We have finally cleared out the backlog of great music and present some new episodes.
Episode 711 features music from The Jesus and Mary Chain, Zola Jesus, Duster, Sangre Nueva, Dialect, The Bug, Cleared, Mount Eerie, Mulatu Astatke & Hoodna Orchestra, Hayden Pedigo, Bistro Boy, and Ibukun Sunday.
Episode 712 has tunes by Mazza Vision, Waveskania, Black Pus, Sam Gendel, Benny Bock, and Hans Kjorstad, Katharina Grosse, Carina Khorkhordina, Tintin Patrone, Billy Roisz, and Stefan Schneider, His Name Is Alive, artificial memory trace, mclusky, Justin Walter, mastroKristo, Başak Günak, and William Basinski.
Episode 713 brings you sounds from Mouse On Mars, Leavs, Lawrence English, Mo Dotti, Wendy Eisenberg, Envy, Ben Lukas Boysen, Cindytalk, Mercury Rev, White Poppy, Anadol & Marie Klock, and Galaxie 500.
Skolavordustigur Street in Reykjavík photo by Jon (your Podcast DJ).
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Ora was always a rather curious and enigmatic project, as the collective formed by Andrew Chalk and Darren Tate in the '80s has been historically characterized by extremely limited releases and shifting membership.  Time Out of Mind adds yet another strange chapter to the Ora tale, as it is a reworking of unreleased material that largely pre-dates Ora's debut release (1992's DAAC cassette).  Chalk and Tate make it clear that this is not a "lost album" though–it is more of an alternate history, suggesting a path that the project might have explored without the intervention of line-up changes and new working methods.  Naturally, Chalk fans will probably swoop down on this album en masse, as material from this project is so maddeningly rare, but this collection is a modest and understated affair content-wise, consisting primarily of brief sketches and vignettes of mysterious field recordings and bleary drones.
I am not quite as familiar with Ora's oeuvre as I am with Andrew Chalk's solo work, but there are certainly some recurring themes throughout the band's long and underheard history.  Naturally, I associate Ora most closely with drone music, but they also had a strong bent for both field recording and luring in fresh collaborators. All of those tendencies are reflected here to some degree, albeit in somewhat embryonic form.  For example, future members Colin Potter and Daisuke Suzuki both turn up, but Suzuki only appears on two songs and Potter is largely relegated to engineering.  Far more interesting are the divergences from Ora's future work.  The most significant is arguably the brief, sketch-like nature of these miniatures, which is a far cry from project's characteristic longform work.  Also, Chalk and Tate occasionally flirt with eschewing music altogether in favor of strange and evocative collages of field recordings, such as "Path To Infinity," which sounds like a mysterious figure slowly wandering through an abandoned factory full of echoing metallic clangs and ominous bubblings.  Another crucial component here is that Tate and Chalk greatly valued spontaneity at this phase of their career, using a portable recorder to work outdoors and incorporate natural ambiance into their work.  I believe Ora never fully abandoned that approach, but they did transition into using that material as grist for more elaborate studio recordings.  On this album, it feels like those initial explorations were the endpoint rather than the beginning.  Given the degree of transformational wizardry that Potter has brought to Nurse With Wound’s studio scraps, the ephemeral, fractured nature of this album can only be a deliberate choice.
That reduced emphasis on composition is admittedly felt a bit here, as there are no newly unearthed masterpieces lurking amongst these fifteen songs.  Again, however, that seems to be entirely by choice, as Time Out of Mind feels like a willfully naturalistic and egoless experiment: Chalk and Tate seem like they were not so much harvesting material for a great album so much as wandering about the English countryside in search of sonically intriguing or inspiring settings, then attempting to capture the essence of those settings in the moment.  That admittedly sounds a bit more beautiful and pure than the actual reality, as the duo were quite fixated upon scraping metal and cavernous natural reverb rather than, say, bird songs or whispering breezes, but it still makes for quite an unusual album and justifies this belated vault-exhumation: no one needs a collection of "normal" Ora songs that were not good enough to wind up on an album, but a strange and cryptic collection of sonic postcards from far-flung and obscure places has a definite appeal.
