Pre-dead

 

The astounding 3-minute rush of Microfilm's '80 single 'Centrefold' (producer 'Ron Rude'). 

'Piano strings & vocals': pre-Dead Can Dance Lisa Gerrard...

#Melbourne #UnforgettableMusic

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

More Weekness

Some of these ears' listening from the past seven days...

Missed this ravishing :zoviet*france: piece, It's Been a While, in August - struggling to make room for anything else now...



"Created from original recordings made on location under a bridge in Wester Ross, & in a hawthorn glade in north Northumberland"

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Lulling, somnolent...Forest Management's heavy-eyed The Dreamer: from Remain - inaugural release on FM's enticing new CDr label, Afterhours

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Revelling in the 'Ambient Bedroom Noise' of Ceramic Flowers' C - 1995 01...



From forthcoming per aspera ad astra (Vienna Press)

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Pure & deep... 

Gareth Davis & Rutger Zuydervelt on wandelweiser: 




https://www.wandelweiser.de/_sounds/ewr1810zuydervelt.mp3 
(20-minute 'snippet' from sileen II)

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"The structure brims with materials that create a collage of associations & contrasts" 

Tremendous, wide-eared Provocations set by Chaperone "selected to interact with Rashid Johnson's work at ICAVCU (https://icavcu.org/exhibitions/rashid-johnson/)"

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Exhibit A: Sleep Well



From Little Notes (forthcoming on Fluid Audio)...

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"an aquatic atmosphere, perhaps suggesting an ironic take on ‘orientalism’ - down to the river’s delta" 

Untitled by Nicola Ratti & Giuseppe Ielasi's Bellows

 
[inaugurates ooh-sounds' 'decouple ][ series' https://ooh-sounds.bandcamp.com/album/georgia-bellows-decouple-series 

"metaphor for a world of surfaces"]

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Predictably hot under the collar about KrysaliSound's remaster/reissue of øjeRum's The Forest Is Sleeping Within The Trees



"a sort of spiritual research...a deep combination of human desolation, devotion & fragility" 

[2015 original on Scissor Tail Editions]

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"possessing time blurring & cranium clearing qualities that would wet the weepers" 

Withdrawn by Sean McCann



(h/t Brian Housman)

[from Fountains expanded reissue]

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

St Cyrus & Juliette

Anyone who's heard his immense Live at the Exchange, Cornwall - one of the highlights of the Touch Radio series (#93, trainspotters...) - needs no persuading about Robert Curgenven's powers at the pipe organ. 

Even so, it's hard to keep the jaw undropped at the flaunting of those powers on the recent SIRENE (on his own Recorded Fields). Curgenven, a Cornish re-immigrant from Australia with organ scholarship seemingly on his complex CV too, welds his field recording & duplate sonics on to gripping workouts at this improbable, highly site-specific instrument ("16-foot pipe organs recorded in Cornwall at the churches of St Paul (Ludgvan), St Winnow (Towednack), St Uny (Lelant), St Wyllow (Lanteglos), St Cyrus & Juliette (St Veep). Unprocessed pipe organ recordings, equalisation only"). 

The result is as tempestuous as its rich back story (The Tempest & late Turner) & sea-pounded Cornish setting implies. Curgenven as a new Prospero? Certainly there are spell-binding moments here, both ones of gathering, swelling force & others of beautiful becalmed resolution after the storm...


Robert Curgenven - Ressuscitant de l'étreinte de la Sirène from The Wire Magazine on Vimeo.


The first part of SIRENE (Ressuscitant de l'étreinte de la Sirène) is reworked from a section of a second new self-release. They tore the earth and, like a scar, it swallowed them comes with a very different back story: it "traverses the historical dynamics of the settler colonial trope through the eyes not of the invaded but of the invaders to a harsh, remote land...a very physical negotiation of territories voided by history".

Finally, a recommended live date: Curgenven heads the Ologies' latest Winchester weigh-in, Dendrology, on November 1. 

