These ears have made few more welcome new acquaintances this year than Alex Alarcon's Sustainer.No real surprise, though, considering the pedigree of his ravishing Radiolas - released on Lawrence English's Room40, mastered by Stephan Mathieu. Frosted with shortwave fuzz & punctuated by morse-like bleeps, these eight pieces constitute a hymn of & to communicating across the darkness - a set of aural messages in a bottle, pushed into the void out of hope & longing. & now there's Taps too - a lovely, glowing exercise in a kind of muffled domestic Gamelan via Tessellate. Blurbs: "There is a history of music stemming from time spent recovering from injury. On such example is Brian Eno’s story of creating ambient music, following a prolonged period being couch bound with a broken leg. Sustainer’s Radiolas, shares a similar tale of horizontal inspirations. Whilst recovering from a serious health condition, Alex Alarcón aka Sustainer, began working with a very limited palette of equipment at arms reach. This mix of small recorders, pedals and other electronics become a processing chain through which he started to feed shortwave radio recordings. Having worked with radio recordings previously it didn’t take long for these recordings to take on a very personal and cathartic aesthetic. “Years ago i used to record things with another shortwave receiver at my parents house,” Alex explains, “because it was near the sea and you could catch easily stations from north of Africa. Sometimes I was even able to reach marine stations from boats crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It was an incredibly inspirational feeling tapping into these streams of sound." [Taps] "During the recording process, Alex searched for every resonant object in his home and found that metal, ceramic and crystal items were of particular use. These were struck with rubber-textile mallets and fed into a loop pedal via contact mics. Once these sounds and tones were collected, they were then carefully polished into fluid timbres, using various techniques. He strived to create a record made entirely from the sounds of his environment, using his home as an instrument. He wanted to create textures that reflected the peace of home which could only be achieved there, since outdoor field recordings can be so noisy at times."
Important: LMYE only makes music available that artists/labels have chosen to share freely. Let us know if something here shouldn't be.
Not everything is on SoundCloud, though it can sometimes seem that way. So our 'Radio' round-up of releases that attract these ears is splitting up, with a separate exploration of new material only encountered on Bandcamp alongside a dig into the monthly SC playlist (try this one & this if you're after our as yet undocumented latest...). This Japan & live performance-oriented first LMYB features Andrew Tuttle, Chihei Hatakeyama, Cinchel, Laica, Machinefabriek, Marcus Fischer, Matt Christensen, Michel Banabila, sleepland & Stephan Mathieu. If you're interested, LMYE is on Bandcamp here.
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.
