Prolonged weekness

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

Not sure these ears need the full 20 'ambient' tributes to Phil, but applauding Steve Flato for "exists in the vague place between Music For Airports and Music From The Disney Motion Picture 'Tarzan'"... 

...& always ready for gossamer Nicholas Burrage (formerly Szczepanik) loveliness

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Further on NB, finally spending time with the unhurried richness of marbles.' vol. 1

"appropriation of mariah carey's '#1 to infinity'"

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Headphones on, as guided, & quietly blissing out to Music For Sleep's A Careful Endlessly...



"Listening at low volume is highly recommended"

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Celer is still releasing & these ears are still listening... 

...captivated by the gorgeous new I Wish You Could (Constellation Tatsu) - as natural & restful as breath



[part of Fall Batch w/Stephan Haluska, Rhucle & Ecovillage

 https://ctatsu.bandcamp.com/merch/fall-batch-2018]

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Touching dedication to Brian Young too...

Also, applauding the line Cassettes...no longer just for dads & hipsters

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Revisiting Bethan Kellough's glorious, grand Vision on Touch's unexpected new sub-label Sundry Items!



From Aven (2016)

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Sundry Items also features Rafael Toral's Violence of Discovery & Calm of Acceptance




"crafted with extreme precision & care"

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Resubmerging into Loscil's classic Submers - these ears aren't vinyl fetishists, but kranky's rerelease prompts first descent in a while into its depths...



"sourceless echoes, steely surfaces & ominous melodic & rhythmic undertows"

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Gladly revisiting The Swifter (Andrea Belfi / BJ Nilsen / Simon James Phillips)'s magnificent Wall Sailor (Sonic Pieces)...




"like watching birds being set free from a cage to relish a newly won space for spreading their wings"

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Not everyone approves of it, evidently - but still finding rewards in Max Loderbauer & Ricardo Villalobos's Re: ECM more than seven years in... 

"to harmonize these two worlds, without them aspiring to mutually deactivate each other"

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Not sure I can get away with the word 'splendid', but this new Purlieu podcast for New New World Radio's 'Beauty Sleep' is...great

Featuring Jobanshi, Mt Accord, Knivtid & more... 

"Celebrating one year of sonic healing"

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.

My Weekness

Some of these ears' listening enthusiasms from the past week...

"like a soundtrack to a solemn, ancient ceremony - with not-necessarily human participants" 

Kicking off November's Lend Me Your Radio with Aidan Baker's "steady, pulsing & eternal" Steep Uphill Climb - from Deer Park (Muzan Editions)

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"music that enters your room as sunlight...that moves slowly through your room...a slow journey into silence": Martin Hoogeboom & Oberlin's Light/Well (Thirsty Leaves)

Especially keen to hear moody alien's 12-minute Light vs Well remix...

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Much atmosphere & invention in this Precocious Mouse set from Thursday night - 'Type', live at Demerara Records' Vanishing Point Solo

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Sending LMYE love - False Colors (Appropriate Savagery Remix) by J. De Sosa on Vaagner  

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"spellbinding, uniquely decayed renderings of solo piano pieces, it forms a poetic farewell to the 20th century & a reluctant embrace of new technological possibilities" 

Believe the hype [for Akira Rabelais' Eisoptrophobia...]

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"a take on sound as a representation of memory" 

Ultra-ready for Ultrafog's How Those Fires Burned That Are No Longer (Motion Ward)...

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These ears never need much persuading towards new Piiptsjilling (Machinefabriek / Jan & Romke Kleefstra / Mariska Baars) - but champing at the bit for the quartet's 'concentrated yet playful improvisations' with Sylvain Chauveau, Annelies Monsere & Joachim Badenhorst

FEAN

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

Two friends from Cleveland

From dodgy YouSendIt MP3s to painless embeds, from IDM & dubstep to ambient drone, LMYE is digging out our now-fading tee today to celebrate over a decade on the Hype Machine...

No doubt we could acknowledge this landmark with greater pomp. But what better way, really, than to highlight one of these ears' current passions?

These are captured throughout the month - every month - in our 'Lend Me Your Radio' & other playlists on SoundCloud. June's list continues to evolve, but pre-eminent this month is the excellent Reserve Matinee...

From the unfurling textures of the legendary DJ Olive's 'Listening to Fir' to Forest Management's delicious, never long enough 'Showers' via Nadia's magical 'Intercept' & Esper Werm's chancey 'Gunk', RM's new batch (the first of two for this summer, apparently...) is a high-water mark for a label only launched this year...
 