For the most part, the individual songs blossom into being and disappear too quickly to leave any kind of strong impression, but a few pieces stand out nonetheless.  One such piece is one of Suzuki's appearances, "Inastateless," which weaves a bizarre fantasia of scraping metal cacophony and dreamily swooping feedback.  Elsewhere, the flickering and undulating drones of "Windmill" and the menacing submerged ambiance of "Taiga" seem like legitimately fine Ora fare that should have probably surfaced on an album long before now.  I was also quite struck by the sheer strangeness of "Picturebox," a sound collage that sounds like a close mic’d field recording of marbles rattling around an elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque contraption as a jet passes by overhead.
Obviously, the one big caveat with this release is that these songs languished in the vault for two or three decades for a reason and all of the participants have since gone on to do far better work than is captured here. As such, this is not a viable entry point for new fans, nor will existing fans find a revelatory treasure trove of crucial recordings and they should not expect to: Time Out of Mind does not pretend to be anything more than an intriguingly divergent time capsule.  Given those modest expectations, this is a varied, experimental, and endearingly odd release that unveils a few fine pieces and offers a host of evocative miniature sound puzzles to mull over.  As the balance errs much more heavily on the latter, this release is probably strictly for completists and serious fans, but they are fairly certain to find its small pleasures absorbing.
Compiling recent small-run cassette works into a luxurious double record set, Essential Anatomies represents a reunion for the duo of Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie.  Collaborators since 2000 and friends for even longer, the four lengthy recordings here capture their Texas reunion in 2015, and with its undeniable sense of complexity and cohesion, makes it clear that they have not missed a step from their time apart.
On paper, what Sheffield and Rippie do is well-trod ground:  processing and recontexualization of samples and other forms of pre-recorded music.  But rather than being another pair of John Oswald wannabes, they do so with distinct expertise and precision.  To use a slightly abstract metaphor, they are much closer to Public Enemy’s Bomb Squad production, taking bits here and there and using them as elements in a much different whole, than they are Puff Daddy’s wholesale plagiarism and lack of innovation.
The first of the four lengthy pieces (each around 22 to 23 minutes long) is an instant launch into the gloom that is Essential Anatomies.  Chilling, piano like scrapes cut through a blackened, churning abyss of sound.  Some shrill, sharp bits pierce through the darkness here and there, but the piece largely stays pleasant, even though it is rather bleak and covered in a nicely noisy sheen of fuzz.  Tortured, almost melodic tones occasionally shine through a wall of ghostly drifts and heavy rumbles, at times heading toward a bit of harsh crunch, but stays in check.  The melodies appear here and there again, acting as a slightly less oppressive counterpoint to the sound of decay that surrounds it.  Finally, the duo end the piece on a lighter note, like sun shining through menacing gray skies.
What is abundantly clear right from this start is that Sheffield and Rippie are not only extremely proficient at creating moods and space with their samplers and turntables (respectively), but also a creating dynamic compositions that are quite expansive and varied, changing often but returning to reoccurring motifs that results in a more composed, rather than improvised sound.  The second piece allows a bit more of their source material to shine through, mostly in the form of piano notes and what sounds like frozen reverberations of chimes far in the distance.  There is the same sense of space, but erratic loops and mangled notes result in a composition that builds in tension, eventually transitioning into haunting church organ like walls that dominate the latter half of the piece.
Comparably, the second record comes across a bit less melodic and a bit more textural in the composition and structure.  Part three begins with an almost percussive, crunching machinery like opening that is eventually melded with a batch of wet, almost organic like noises and radio static.  Bits of recognizable music still sneak through here and there, but it is less the focus.  Instead, metallic sweeps and unnatural field recording like sounds fill out the mix, though it ends on a slightly more ambient note.  The final composition first is free and spacious, with some crackling tactile like elements at first, but soon it takes on a decaying sound.  More organ and mangled string fanfares give a more conventional signpost here and there, but by the end the duo has already transitioned the sound to one of tension and fright, slowly evolving into an uncomfortable silence to end the record.
