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.

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.

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.

50 + 50 Compiled

ElevenElevations II by Albient on Mixcloud

At the risk of overplaying the 50s riff, here's notice of another 50 - this being the sum of tracks selected from LMYE's Festive 50 + 50 (lookee here and here) and spun into three assemblages for LMYEers' listening (pl)leisure. Here's the first, ElevenElevations I.

ElevenElevations I by albient

The second, ElevenElevations II, is at the top of this post. The third, ElevenElevations III (see what I did there?), is over on mixcloud or just click below (n.b. it's not so much the Evil Twin as the Beaty Triplet).

ElevenElevations III by Albient on Mixcloud

Have a good trip-tych!

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

Fifty-fifty ball

The new year already, but these ears are still clinging to 2011...desperately & rather absurdly trying to hear everything & anything released in the old year that might bear on our Festive 50 + 50.


Anyway, time to commit: this expanded iteration of past year-end list-making once again tries to get round the one-eyed arbitrariness of shoe-horning all the vitality of a year's listening, the tangents, blind alleys & inevitable shifts, into a handful of its 'best' releases. This time out we're picking an extra 50 exceptional releases/artists alongside the 50 that stood out most for us. 

With the flood of tape & digital releases, as well as the growing tendency to collaborate, facilitating greater output from many LMYE staples, we've also shifted focus somewhat - from individual releases to artists. So we'll end up after tomorrow's further half-century with a hundred great music-makers of 2011, & a rather higher number of their releases... 


As last year, our joint picks are not an elite within the 50. Rather, they are simply the common ground between two co-authors whose separate choices give some flavour of our generally slightly different emphases. 

Black Swan - The Quiet Divide


emuul - drawing of the line (album preview)


Festive 50
Black Swan :: In 8 Movements/The Quiet Divide (Experimedia) / Kyle Bobby Dunn :: Ways of Meaning (Desire Path) / Emuul :: The Drawing Of The Line (Digitalis) / Lawrence English :: Acute Inbetweens (w/Stephen Vitiello; Cronica)/The Peregrine (Experimedia) / Father :: Return of Father (Root Strata) / Chihei Hatakeyama :: Mirror (Room40) / Tim Hecker :: Dropped Pianos/Ravedeath, 1972 (Kranky) / Stephan Mathieu :: A Static Place (12k)/Remain (Line)/To Describe George Washington Bridge (Dekorder) / Pillowdiver :: Elliott, Lou & Bill (Twisted Tree Line) / Benoît Honoré Pioulard :: Plays Thelma (Desire Path) / Janek Schaefer :: Double Exposure ( Cronica)/Phoenix & Phaedra Holding Patterns (Spekk) / Steinbrüchel :: Narrow (Room40) / Nicholas Szczepanik :: Ante Algo Azul (self-released)/Please Stop Loving Me (Streamline)/ talkingmakesnosense :: Coruscates (Rural Colours) / David Wenngren & Christopher Bissonnette :: The Meridians of Longitude and Parallels of Latitude (Home Normal)
(joint)


janek schaefer - phoenix & phaedra holding patterns (album preview)


Please Stop Loving Me (Excerpt) - Nicholas Szczepanik

Frank Bretschneider :: Komet (Shitkatapult) / Conforce :: Dystopian Elements (Delsin) / Ben Fleury-Steiner :: Places that Find You (Low Point) / Function :: Ember (Sandwell District) / The Garden :: In Sea-land (Install) / Inward Content :: Inward Content (Meanwhile) / Kangding Ray :: Or (Raster Noton) / Laurel Halo :: Hour Logic (Hippos in Tanks) / Lucy :: Wordplay for Working Bees (Stroboscopic Artefacts) / Maps and Diagrams :: Get Lost (Time Released Sound)/The Town Beneath the Sea (Nomadic Kids Republic) / Sean McCann :: The Capital/The Sky Is Filled With Incredible Wishes (Aguirre)/Prelusion (Recital) / Yves de Mey :: Counting Triggers (Sandwell District) / Regis :: In a Syrian Tongue (Sandwell District) / Sandwell District :: Feed Forward (Sandwell District) / Spheruleus :: Voyage (Hibernate) / Vatican Shadow :: Washington Buries Al Qaeda Leader At Sea/Yemeni Commandos (Hospital Productions) / Willamette :: Always in Postscript (Own)/Echo Park (Infraction)
(al)

ben fleury-steiner - Memory


willamette - echo park (album preview)