 
& from earlier this year:

Finally, hear the label's forthcoming 'outpu' by havetogo (it says) at the end of this rich, recent-ish mix for Beyond / Below by Forest Management...



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

Barbaric bombast

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 mesmerising Hell 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.

And counting...

Factory never died, it turns out. It just moved south. For LMYE's Label of the Decades, Touch, is the label Factory promised to be and might even have proved to be had it sustained its own model of a defiantly independent, endlessly ambitious imprint (something more than just a record company) - as Touch so manifestly & triumphantly has across its now 35 years of inspiring operation. 

So many happy returns today - the latest anniversary of co-founder Jon Wozencroft's first contact with New Order (by Touch mythology, the official start...).  

Factory has been a profound influence on Touch across the years, of course. Both New Order & Tuxedomoon feature on that first Touch tape later in 1982. Even today Chris Watson (of Factory Sample-ed Cabaret Voltaire) remains a core Touch artist. 

The connection was highly evident at Touch's last big birthday event at the end of 2012 - from the pontifical blessing of Atmospheres 4's audience with Peter Saville to the Ian Curtis postcards handed out to Wozencroft's willingness to frame almost anything in terms of Joy Division/New Order (& his Blue Monday beat-boxing to send the last night audience home) to an in absentia rendition by Watson. 

You might also compare Touch with the even more long-lived ECM. The two clearly share an insistence on the integrity of the whole product - emphasising recording & presentation - with quite a shared visual aesthetic - alongside/around the music. 

But where ECM has been underwritten for most of its near 50-year life by the earnings of a few outlying successes (Keith Jarrett's Köln Concert, in particular - as Factory was too, of course: think Blue Monday...), Touch has sustained itself despite a championing a more resolutely uncommercial output - one that has been subsidised neither by the market nor public money.  

After all this time it combats middle-aged spread with an unmatched appetite for going beyond conventional boundaries. Who else runs a mentoring programme, hosts conferences, publishes print & audio-visual work, repositions the organ, curates free recordings by aligned artists, experiments not just with formats but multi-channel recording, proclaims a psychological/digital 'Kingdom', & even collates recipes & commissions its own beer mat?!

As a label Touch remains the benchmark despite its age - essential, genuinely pioneering, unself-consciously experimental, constantly reinforcing & broadening its unmatched body of work. One mark of its greatness: even 34 years in, few other labels - apart perhaps from eMego - rivalled the richness & vitality of its 2016 output. 

Ditto almost all of LMYE's 10 years...

Of course, Touch's non-pareil roster of artists - from Oren Ambarchi to Fennesz to Philip Jeck to Phill Niblock to Watson - is ageing with the label. Will it outlive them & its founders?

That's still unclear. As Mike Harding, Wozencroft's partner in Touch, considers in a typically thoughtful response (taken from an unpublished interview): "The artists we work with tend to be middle-aged – they’re in their 30s, 40s, 50s. I’m stretching middle age to encompass not-youth & not-extreme old age, that period. So ‘will Touch survive the artists around whom we are flourishing?’ I honestly don’t know because I don’t know what’s going to happen. And I don’t know what’s going to happen in relation to the reaction against things digital which is definitely alive and kicking hard. You never know. Someone completely outside our experience might come along and find a huge amount to relate to and vice versa, because all of our relationships are completely collaborative." 

"Maybe, thinking about it, there’s something generational about what we’re doing and young people relate to it in a different way compared to people who have lived through the same period that we’ve lived through and have themselves experienced the evolution and development of recording technology but also the cultural responses – digital and all the rest of it that we’re also horrified and fascinated and preoccupied with in equal measures." 

"We never react to anything. We respond, giving it the dynamic activity of a communicative dialogue-based relationship. Something doesn’t happen & we go ‘Ooh’. We do thoughtfully and carefully respond to issues that arise. And it may not seem to be necessarily very direct but all the time we’re having this discussion and these debates and conversations about what we think’s important."

Certainly Touch is far from winding down with age. On the contrary, it's been replenishing its ranks. As noted, its most compelling releases last year were Bethan Kellough's Aven & Claire M Singer's Solas. 


More established parts of its canon, BJ Nilsen & Hildur Gudnadottir are other younger artists who could "carry the flag into the long-term future". Moreover, the label has embraced Simon Scott in recent years. 

It is also mining an increasingly rich seam on the US west coast - scene of its 2016 'conference'. This connection links it with Kellough, the Richard Chartier/Robert Crouch/Yann Novak nexus & older Touch connection Mark van Hoen (Harding's collaborator in the excellent drøne), as well as Lustmord (Dark Matter). 