While I do not believe I could ever manage to place the source of the sounds Colin Andrew Sheffield and James Eck Rippie utilized in making Essential Anatomies, never does it feel like the two overly processed or from their source.  Meaning that, there is some of the original character left from the source material, however subtle it may be.  Instead these audio building blocks are obscured but tastefully utilized to construct these atmosphere heavy works.  Rippie’s day job is a sound mixer for films and television shows, which surely aided the two in creating the cinematic mood that these two records conjure up.  It is that combination of sonic nuance and compositional strength and diversity that make Essential Anatomies so good.
This collaboration between Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luijk (Af Ursin) has been active since 2011, yet this is the first of their albums that I have actually heard, as Van Luijk shares Chalk's love of limited, small press-style releases.  As a result, Elodie's output has mostly been a series of vinyl-only releases from Belgium and Japan, though Stephen O'Malley’s Ideologic Organ has thankfully stepped up to get their next album to a wider audience.  On paper, Odyssee seems like a very poor choice for my first Elodie experience, as it has two traits that generally make me steer clear of an album: it is both a live recording and the soundtrack to a film.  In reality, however, this album is quietly stunning, taking Debussy-style Impressionism into gorgeously smoky, twilit, and eerily hallucinatory territory.
Odyssee consists of just one 33-minute piece, "Musique En Scène II," which was recorded live at the Geräueschwelten Festival in Münster in 2015.Although the release itself is characteristically lean on background information or useful details, the piece was apparently performed as accompaniment to a film that Van Luijk made that very evening.  Since the film did not exist earlier that day, it is probably safe to say that the music was completely improvised.  It certainly does not sound like it though, nor does it sound at all live (until the audience begins clapping at the end, anyway).  More importantly, it also does not sound particularly like an Andrew Chalk album, nor does it bear all that much resemblance to what little Af Ursin I have heard (though Van Luijk is admittedly kind of multi-instrumentalist shape-shifter).  I will not say that Elodie is necessarily greater than the sum of its parts here, but they certainly transcend whatever expectations I had and offer something a bit unexpected.  Of course, part of that stylistic transformation is due to the piece's simple structure and instrumentation, as it is essentially a languorous and Eastern-flavored flute solo centered on a small cluster of notes.  For his part, Chalk provides a shifting and understated backdrop of quietly swelling synth chords, which is just perfect, as a large part of Odyssee's otherworldly beauty lies in the breathy intimacy of Van Luijk’s flute.  Any further clutter would dilute the magic.
A more significant part of Odyssee's mesmerizing spell lies in the eerily melancholy and exotic mood, as it evokes nothing less than the exquisitely lonely sensation of being alone in a vast desert at night, though the piece gradually becomes somewhat less haunted-sounding as it progresses.  There is also quite a bit of subtle beauty to be found in the details.  For example, while Van Luijk’s woozily snaking flute melody is presented with crystalline clarity, it often leaves a ghostly afterimage that lingers in the air.  That dreamy reverie is sometimes additionally enhanced by a sheen of feedback or chirping, trilling overtones. The overall effect is quite a surreal one, as the piece leaves a wake of lingering shadow and murk while simultaneously conjuring up a chorus of illusory birds.  While that is essentially all the piece offers, that turns out to be more than enough, as both the melody and the atmosphere are quite entrancing.  The piece does have a clear arc of sorts, however, as Chalk’s synthesizer gradually becomes a bit more intrusive, creating more complex harmonies.  At the same time, the backdrop gradually shifts towards radiant major chords in the second half, though they are thankfully still vaporous enough to maintain the delicious spell of bleary unreality.  Granted, I would probably like the piece more if the occasional shafts of light were even more toned down, yet I appreciate the ambiguous precariousness of the brighter interludes, as the encroaching undercurrent often suggests a mirage rather than an oasis.
Given its humble origins, Odyssee was probably intended as a somewhat minor release, but it is a weirdly perfect one.My only minor issue is with its brevity, which was no doubt dictated by the film.  As far as I am concerned, it could have easily extended for twice as long, as the duo weave a gorgeously haunting dreamscene from the first notes, nimbly walking the tightrope of providing enough small-scale dynamic variation to keep me deeply immersed while never disrupting that spell with anything more forceful. Granted, I was admittedly quite predisposed to like this album as an Andrew Chalk fan, but that only got my initial attention: if this album were not special, I would have quickly lost interest.  Fortunately, Odyssee feels like something entirely unique.  I love pleasant surprises.  This is exactly the sort of hidden gem that I am always looking for, though I suspect it may herald the dawn of a painfully expensive scavenger hunt for the rest of Elodie's oeuvre.
