Two valuable voices of resistance performing powerful alchemy on the basest sources - each constructed directly from ultra-right material, Marc Kate's bittersweet, stately Deface (Falling Forms) & TVO's mesmerisingHell is Empty (V I S) point to an engaged experimental ambient beyond the genre's typical apolitical stance. Kate "steals the music of the ultra-right [especially 'National Socialist Black Metal'], & converts anthems of hate into shimmering spells of beauty...plunderphonic compositions apply all manner of filtration & effects to render the music as barbless, extracting the harmonic material as spectral emanations from their misanthropic origins."
All the same, he combats the risk of "amusing novelty": Deface "is dolorous. It mourns. Kate’s
reaction to this deeply troubling political moment resonates with a
sense of loss, and reflects on the work that lies ahead if the culture
is to move through and forward."
Similarly, Ruaridh Law (TVO)'s piece - which began life as an installation on the theme of alchemy at the FIBER festival in Amsterdam - seeks to "alchemically take the basest raw material possible and turn it into
something beautiful or at least worthwhile, whilst also making a comment
on how easily the raw material falls apart" [quote from this recent interview]. Hell is Empty is generated entirely from "alt-right shithouse" Breitbart - code line by code line: "The php code of the site is the rather 'data-sounding' noise that
travels through the whole piece, grabbed & converted on the fly to raw
audio then stretched & pulled, & the majority of the rhythms (short
of an 808 kick) are all generated by grabbing code live from the site & clipping it to short lengths. There's MIDI data & sequence data
that are generated by pulling numbers out of the php code, & the
drones underpinning the start & end take their pitch, resonance & harmonics from light-sensing cameras taking data from the visual
part of the installation, which is a gradual breaking down of the
Breitbart site into granular pixels."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
One of this year's more audacious & diverting 'remixes' (response or engagement might be a better way of putting it...), Marc Kate'sLowblow brilliantly unleashes Bowie & Eno's inner drone: "All 11 tracks of 'Low' playing at the same time, stretched to three hours." That cover image (itself a manipulation of the The Man Who Fell to Earth-sourced Low cover, presumably) encapsulates this vast piece's inevitably sedimented, smeared feel. Even if its ochre strata are rather warmer...
NB: Kate is also the host of Why We Listen: a strikingly thoughtful podcast that recently featured Disquiet's Marc Weidenbaum, in whose online listening group of a few years ago LMYE's jl & al first 'met'...
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Managed to miss a couple of earlier tip-offs, so the first taste of new Chris Herbert isn't so much a tease as a disconcerting delight. Disconcerting because of its warp-speed arrival after the, er, pause between Mezzotint & Constants (part of LMYE's 2014 Festive 33-1/3) - two of the most beguiling releases in these ears' acquaintance. & a delight because:
Enveloping organ swells cut through with both introspective switch-backs & soaring, sky-rending moments - as Room40 brilliantly terms it, Herbert again "blends the momentary blooming of rich structures with greyscale microclimates"... Oh, & it's a tape. On the always admirable Low Point... Stylistically-related bonus: "A collage of material that didn't make the cut for the second album for various reasons: germinal ideas, failed experiments, technical insurrection. In the grand tradition of the freedom of b-sides, some of it is worthwhile, if unpolished. Many of these audio swatches exist as longer stand-alone tracks that may surface at some point."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Another month, another belated,inevitably partial sample of the period's riches... Highlights include a strikingly poised, shimmering Christopher Bissonnettepiece (from a forthcoming kranky release); a ravishingly bucolic, meditative version of LMYE's old flame Le Berger, for Home Normal; the glowing, gathering warmth of Maxwell August Croy & James Devane's returning En (on the ever more essential Students of Decay); a quite lovely Lee Ranaldoworkout for Important; a valuable "atypical & personal" Chris Herbertset of "phasing & stippled atmospherics" for Sydney's Ears Have Ears; & a refracting first taste of the as-yet unreleased Tsjinlûd (a Frisian collective that includes Jan & Romke Kleefstra & Anne Chris Bakker, who appears under her own name too...). Also notable, TVO & Andrew Sharpley's provocative, caricaturing 'Feast Of Fools' - leering at the "dancing bears" of the "dead-eyed" Labour leadership losers, with exemplary agility (released at the moment of the Corbyn coronation). Further contributions from the Broken20/Moving Furniture axis are a powerful Digisizer dirge from Orphax & yet more rumbling longform beauty from D. Fyans (aka Erstlaub). September's 'radio' also features compelling new work by Chambers (Michael Red & Gabriel Saloman), Will Bolton, Scott Cortez, Emptyset, From The Mouth Of The Sun (Aaron Martin & Dag Rosenqvist, who also appears in his own, post-Jasper TX right...), L A N D, The OO-Ray, Andrew Pekler, PERILS (Kyle Bobby Dunn & Benoit Pioulard), Ruhe, Ryuichi Sakamoto & Taylor Deupree, Small Things on Sundays, Undisclosed & Voyou. The full 3-hour SoundCloud playlist, plus a few supplementary streams & videos, is at the bottom here. Disclaimer: no doubt September brought reams of deeply worthwhile releases besides this lot. Apologies that these ears haven't got to them yet.