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

Our tidal flats

It's not just the national cricket team working up a head of steam down under as the year closes. Lately Australia's Room40, LMYE's label of 2011 (joint with Experimedia, trainspotters!), has unleashed a gleaming raft of essential 'editions' that add lustre not only to an already benchmark catalogue but to 2013's output more generally...

This new batch underlines the label's characteristic anti-generic open-earedness. From Eugene Carchesio's manic glitching to Heinz Riegler's therapeutic lullabies, via major statements from Simon James Philips (the gloriously, grandly pealing Chair) & Rafael Anton Irisarri (the crepuscular, clankingly pensive Unintentional Sea), this disparate outpouring somehow reaffirms the uniqueness of Room40's voice. 

Moreover, the label still has the great Chris Herbert's Constants to come (some earlier blather). A delectable, delicate freebie EP, Wintex-Cimex 83, only stokes the appetite for the return of an all too rare releaser - now due in February...

& that's not even to mention head honcho Lawrence English's magnificent collaboration with Liz Harris (Grouper), Slow Walkers - though that's a somewhat less recent vintage (even more so in the video below)... 

Simon James Phillips - Poul

moth to taper by simon james phillips  


Simon James Phillips - Set Ikon Set Remit

Rafael Anton Irisarri - Lesser than the sum of its parts


Rafael Anton Irisarri - Daybreak Comes Soon

rafael anton irisarri - the unintentional sea (excerpts)

Chris Herbert - Soft Quasars

 
Eugene Carchesio - Day 3

Eugene Carchesio - Day 12

Heinz Riegler - SLEEP HEALTH (Side A Excerpt)


Wake - Slow Walkers




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

Between 11 & 4

Another week, another Australian heavyweight... If Ben Frost knocks a release out next week, I'll have to dust off the old London buses quip. 

Even without that unexpected treat, however (new Frost, not old quip), the arrival of Lawrence English's Lonely Women's Club is a long-awaited highlight of LMYE's year that fully merits its place in our anticipatory Best of 2013 from the start of the year. Surfacing on the knotty, shifty heels of Chris Abrahams's Memory Night (from English's Room40, while LWC is on Important), it is as single-minded in its "gently toasted" excavation of noctural tone as MN is magpie-like in its shuffling of soundscapes...   

"The room around it is filled with a dusty ash; smoke in haze like proportions. Eyes are blood shot, sunken below the rim of a glass. The organ's speakers cough vibrations into the room, smoke plumes spinning and spiralling into dissipation. No one speaks though the room is crowded, there is nothing to say and no one cares to hear it. Is there ever a time for last drinks? At the Lonely Women's Club it's an undecided question."

Cigarette Burn (excerpt) by Lawrence English


Lawrence English's Lonely Women's Club [re-up]


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

Melt & reform

& we're back. One of our anticipatory Best of 2013 list at the start of January (only no title had emerged then), Chris Abrahams' Memory Night brims with his knotty intelligence & shifty textures - small wonder that Room40 advise bringing "an attentive ear" to its "unfamiliar sound spaces".

Case in point: the initially ratcheting, Buck-ish Stabilised Ruin with its unexpected lurch into a puffy, burbling crabwalk two minutes in...

Chris Abrahams - Stabilised Ruin

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.

Without ever meeting

Staying down under: working alone & with a new co-conspirator, Kane Ikin has put his name to two of this year's most rewarding releases. Ikin's growth beyond/besides Solo Andata has already yielded both the Contrail EP in his own name (on 12k) & Strangers with David Wenngren (for Simon Scott's keshhhhhh), as well as a raft of unreleased SoundClouding (much of it already down again, however, though the "slow & slow" Tails & A chord.repeated - "repeating itself into itself into itself" - feature below for as long as they remain up)...