Post-minimalist American composer Rafael Anton Irisarri makes his Umor Rex debut with bold new album, The Shameless Years. Inspired by a troubled socio-political climate, buried melodies punch their way through a bleak cover of noisy drones, periodically veering into some of Irisarri's most eerily pertinent music to date.
One of Rafael Anton Irisarri's most thematically and sonically cohesive records to date The Shameless Years came together in a relatively short burst of creativity starting at the end of 2016. Rediscovering some relatively older tools – namely Native Instruments' Reaktor, Absynth, and Kontakt software – Irisarri combined them with his collection of guitars, pedals, amps, and analogue processing gear, turning his Black Knoll Studio north of NYC into a powerful writing tool. Completed quickly by Irisarri's standards, let alone during a period of social upheaval in American society, the record faces down several key personal themes. The title, suggests Irisarri, could in fact be seen as a reflection of the era of shamelessness we're currently living in; a time of fake news and alternative facts.
Two tracks were completed remotely between Irisarri in New York and Umor Rex veteran Siavash Amini from his home in Tehran, Iran. This music came together at the peak of all the anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant rhetoric happening in the USA, not to mention the banning of Iranians from entering the country, explains Irisarri. The diptych with Amini, "Karma Krama" and "The Faithless," seems bathed in additional waves of sorrow and dread. The wash of symphonic stormclouds of synth drones and processed notes on the latter gradually appears and disappears over the course of thirteen mournful minutes.
"Rh Negative" marches gigantic guitars through towering valleys of scarred ambient noise dealing with Irisarri's own heritage, many of his ancestors having come to America to escape poverty and oppression. The refusal of modern America to extend similar sanctuary to refugees escaping turmoil weighs heavily on the composer. Elsewhere an emotional onslaught of notes buried in mounds of greyscale noise on "Sky Burial" aims to deal with Irisarri's very own mortality – something he was recently confronted with following health scares, an accident, and a near-death experience in 2016. Pushing 40 as this album was being made, the composer is constantly aware that he's already outlived his own father, who died at the age of 32. Facing down both intolerance and the void, the epic soundscapes of The Shameless Years are a vast cry of emotion from Irisarri. The clock is ticking – gotta make the most out of it while you still can.
Having been entranced by both Andrew Chalk’s work with MIRROR (and back to his solo works as FERIAL CONFINE, plus multiple collaborations with David Jackman, The New Blockaders, Daisuke Suzuki, etc ) and Timo van Luijk (as Af Ursin, In Camera, La Poupée Vivante, and collaborations with Kris Vanderstraeten and others) for many years, I was naturally intrigued to hear about and hear their duo project ELODIE. The project formed in 2010, and has spanned eleven beautiful albums already, to date.
Vieux Silence for Ideologic Organ is their first release presented outside of their own record publishing nook, Faraway Press & La Scie Dorée. However this is not the first encounter between Ideologic Organ & ELODIE: they performed at a night in London I curated in February 2012, alongside Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang. Elodie's performance was among the most delicately engaging and savant I have witnessed… so very quiet, with snow falling in London outside Cafe Oto's windows, the audience palpably entered a high intensity listening focus. The impression of this vivid memory is striking, considering how spare each of the individual elements present that night were.
Vieux Silence, and ELODIE in general, provoke a visual imagination in an instant, perhaps filtered through aged watercolour, tape grain, antique lenses, forgotten levels of listening and observational patience. On this gorgeous album, Chalk & van Luijk also collaborate with piano, pedal steel and clarinet (played by Tom James Scott, Daniel Morris and Jean-Noel Rebilly, respectively). Each detail carefully considered and colouring step by step, like an impressionist watercolour.
