Horn of Plenty

 

As a further part of broadening the recognitions in LMYE's Festive Twenty for 2020 (list / compilations / alt list [to follow]), here are 10 'projects' that went beyond the bounds of a single release - sometimes far beyond, either by sheer weight of output or - in a couple of cases - being part of a larger work in several media...

The self-description of one entry - :zoviet*france:'s long-running, unceasingly exploratory A Duck in a Tree mix series on Resonance FM - more or less encapsulates them all, happily: "genre-refusing, zero BPM, hypnatropic & maximinimalist recordings that have grabbed their attention".

Note that both Broken20's 'proper ambient' Slow Notes series & Front & Follow's inspired Isolation & Rejection benefit deeply worthwhile charities. 

Equally, Touch: Isolation - whose sprawling brilliance parcelled out across the lockdown spring was on a scale only matched by Boomkat's Documenting Sound (though without an Akira Rabelais mega-mix as the completist's reward...) - sought to support artists through the pandemic. 

Like other Bandcamp subscriptions, Scanner's Fan Club served this role for an individual artist - providing an insightful stream of often compelling exclusives from installations & other unreleased output. 

Sprawling brilliance also describes the continuing unfurling of A Year In The Country's 'year-long explorations of an otherly pastoralism, the undercurrents & flipside of bucolic dreams' - now entering their seventh year...

Longform Editions has featured in this slot before, but no matter: 2020's editions (including members of the LMYE pantheon like Celer, Robert Curgenven, Taylor Deupree, Chihei Hatakeyama & Strategy, as well as a host of welcome discoveries) were some of the strongest yet from this exceptional initiative. 

Unexplained Sounds Group's amazing geographic anthologies follow Electroacoustic Lebanese Music forming part of LMYE's unpublished selection of 2019, for what that's worth...

Finally, Le Berger's 'faint, warped, imperfect' pale blue dots: 

"The prism by which we should measure progress is the way we treat one another; locally, globally. Also the way we treat & share our habitat."

 The list:

12/13/14/15/16/17 (Longform Editions)

Anthology Of Post Industrial Music From Balkan Region / Persian Experimental Music Vol. II / Experimental Music From Mexico (Unexplained Sounds Group)

dat pale blue dot tho I/II/III/IV/V - Le Berger (self-release)

Documenting Sound (Boomkat) 

A Duck in a Tree (:zoviet*france: / Resonance FM)

Isolation & Rejection series (Front & Follow)

Scanner Fan Club (self-release)

Slow Notes series (Broken20)

Touch: Isolation (Touch)

Year 6 (A Year In The Country)

 

Touch: Isolation showreel

Top photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech. 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 Headphone

Even in an era of mega-compilations, Headphone Commute's ...and darkness came is a giant. Not just for its epic scale, though at 87 tracks its self-description as "colossal" is an un-hyperbolic statement of fact, but for its ambition: "to benefit all of those affected by Hurricane Sandy, the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, which has devastated portions of the Caribbean, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States in late October 2012."

Specifically, HC will donate "100% of all the proceeds generated from the sale of this album." Beneficiaries are The Humane Society & the US arm of Medecins Sans Frontieres. 

The compilation costs $10 - 11.5 cents a track, value hounds. Though you can also opt to pay more.

Is it any good? The question of quality may seem in poor taste when the cause is exemplary or irrelevant when the price is so modest. But the contributors anyway include an alluring raft of LMYE alumni, including Lawrence English, Ezekiel Honig (solo & with Mark Templeton), Erik K Skodvin, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Simon Scott (solo & in a quartet with Corey Fuller & Marcus Fischer, who also features solo), Kane Ikin, Kreng, Machinefabriek, Celer, loscil, Scanner, Black Swan & Radere - some with exclusives to satisfy trainspotting impulses... 

Probably very pompous, but: commended

























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

Környezeti lábjegyzetek

Ambient footnotes dept: following recent pieces on Scanner & Chubby Wolf, more richly layered, reflective loveliness from the same fertile sources - the Professeur's Sighs, Wonders in an exclusive instrumental mix that reveals a host of subtle, telling details previously ornamenting Sukhdev Sandhu's text, plus the new Celer (Weavings of a Rapid Disenchantment - "dense, warm, generous but dark and nostalgic drones, that fit with “Panoramic Dreams…” mood", according to the label's indisputable blurb) forthcoming in LMYE's favourite 10" vinyl (why aren't all records in this perfect format?!)

Sighs, Wonders (Instrumental) by scanner

"Originally commissioned for The Spitalfields Festival London, in collaboration with writer Sukhdev Sandhu, June 2010. This is an exclusive instrumental mix."

Celer > The Acceptance of Paralysed Infinity [excerpt] (from Weavings of a Rapid Disenchantment, Basses Frequences)

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

Blood & beer

After their often mesmerising Night Haunts Sukhdev Sandhu & Scanner recombine on the chewily poetic Sighs, Wonders for the Abrahamic The Calling (part of this year's Spitalfields Festival) - a long extract below, with a moving coda ("you don't know what I do...") by Paul Turp, Rector at St Leonard's Church, Shoreditch.

A rewarding pair of NH instrumentals - the throbbing, rattling Graffiti & ruminative, ebbing Rivers - below too...

"The invasion of the Visigoths. The onward march of the Griffin. The role of corporate capital in mangling the languages of ethics and intimacy that the church tries to speak. This experimental sound piece is a drift through the yearning spaces of the East End: its dreams and disappointments, its fierce refusals and affirmation. It is as if eavesdropping into a misty day and falling into a plaintive dream, where Sandhu's libretto resonates against the brittle dark textures and ambience of East London composed by Scanner."

Also from The Calling, video of Swirling Passages of Time - 'A Sufi Journey' by Sonia Mehta & Nasha Crew/Experience:

Sukhdev Sandhu & Scanner > Signs, Wonders [excerpt] (from The Calling, unreleased) > Graffiti / Rivers (from Night Haunts, unreleased)

Photos by Robin Rimbaud / Toby Glanville (Sandhu).

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

Tourcoing tenure

The characteristic lush menace of one of LMYE's Artists of 2009, Scanner, on display in this soaring yet poised soundtrack extract from his tenure at Le Fresnoy National Centre for Contemporary Arts...

Falling Forward by scanner

Previous coverage (also here & here).



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

Old gits

In truth, I'm more engaged by Professor Scanner's compelling new Conversations with the Dead & his mesmerising iPhone Whisper than the new Githead - even after fellow Git Colin Newman's fine recent trans-generational WireTortoise collaboration.

But Landing's arrival is also a welcome excuse to revisit some classics of earlier Gittery. On form, this unlikely collision of talents sums each other's disparate parts into something distinctive & valuable - Newman's sardonic, knowing vocals freighted in a gliding post-postpunk...

Githead > To Have and to Hold (from Headgit, Swim) > Option Paralysis (from Profile, Swim)

NB: top photo by Arne Wojciechowski

Bonus: Scanner > Moscow Radio (from scannerdot.com)

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