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Harvesting August's riches, finally: from the ultimate space rock of Robert Curgenven's (inter)stellar Climata ("made entirely in Turrell Skyspaces...for best results use an external speaker, pointed upwards or away from you") to Stephan Mathieu's predictably mesmerising Stasis 6("a stereo mixdown from an excerpt of a 58-channel installation piece of 52 minutes duration" from his Before Nostromo for The Morning Line) - &via a host of LMYE loves (including William Basinski & RIchard Chartier [both with & without each other, & Chartier both under his own name & as Pinkcourtesyphone], Duane Pitre, Ezekiel Honig & Yann Novak) & discoveries - here are 25 pieces that stood out for these ears over the month... Also featuring Danny Clay & Greg Gorlen, Erstlaub, Fennesz & King Midas Sound, Billy Gomberg, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Tatsuro Kojima, Darren McClure, Toshimaru Nakamura & Celer, Offthesky, Yui Onodera, Nils Quak, Benoit Pioulard, Simon Scott, Andrew Tuttle, Simon Whetham, :zoviet*france: & a raft of Dauw/Eilean Records artists. Note Pitre's comment that the moving, strikingly serene Bayou Electric is his "last “solo” album 4 foreseeable future"... Note too that all proceeds from Tuttle's 177 go to the Malindza Refugee Camp Library "where your enjoyment of great experimental music goes to continuously fund the library that serves over 400 refugees from all over Africa". Finally, most of the 25 are gathered into a 3-hour playlist if you've got some time (it's also at the bottom here). A few not on SoundCloud (Erstlaub, Mathieu) or where the preferred version is in another format (Fennesz & King Midas Sound, Simon Scott) are bunged in alongside...
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Compelling, expansive sounds from recent collaborators (Naked Island) Felicia Atkinson & Brian Pyle - FA in another trans-Atlantic, male/female pairing (La Nuit), this time with Peter Broderick. Where La Nuit's Road Snakes is a writhing, echoing vamp adhesively shaped around that intimate but distant voice's swerves between English & French, Ensemble Economique's From The Train Window, Red Flowers On The Mountain is all lulling wide-screen stillness - a tranquil, glowing tone poem. Broderick on La Nuit: "after she left I treated those words as lines of an opera under which to make a ghostly string arrangement"...
Back-dated bonus tracks:
NB: artwork at top by Felicia Atkinson. Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Close
to an LMYE best label award for contributions to 2013 (Annual Hairshirt), it was A Very
Good Year for Home Normal, which recently celebrated its 5th birthday. After a shaky early-’09
inception (Sketches)
an increasingly stronger run of releases has seen the Tokyo-London enterprise slowly
grow to the status of a beacon of stylistic tone-setting, sustaining a
burgeoning ambient drone and organic electronic community. Despite relatively
high print runs releases are often sold out at source—further cause for
celebration for Ian Hawgood, for whom, in the face of a flagging mainstream music industry and his
‘not promoting the hell out of it,’ (interview, Tokafi), it's been business as usual. LMYE has
been meaning to resume Normal service since the turn of the year, so here goes…
One
of the stand-outs in ’13-14’s stream was Fabio Orsi + Pimmon’sProcrastination—but blow me down if this didn’t come out last February, so
ffwd-ing to now in the interests of currency, we find a certain MrMargraff ditching duck-down-delvingnom
de disque and
coming out as plain old René, maybe a way to say that Phasencomes from a more authentic self—more guard-down
hair-let-down. Over eight smeared—presumably steel string-wrung—textural meditations
Margraff shapes shudders of unsettled mien from slender means—getting closer to
source sounds’ core, small grabs blurred and transformed—a shift from previous
ethereal and shoegaze orientations to bleaker, more fragile but more focused
compositions.
