Festive downpayment

As a preamble to or downpayment on LMYE's annual Festive 33-1/3 - out shortly in its traditional New Year's Eve slot - & to give them some additional prominence merited by their ambition & scale, these are the four 'projects' that round out our list. 

Besides each selecting 15 releases that meant the most to us over the year, subject as ever to the recognition-spreading/hair-shirted restriction of no more than one per artist/label, we highlight a quartet of works that go beyond the confines of a single album. 

This year's four comprise:

Jim O'Rourke - Steamroom (#38-42)
Longform Editions (the lot...)
Mike Shiflet - Tetracosa (Volumes 1-8)
The Caretaker - Everywhere at the end of time

To be sure, the year brought other deeply worthwhile larger-scale projects. But these four resonated particularly vividly with these ears.

(Full disclosure: while al & jl make the list's core 30 selections between us, the additional 3-1/3 are jl's alone.)

That three of the four are self-releases seems significant. Clearly, very few labels would underwrite a 24-hour release like Shiflet's immense drone epic ('350 unique sound objects categorized & layered such that no two moments are alike') or a 6-album conceptual suite like The Caretaker's exploration & embodying of dementia (though Boomkat have provided vinyl & CD versions of some of the 'stages'...).

This makes Longform's emergence from the Preservation stable all the more notable - & all the more worthy of celebration: a label dedicated to being 'a space of musical discovery for extended, immersive music pieces from around the world' that has already accumulated 16 often glorious pieces since emerging in June.

Longform's uncompromising emphasis on 'deep listening' is also relevant here. Despite their length, each of the quartet repays full immersion - revealing work that can be "truly tender & beautiful" (as one comment on the ravishing Steamroom 40 puts it).

Inevitably with pieces this long, engagement ebbs & flows. Some moments, some avenues are - naturally - more successful than others. Perhaps this puts it in the territory of Eno-esque ambience, "as ignorable as it is interesting". 

But this classification doesn't feel quite right. This is all music that demands, & in turn richly services, the fullest of attention...

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.