The frontier for French electroacoustic mystical music has traversed much ground since Pierre Schaeffer sloughed off the past and laid out a map without borders or designated ground. Seventy years in this land of the fried, we hear a plethora of ideas and ongoing potential coming from all corners of the globe. Inheriting the wisdom of past masters whilst forging a signature style of his own, Kassel Jaeger persists as one of the premier explorers of these unknown worlds today. Comprised of recently recorded tracks, Aster is a work of revisits and reworkings, one which acts as a hinge in both closing this particular chapter whilst opening up the windows to new sound world to come. In Aster we have a rich, deep music replete with dark ambient sonorities swirling amongst intense buzzing tones. Often chilling and ominous, this is a fearless music with abstracted corners and dynamic leverage. Unafraid to embed itself in the ongoing whirlpool of sonic progress. Jaeger's output remains a thrilling body of exploration and ongoing transformation.
Hood Faire are raising funds to release solo electric guitarist Dean McPhee's third full length album, a collection of free-flowing solo electric guitar instrumentals which combine fluid fingerpicked melodies with atmospheric drones and hypnotic loops.
"Four Stones" brings together remastered versions of three tracks that were only previously available on limited edition tape compilations on the Folklore Tapes label (which are now sold out) along with two new pieces "Dance Macabre" and the epic 14 minute "Four Stones" which sees Dean using a new kick drum pedal to add a percussive undercurrent to his music.
To read a biography and some reviews of Dean's previous albums click here.
Funds pledged will be spent on pressing 500 records. Backers will be kept up to date with previews of the album art as it is finished and with the progress of the vinyl pressing, as well as upcoming launch gig dates and documentation of any live gigs or other events.
After backers have received their copies the finished album will be given a wider release and will be distributed by Cargo Records
Risks and challenges
The tracks are already recorded and mastered and are waiting to be sent to be pressed. The aim is to have the album ready to ship by November.
There are no major issues anticipated except for the possibility of delays at the pressing plant. This risk has been managed by using Vinyl Factory who have an excellent reputation for quality control.
Edward Ka-Spel is certainly having quite an amazing year, already releasing two great albums in the form of I Can Spin A Rainbow and The Brown Acid Caveat.  This deeply strange and proggy solo effort is kind of a bizarre bridge between those two peaks, featuring occasional contributions from Amanda Palmer and seemingly expanding upon the thematic premise of The Tear Garden's "Lola’s Rock."  High On Station Yellow Moon also feels like a repository for all of Ka-Spel's recent ideas that were too abstract and unstructured for his "proper" albums–like a pressure-release valve for an overactive mind.  In that sense, there is a definite resemblance to the collaged, free-form aesthetic of The Legendary Pink Dots' Chemical Playschool series, albeit with a fairly consistent and intriguing thematic thread weaving through it all.  Another similarity to the Chemical Playschool series is that Yellow Moon can be a meandering and frustrating listen at times, but patient listeners will be rewarded by an occasional sustained passage that captures Ka-Spel at the absolute peak of his powers.
The basic premise of High on Station Yellow Moon is laid out with reasonable clarity in the album's first half: a comet is hurtling towards the earth and a trio of astronauts (each of whom speaks a different language) is marooned on the titular space station with no way to communicate with the outside world or measure time, as a solar flare wipes out all of their electronics.  After that, however, the story quickly becomes very fractured and muddied, as does the structure: each half of the album consists of a five-part suite of small vignettes the blur and bleed together.  Much of the background is laid out in the surprisingly lyrical and simple piano ballad "OMG 666," in which the narrator expresses his optimism that technology will save everyone from the comet and that there is no need to worry…but then it blossoms into a lushly swirling darkness of crackling radio transmissions, brooding synthesizers, and distracted and decontextualized female vocals and the narrator delves into the alternate possibility of everyone being completely obliterated.  Unexpectedly, that schizophrenic introduction gives way to the album's mesmerizing centerpiece, a lengthy and haunting spoken-word passage in which Ka-Spel describes the moment when the space station’s astronauts are suddenly left stranded in space with nothing but each other.  After that point, clarity and lasting structure become rare commodities and the album dissolves into something of a kaleidoscopic fever dream, though it does re-cohere briefly for a lilting ballad with Palmer ("The Leary Cloud") that beautifully embellishes its Romantic neo-classicism with an unpredictably garbled and smeared onslaught of warped psychedelia.  The side ominously closes with that piece being pulled apart into a lurching and disjointed groove of decontextualized fragments.