While the mechanical joins don't show, the strikingly still, stately Strangers' remote co-production "without ever meeting, without real discussion or even a plan" seems reflected in its hushed self-containedness. The somewhat warmer, sometimes busier Contrail makes a lovely companion piece. Its additional colour helps round Strangers' graver delights into a richer, coherent whole. 


Previews, tracks, a video & full streams below. 

kane ikin - contrail (album preview)



Kane Ikin | Contrail EP on Vimeo
 



kane ikin + david wenngren - strangers (album preview)


Kane Ikin + David Wenngren - Veil





 

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

Beck Creek

Saturday's post on Bellows & Breath prompts a quick refresher on the rest of this year's output from Preservation, one of our labels of 2011. Recent-ish releases from Sparkling Wide Pressure (the subtle, deceptively unvarnished Grandfather Harmonic), Greg Haines (the keening, almost florid Digressions) & Nuojuva (the crackly, handcrafted melancholia of Valot Kaukaa) underscore the Sydney imprint's captivating, quietly experimental orientation. 


Hear diverting pieces from each (Looking to Remember, 183 Times, Laakso) below. Stream all of Grandfather Harmonic, plus Ernetti from Digressions (both Spotify). 

Looking To Remember by Sparkling Wide Pressure


183 Times - Greg Haines

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

33°51'12"S

A uniquely lulling, layered haziness has long made Cameron Webb's Seaworthy a jewel even among the Aussie ambient riches he hailed in a rewarding recent radio interview (& which LMYE has celebrated over the years). Now Bellows and Breath - via another down under delight, Preservation (our Neglected Label of 2011, even) - works wheezy harmonium loveliness & yet defter field "detritus" into his sound. 


Hear to what beguiling, blurry effect on Breathe Deep & Rattled Rushes below (or stream the whole album (Spotify)). Another take on this tack in his course comes from a plaintive remix for Preservation label-mates The Singing Skies, while a loop series & live performance - both for radio - amplify the insight.  

A Message From The Cliffs (Seaworthy remix) - The Singing Skies





Loop #4 by seaworthy


Loop #1 by seaworthy





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

Psalm 12:7

After a truly exceptional year of releases from the likes of Area C, Deep Magic, Aaron Martin, Nickolas Mohanna, Fabio Orsi & Quiet Evenings, why isn't Preservation being showered with awed acclaim?

Like helloSquare, its predecessor as LMYE's Neglected Label of the Year, Australia's remoteness seems to play a role here. Though since Preservation's focus this year (reminiscent of its compatriot, Room40 -  our recently named Label of the Year for 2011) has been on international artists, particularly but not exclusively in its Circa series, this hardly explains it.

The series's limited-run nature (just 300 copies a time) may be more significant. But the Marrickville-based label has also served up compelling non-Circa releases from international artists - notably, Black Eagle Child's debut, Lobelia, a Richard Skelton re-issue & a raft of prominent remixers unleashed on Ous Mal's Nuojuva Halava - hear an exclusive breakdown of Marraskuu by the great Pimmon, an earlier Preservation artist (& a key element in Room40's output this year, incidentally) below.

Who knows? In any case, the label has powered its way this year into the pantheon of what you might call post-ambient music - deepening Australia's already rich tradition of artists & labels in this area still further...

& Circa, whose distinctive, systematised artwork (by Preservation partner Mark Gowing) has given it a sharp identity & sense of specialness, returns next year - with a new look, apparently.

Preservation 2011 playlist (Spotify).

Marraskuu (Pimmon's Shallow Grave mix) - Ous Mal

Transcending Spheres - Quiet Evenings

Merilaulu (Motion Sickness of Time Travel's Mortem Obire mix) - Ous Mal

 

Minds in Lucidity I - Deep Magic

Parveke (Deep Magic's Fatal Wound) - Ous Mal

Solar Mechanism - Nickolas Mohanna

Full Metal Flat - Fabio Orsi

Sleep Threaded Into Ashes - Aaron Martin & Justin Wright

Ford - 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.