Bee Mask :: Canzoni Dal Labatorio Del Silenzio Cosmico/Elegy for Beach Friday  (Spectrum Spools) / Black to Comm :: Coldplay, Elvis & John Cage (En/Or) / Billy Gomberg :: Give Or Give In (Digitalis)/Only The Sun For Our (Students of Decay)/Quiet Barrier (Rest + Noise) / i8u :: Surface Tension (Murmur) / Jan & Romke Kleefstra :: Sieleslyk/Tongerswel (Gareth Davis/Jan Kleefstra/Romke Kleefstra; Rural Colours/Home Normal)/Deislieper (Kleefstra-Pruiksma-Kleefstra; Hibernate) / Le Berger :: Everything is everything else/Expeditions on the Grayscale (one tiny, two medium and a grand one) (self-released) / Jon Mueller :: Alphabet of Movements (Type) / The Necks :: Mindset (ReR) / Pimmon :: Lay Down Real Slow (Stunned)/The Oansome Orbit (Room40) / Preslav Literary School :: Alamut (Corvo)/La Reflexion du Tir (Full of Nothing) / Quiet Evenings :: Gold Coast (Rotifer/Hooker Vision)/Intrepid Trips (Hooker Vision)/Spirit Smoke (Kimberly Dawn)/Transcending Spheres (Preservation) (plus any amount of QE strands Motion Sickness of Time Travel & Nova Scotian Arms, but especially Crystal Anniversary (Aguirre) / Alexander Rishaug :: Shadow Of Events (Dekorder) / Richard Skelton :: *SKURA - A Collection (Sustain-Release) / Colin Stetson :: New History Warfare Vol.2: Judges/Those Who Didn't Run (Constellation)/ New History Warfare Vol.1 12" (Aagoo) / Svarte Greiner :: SGAR (w/Alexander Rishaug; self-released)/Twin (Type) / Ricardo Villalobos & Max Loderbauer :: Re: ECM (ECM) / CM von Hausswolff :: 800,000 Seconds In Harar (Touch) / Xela :: Exorcism (self-released)
(JL)

NB: Deaf Center's Owl Splinters (Type), the Piiptsjilling/Kleefstra contributions to Peter Broderick and Machinefabriek's Mort Aux Vaches (Staalplat) & Greg Haines w/ Mariska Baars & Sytze Pruiksma/Piiptsjilling/Heather Broderick & Nils Frahm's Seelocht (Into The Great Wide Open) &, to stretch incorporation rather further, Machinefabriek & Gareth Davis's Ghost Lanes (Dekorder) are honorary parts of the JL list through Greiner & Kleefstra too... 


Those who didn't run - Colin Stetson


Water 72.86 (extract) - i8u


Villabauer player (ECM)

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 Shorts

Revelling in one day's plenty while trying not to drown in it, a quick & dirty acknowledgement of thrilling new music from five distinct, diverting voices - Chris Herbert, talkingmakesnosense, Seaworthy, Tone Color & Dentist. Second & last in this list have not featured on LMYE before, but will again...

rock-1/vl-tone by chris herbert

Chris Herbert coaxes improbable, poignant depths from a Casio - striking shifts of gear & slippery tones in a ravishing, moonlit piece. 

Backstory ("As a tribute to its limited charms I thought I'd try and use sounds from the VL-1 for a short piece..."). 

Photophobic by talkingmakesnosense


From an outstanding new release on Rural Colours (Hibernate's sidekick), Dominic Dixon's affecting, blissily accumulating talkingmakesnosense...






Talkingmakesnosense - Coruscates


Live in Bowral August 2011 by seaworthy


As ever, Cam Webb's lulling, moving sound mounts to something profoundly more than the sum of its trilling, arpeggiated parts.


"Live performance at Lucindas Cafe, Berkelouw Books, 28 August 2011. Guitar, loop pedals and ebow."


Ebowed an' Clear by Tone Color


Framed & freighted by a subtly percussive, field recorded rattle, TC's blithe, swelling tone poem...


"if i could i'd ebow my synths...a bit obsessed with my ebow at the moment..."


fine by dentist


A slo-mo vampy distillation (like a dub techno X-ray) - meditative, inward, sepulchral.


Free to download. 

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