The second half of the album opens with a buzzing and skittering piece entitled "Provisional" that sounds like a distant radio transmission struggling through a haze of static.  If it were not for that willfully corroded and trebly texture and a penchant for suddenly fading or dissolving, it could probably pass of a decent Legendary Pink Dots song.  That said, it abruptly gives way to yet another spoken word passage in which one of the astronauts recounts the lonely, isolated horror of being trapped forever inside a space suit.  The structure of the album definitely starts to mirror that escalating horror and feeling of disconnection at this point, as Ka-Spel cycles through his surreal and vaguely haunted-sounding motifs without giving me much time to establish my moorings.  He thankfully has one more rabbit in his hat though, as Palmer returns for the album’s other centerpiece "Eight Mile Bride," a tender and unsettling music box interlude from the perspective of a woman who performs for the astronauts in exchange for "wonderpills," but can never be reached or touched ("the entertainment for lonely men with fishbowls on their heads…untouchable").  After that sad, weirdly beautiful, and vaguely creepy interlude, the remaining minutes gradually cohere into a bleak and brooding coda of melancholy strings, mysterious textures, and uneasy drones that feels like an elegy for the hapless astronauts dying together (yet so alone) in the vastness of space.  Appropriately, the album concludes with a bitterly sardonic poem from Ka-Spel that ends with a scathing indictment of God.
Curiously, the CD version appends two bonus tracks, which maddeningly undercuts the bleak finality of Ka-Spel’s closing words.  Sequencing crimes aside, however, the bonus songs themselves are generally quite good.  One is an alternate stand-alone (if somewhat unnecessary) version of "The Leary Cloud," while "No One Can Hear You Squeak" is a nice bit of stark drone, dark atmosphere, and simmering tension enlivened by some subtly visceral textural touches that sometimes resemble a slow drizzle of broken glass or shards of metal.  The latter is absolutely good enough to have warranted inclusion of the actual album, but the symmetry and arc of the vinyl version sans bonus material feels like the more definitive and powerful version.  Of course, odds are strong that anyone interested in High on Station Yellow Moon is probably a bit of a Legendary Pink Dots' completist, as this is a comparatively modest release in a prolific year.  There is no question that most of Ka-Spel's best ideas went elsewhere, as it definitely feels like this album has a lot of vault scrapings and studio scraps inserted as bridges between the more fully formed passages.  There are fully formed passages though and Ka-Spel spins what little gold he has into an immersively surreal and evocative whole, even if he leaves the seams showing a bit (moderate expectactations are key here).  Yellow Moon is a solid, mid-tier album: if it lacks the compositional rigor and songcraft of Ka-Spel's best work, it compensates through sheer imagination and a few orphaned flashes of brilliance that did not find a home elsewhere.
As a follow-up to 2015's debut EP, the duo of multimedia artists Nicol Eltzroth Rosendorf and Jonathan Lukens expand on the ambiguity and sparseness on Two, while still showing marked development and innovation in their work. With their sonic palates expanded and a determined focus, the final product is an album that conveys a significant amount within its somewhat minimalistic framework.
With nine pieces spread over two sides of a cassette, there is a clear sense of two distinct suites of music, joined together but with each half developing and evolving on its own as a distinct organism.The slow, bleak opening of "Wolf Tone" sets the stage as sparse yet deliberate.Bleak melodies are perceptible, but low in the mix, to give a nicely haunting sense of space. This transitions into "Duet," which sees the duo adding an intentionally erratic kick drum into the already complex layered structure.The layers swell and retreat, providing a strong contrast to the more strident rhythms that stab through.
The overt beats retreat on "Circularity of Action," but the piece comes together as a science fiction tinged composition, with hollow machinery noises reverberating throughout a cold, clinically clean space.The piece does not move as much as drift on its own inertia, and although the piece is extremely rich and complex, there is an unabashed frigidity to the music.The closer of side one, "Null," is a brief respite that ends the first half very well.Instead of the icy space that preceded it, it is more of a warm, pleasant cloud of sounds that slowly fill the space and concludes the first half on a calm note.