Novak's outstanding recent Ornamentation is soon to be followed by Crouch's Sublunar & Something You Are Or Something You Do by Chartier alter ego Pinkcourtesyphone for the allied Tapeworm... 

Pinkcourtesyphone – Live at LACE

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

Capelli camicia

Ineptitude or high-mindedness? Either way (both, really), LMYE's Festive 33-1/3 - a selection of the releases that meant most to us in 2016 - again emerges on the last day of the year...

The song remains the same too: a clunky but sincere attempt to acknowledge how much more great music was released over the year, even just in our narrow corner of endeavour, than an inevitably partial list like this can begin to embrace. 

To spread the love as far as possible the two of us select 15 releases each, but no more than one per label or artist. After a bit of jostling & horse-trading over duplicates (though barely any this year, when we've evidently been further apart in our listening than previously...), we supplement the 30 with four projects that fall outside the normal 'release' boundaries - bigger &/or more ambitious (in multiple media, for example), or not strictly new - to derive our 33-1/3. 

This year's list has been unusually challenging since a number of key labels were in overdrive. Grand projects have multiplied too. So our self-constraining methodology became even more masochistic.

How, to take an especially painful example, to choose between Bethan Kellough's Aven & Claire M. Singer's Solas? Two exceptional releases that each expanded notions of sound palettes & what could be done with them, but both on Touch (about whom more shortly...). 

& that's to exclude Yann Novak's Ornamentation, Simon Scott's Floodlines, Anna von Hauswolff's Kallan (Prototype) & Fennesz's Mahler Remix, despite all four clearly demanding recognitition as part of the year's 'best'. 

Ditto conflicts between multiple pieces of outstanding work on Dragon's Eye, Editions Mego, Line, Room40, Sonic Pieces & Students of Decay - to highlight the concerns of only one pair of LMYE ears. 

Note to self: a follow-up without the hair shirt may be needed to honour all these exclusions.

At the very least, for a less partial picture of our listening priorities please check out the monthly Lend Me Your Radio series on SoundCloud, al's Mixcloud & jl's Bandcamp (collection & wish list). 


2016 Festive 33-1/3:

Jeremy Bible - Music for Black Holes (Aole) [jl]
Dirty Hope/Graham Dunning/David Fyans/Mark Lyken/Orphax/TVO/Arne Weinberg - li series (Broken20) [jl]
Stephan Mathieu - Radiance series (Schwebung) [jl]
Abul Mogard - Works (Ecstatic) [al]





1991 - No More Dreams (No More Dreams) [al]
Chris Abrahams - Climb (Vegetable) [jl]
anthéne - Black Carbon (Assembly Field) [jl]
Beautumn - Bordeaux (Infraction) [al]
Benoît Pioulard - Thine / Radial (self-released) [al]
Bruised Skies - Guide (Blank Editions) [al]
Celestino - Beyond Enemy (A Guide To Saints) [al]
Dominic Coppola - Ladylike EP (Overview Ltd.) [al]





drøne - reversing into the future (Pomperipossa) [jl]
Drottning Omma - Iris av is (offworldcolonies ltd.) [al]
Christian Fennesz & Jim O'Rourke - It's Hard For Me To Say I’m Sorry (Editions Mego) [jl]
Francesco Giannico & Giulio Aldinucci - Agoraphonia (Dronarivm) [jl]
Billy Gomberg - Slight at that Contact (Students of Decay) [jl]
Tobias Hellkvist - Vesterhavet (self-released) [jl]
Chris Herbert - Katushki (Low Point) [jl]





Braeyden Jae - Fog Mirror (Whited Sepulchre) [al]
KETEV - I Know No Weekend (Portals Editions) [al]
Bethan Kellough - Aven (Touch) [jl]
L’eoscombu Couti - Five Cambridge Utilities (Constellation Tatsu) [al]
Sophia Loizou - Singulacra (Kathexis) [al]
Sana Obruent - Prince of the Air (Blackjack Illuminist) [al]
Marsen Jules - Shadows in Time (Oktaf) [jl]
Moss Covered Technology - Speicherbank (Eilean) [al]





New Rome - Nowhere (Room40) [al]
Nils Quak - Ad Interim (Phinery) [jl]
Alex Smalley - JAN SBR 15 (Rural Colours) [jl] 
The Swifter - Wall Sailor (Sonic Pieces) [jl]
Triac - Here (Line) [jl]
Willamette - Diminished Composition (Scissor Tail) [al]
Uwe Zahn/Porya Hatami/Darren McClure - Veerian (Eilean) [jl]





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