cumbria, and one for Cappanawalla, County Clare". 


Black Combe in its turn is a Skelton release too, in his classic quavering, aching mode (originally on the *SKURA complete works; stream in full below) - though not part of the Landings album trio (some pieces from which also below), trainspotters please note... 


Cappanawalla by Richard Skelton

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

Countless congruities

Two alluring, affecting new-ish collaborations - with Steinbruechel (Seam) & Marcus Fischer (Two / Twenty-Two) - add further lustre to Cory Allen's lovely body of work. While both exhibit what Marc Weidenbaum (Disquiet) nicely terms "gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient" (in his predictably insightful reflections around Two / Twenty-Two: see below), Seam is distinctive for its happy marriage of intensely detailed, almost gritty microsound with a huge bass rumble. Two / Twenty-Two, in contrast, deploys a larger, messier palette (twangs & groans, even...) to shape a more urgent, more 'narrative' sound - especially in the second part, Seventy-Seven. 


A fair few Allen streams here. Several albums on Spotify too...


Blurb: "Fourteen months and countless folders of audio files later, Steinbrüchel and Cory Allen offer their first collaborative album entitled «Seam». An intensive and process driven work period resulted in an album that integrates the two artist's individual soundworlds. Each sound was processed and multiplied by both artists, forming a sound archive of individual threads. The compositions were then sewn and stitched together using the collection of the archive. Connecting each composition is an inbetween thread which weaves the album's tracks together.


The «- -- - --» audio process was extended into the design and production of the physical packaging. The cover design is based on a system which reflects the track order and the artists' contributions to the creation of the compositions."


steinbrüchel + cory allen - seam 06


steinbruchel + cory allen - seam 02














Way beyond blurb (Marc Weidenbaum, Disquiet): "The Internet is a congruity engine. The ceaseless churn of online databases aligns any two or more things found to have in common any one thing. 

Cities with similar names require clarification from mapping systems. Faces of people with similar names appear together in image searches, forcibly conflated into one extended family. 

Congruity is especially powerful regarding individuals with the same birthday. Factors such as seasonal attributes and development relative to classmates are widely accepted to explain perceived similarities between individuals otherwise born years, even centuries, apart. 

Two / Twenty Two by Cory Allen and Marcus Fischer occurred because the two musicians acted on their shared February 22 birthday. Both live in cities considered artistic outposts in otherwise rustic states (Allen: Austin, Texas; Fischer: Portland, Oregon), both have professional experience in visual design, and both explore gentle sonic psychedelics that bring texture to what might otherwise be termed ambient. All coincidence, certainly. Allen and Fischer stacked the deck in congruity’s favor by providing each other with a set of samples from which to devise new music. The result is two rough fragile recordings. They have the burnish of delicate objects that survived significant tumult. As for the tremulous piano in track two, perhaps it’s a nod to Chopin, who was, according to various databases tracking such things, also born on February 22."

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 Your Escala

Legions of LMYE loves & a raft of new discoveries populate this gargantuan new 3-volume (Ice, Water & Snow) Escala comp - all the way from Le Berger's characteristically enthralling, swelling Naine bleue-blanche de type B to Kenneth Kirschner's oblique, unadorned November 18, 2011 via the textured scale of Monoceros's Magatzem abandonar St. Julia de Ramis, the luminous flickers of Pascal Savy's Eroding Memory,  & Hallock Hill's growling, penetrating Anecdote, plus outstanding contributions from Antonymes, Offthesky/Radere, Leonardo Rosado, Jannick Schou & Nicholas Szczepanik, as well as a host of significant others [konntinent, Francisco Lopez, Yui Onodera, Fabio Orsi, Pleq/Philippe Lamy, Saffron Slumber, Carlos Suarez, thisquietarmy et al] too)...

Scintilla by Nicholas Szczepanik


























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