The aptly titled Continental
Drift (previously earslent)
is the outcome of a cross-continental communion between LMYE fave, Sam Landry (North
America), aka Le Berger,
and musician mates—René Margraff (Europe) again, with Fuzz Lee (Asia), aka elintseeker, making
up Faures. The eponymous
earth alluded to is the least salient element evoked here. Rather they are air—palpable musical gestures of
soaring, water—sequences suggestive
of submersion, especially in the longer-form “Asthenosphenic Movement” trilogy,
and crackling fire, all converging in
highpoint, “Magnetic Striping.” The trio fuses controlled grainy rushes with more
composed unfurls in a shimmering son
et lumiere. Overall, a notably neo-romantic deep-water, wide sky,
beyond-horizon, into-the-spheres affair, this unlikely ambient-drone supergroup
engage in an unwontedly pretty poesis
of sound design. The trio spin this accompanying quote into their semiosis of sound:
‘It let them float and drift, break apart
and converge. Where they broke away, cracks, rifts, trenches remain; where they
collided, ranges of folded mountains appear.’ (geologist Hans Cloos re: Wegener’s theory).
Back
to 2013, on a completely different tip is c60 / tmkutekt by wndfrm, which is real Oregon kid
(geddit?) Tim Westcott
(who some may have caught as Cloudburst for Resting Bell release, Katedra) with two
long-form ’scapes sourced from location recordings of the Biosphere Museum of the Environment
in Parc Jean-Drapeau, Montreal’s geodesic dome, which showcases the water
ecosystems of the Great Lakes-Saint Lawrence River region. Westcott’s dome of
enclosed sound is initially all restraint, silence abounding, then a deal of
metallic hiss as a backdrop for an odd back-quack; the further it peels, the
more it reveals, ending in a kind of intense long thin wire drone. The
second piece sets out like an industrial dryer before chatter enters followed by
remote reverbed clank, the whole then drowned out by a passing plane. If, as
the sleeve has it, Canada Council for the Arts funded this, I’m putting in a proposal.
In the meantime, a virtue with c60 /
tmkutekt is definitely patience.
A
propos of patience, Ithaca Trio offers Music For
Piano & Patience. With previous on Hibernate and Under The
Spire, Oliver
Thurley plots a path from a lowlight Leeds with a set of nicely reel-to-reeled
piano loops. Obvious reference point is Lord of the Decadent Tinkled Ivory
Loop, William Basinski, but these two half-hour pieces are sui generis; the first lets loops spool out somewhat scatter-gun, with
a warm grain of tape saturation, skips and crackles, weathered-seeming—as if
from some unearthed old vinyl find from a loft stash; the second—more structured—sounds
like someone stopping off for a pensive plonk at an old Johanna in a deserted
church.
Far from—let alone up—any notional alleys
approaching the al
wing of Earslend Towers is Place For One Day—trailed
as a sort of alternative minimal-electro-folk record—by a project called
Birdt (violin/vocals - Janne
Mansens|accordion, synths, vocoder, glockenspiel - Sascha Schmitt|bass clarinet
- Gareth L. Davis|guitar, vocals & lyrics – with a bunch of mates playing,
singing & helping along). Likewise leaving your LMYE scribe’s chimes
unrung, though undoubtedly well-crafted, is At
Home - Piano Book (Volume One) by Sardinia-based Stefano Guzzetti—a
set of ivory-tinkling lyricism to please Dustin
O’Halloran types.
Chronovalve
aka Mike Engebretson has been under the radar for some time now plying his
ambient trade; associated with the (now sadly defunct) Smallfish
enterprise half a decade or so ago, he (re-)surfaced last year with Trace
of Light which has oodles of lush textured ambiance and a few neo-choral
wisps with lashings of synthi-ness. For the sleep-deprived, this is the right somnific
stuff—cloud-watch micro-symphonies, billowing, undulant drift, reminding of the days/daze of fave
‘snooze-to’ records (Somnium, DJ Olive,
anyone…?). Currents swirl, waves coalesce in fleeting intermesh, then peal off
in a rendering of sonic light bathing sounding object in halation effect.
Finally,
commemorating its 5thbirthday is a 5-disc comp, Elements, featuring 60+ artists from Home Normal past, present and future, raising money for 5
different charities.
Last word to HN: ‘In this modern digital age with its constant stream of information, we've sought to work as quietly as possible, firmly rooting our ethos that things can be released in a subtle, quiet way. 'Organic' has always been the key word, and we are so thankful that people seem to still appreciate the natural path we've chosen, ignoring all the noise that surrounds our chosen way.'
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
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.