On the other half, Rosendorf and Lukens start off big with "Tremendum."Multiple passages of dissonance and melody intersect, propelled by a rumbling low end and expansive mid range of sound.The sound is a bit of everything, but never discordant or chaotic in nature.Instead it is a strong balance of noise and tone, and covers the Scratched Glass school of sound perfectly.Comparatively, "Manifest" is a bit more understated, and has a pleasant murk to it, with the two weaving in a nice passage of feedback-like chaos to contrast the calmer moments.
"Perverse Instantiation" features a return to rhythm, though much less conventional than heard on "Duet."Instead the work is more an examination of textures, with a continual shift between the more musical facets of the band’s sound, and their occasionally abrasive approaches.This transitions into "Gold," although at this point there is a greater sense of space and expanse.The harsher elements build slowly simmering and eventually become the primary focus.The second half of Two is tied up nicely on "Normative", a slowly lurching piece that pulls the entire tape together handily.
Scratched Glass’ debut was a good bit of ambiguous sound and composition, but Two feels like a more fully realized work.The strongest elements of the first tape are still here: a blending of dichotomous sounds, but the whole is stronger this time around.While I would have enjoyed hearing Rosendorf and Lukens flirt with rhythms a bit more as they did on "Duet," the nuanced and constantly evolving sound on this tape is extremely effective in its own right.
A rather fast follow-up to her last tape (It Was a Time of Laboured Metaphors, also on Helen Scarsdale), Australian sound artist Kate Carr's latest work is another entry in a rapidly growing discography that blends elements of both traditional composition and the unpredictable nature of field recordings. She does this and merges them together seamlessly, coming together as a beautiful set of sounds and moods from across the globe, yet still unified as a part of the human experience.
Elements of The Story Surrounds Us were recorded during Carr’s travels to Iceland, Mexico, Sweden, and Spain, all of which clearly had an influence on the work; most obviously in the natural recordings she utilizes throughout.The tape is bookended by two sets of untreated field recordings from Ólafsfjörður, Iceland that perfectly capture the juxtaposition of her work.The first, "The Creaking Door Of The Abandoned Concrete Factory" is half a minute of just that:creaking sounds of post-industrial decay, capturing the emptiness of what surely was once part of a thriving industry.The end is "Water Lapping at Ice on Melting Lake":the sound of wet and watery nature decaying, no doubt exacerbated by the same industry.
Between these two most obvious field recordings lay eight songs that are never truly a-musical, but never become overly conventional either."Things That Stubbornly And Resiliently Subsist Without Leave" features a lot of sparse, delicate guitar playing, but the musicality is broken up by mysterious, more synthetic-like passages that never become unpleasant.This combination also features heavily in "I Didn't Get A Lot of Sleep in Mexico", with light floating tones melded with processed guitar-like sounds, peppered with incidental found recordings and hints of music throughout.
A brilliant pairing of compositions is the untreated recordings of "Communication Wires In Tropical Storm, Si'an Kaan, Mexico", and their appearance in the more compositionally based "We Were The Pulse Of A Wire Pulled Tightly".The former recordings are simply the sound of undulating metallic cables whipped about in heavy winds, taking on an odd beauty that contrasts their significantly more frightening pedigree.On "We Were The Pulse…" they reappear as overt pulses and jittery echoes resonating within electronic swarms and insinuations of percussion.The final product is moody and expansive, but concludes on a much lighter, drifting note compared to its more menacing moments.
Other moments of this tape showcase Carr’s more conventional musical tendencies as well.Gentle melodies are the initial focus on "There Was a Lot of Whispering Involved", with a bit of plucked string being counterbalanced by the heavier subterranean rumble.On the whole it sounds much more traditional, but no less gripping.On the other hand, "1001 (Missed Connections)" begins with crackling voices on a PA system and ugly buzzing noises, but soon is realigned into sustained, yet chilly melodic moments.What even resembles a traditional 4/4 bass drum comes in, but just a bit too briefly.
Conceptually, The Story Surrounds Us continues Kate Carr's focus on studying the sounds of specific locations, as well as the effects of social decay and its inevitable renewal.However, the music is captivating on its own as well:a wonderful blend of composed sound blended with the incidental, ephemeral sounds that surround us at all times, culminating in a strange, sometimes almost alien, but never mundane experience.