This week's series of episodes features images from Asheville, NC, which was devastated by Hurricane Helene this past week.
Please consider donating to the various organizations in and around the area.
Episode 714 features music by Pan•American, Maria Somerville, Patrick Cowley, The Gaslamp Killer and Jason Wool, Der Stil, Astrid Sonne, Reymour, Carlos Haayen Y Su Piano Candeloso, Harry Beckett, Tarwater, Mermaid Chunky, and Three Quarter Skies.
Episode 715 has Liquid Liquid, Kim Deal, Severed Heads, Los Agentes Secretos, mHz, Troller, Mark Templeton, Onkonomiyaki Labs, Deadly Headley, Windy and Carl, Sunroof, and claire rousay.
Episode 716 includes Actors, MJ Guider, The Advisory Circle, The Bug, Alessandro Cortini, The Legendary Pink Dots, Chihei Hatakeyama and Shun Ishiwaka, Arborra, Ceremony, Ueno Takashi, Organi, and Saagara.
Sound In Silence is proud to welcome Endless Melancholy to its family, presenting his new album A Perception Of Everything.
Endless Melancholy is the self-descriptive music act of Oleksiy Sakevych, based in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since 2011 he has released six albums, a remix album, a compilation and many singles and EPs on labels such as Preserved Sound, Twice Removed, AZH Music, 1631 Recordings, p*dis, Dronarivm, Thesis, Past Inside The Present and his own Hidden Vibes. He has worked on collaboration/split releases with artists such as Desolate Horizons, Lights Dim and Hotel Neon, is also member of the post-rock band Sleeping Bear and has released music under the aliases of Moonshine Blues and bc_ranger.
A Perception Of Everything is the seventh full-length album by Endless Melancholy and his first for Sound In Silence. It is an album, inspired by traveling and visiting new places. It is made of field recordings made using a microcassette tape recorder, tape loops and synth pads. It is an album about the constant attempts to live in harmony with yourself and searching for your inner peace. About trying to shape your own perception of everything in this fragile and ever-changing world. A Perception Of Everything is a sublime album of wonderful soundscapes, carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) and highly recommended for devotees of ambient pioneers such as Brian Eno, Harold Budd and Steve Roach.
Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Halftribe to its roster of artists, presenting his new album Archipelago.
Halftribe is the solo project of Ryan Bissett, an ambient/electronic music producer and DJ, born in Northern Ireland, residing in Manchester, UK. Influenced by other artists’ music, modern art, minimal photography, moods and emotions, since 2014 he has been producing his sublime music having released four albums and four EPs on labels such as Archives, Dronarivm, Vent Sounds, Dewtone Recordings and Silk Sofa Music.
Archipelago, Halftribe’s fifth full-length album and first for Sound In Silence, features eleven new compositions with a total duration of something less than 45 minutes. Bissett creates one of his best albums to date, skillfully blending together airy synths, soothing pads, hazy drones, delicate chimes, processed vocal samples, lo-fi plucked guitars, overlapping tones, looped crackles and calm field recordings. Expertly mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Archipelago is a beautiful aural journey of blissful ambience, subtle textures, twinkling melodies and dreamy soundscapes which appeals to all fans of artists such as Fennesz, bvdub and The Green Kingdom.
With a flurry of recent activity, including the Herbstsonne album also under his own name and Electric as Organum, David Jackman has been rather prolific in the past year. While I admittedly cannot say I know for sure what separates a David Jackman record from an Organum one (or why this one is credited to just his surname), Silence in that Time clearly shares some kinship with last year's Herbstsonne. Both feature his use of wide-open spaces, symmetrical song structures, and punctuations of massive piano chords, but the other details are where the difference lies.
Like Herbstsonne, Silence is a single, long form piece (42 minutes) that features an intentionally reductionist palette of sounds.Jackman uses piano, a sustained organ/synthesizer bit, far off bells, and field recordings of birds.Again, it is not so much the variety of sounds that he is working with, but his placement of them, and the careful, considered production that surrounds them.
Big, booming piano chords stomp into the lengthy passages of silence, and then resonate slowly, giving an almost harmonium type quality to it.From this a bed of synth occasionally fills in the gaps, but Jackman has no qualms about letting silence take hold.From the distance the occasional tolling bell can be heard and the infrequent recording of birds sprinkled throughout that give an organic component to the otherwise empty space.
The specific sounds he works with on this record cast a bleaker feel than the otherwise more beautiful Herbstsonne.With the jarring piano outbursts and the far off bells, there is a sense of emptiness and isolation throughout.With the addition of birds, it is hard to not feel an overwhelming sense of dystopian desolation, and the distant tolling convey a malignant presence lurking just somewhere out of view.Intentional or not, I certainly appreciate this added dimension to the disc.
Being a fan of minimalism in general, Jackman’s work always encapsulates the best elements of that.Sounds are allowed to expand and sustain nearly indefinitely, allowing each deliberate component to become the focus before drifting away to be replaced with another.This deliberate sparseness also makes for an even more significant impact when volumes change or dynamics shift.Which is exactly why his work as himself and as Organum is always captivating.Silence in that Time has some consistent elements with the previous album, but never do the two feel interchangeable.Like that disc, there may not be a whole lot going on on the surface, but the attention it demands results in a consistently a fascinating experience.
Creating what Iggy Pop described to Jim Jarmusch as "symphonies for people that don't have a lot of time," Sarah Lipstate has emerged as an innovative and defining voice in the world of music under the name Noveller. Wielding a guitar as her main instrument, Lipstate has pioneered a transcendent approach to composition through her mastery and integration of effects pedals and technology. Forming unexpected sonic routes, her songs are vivid and cinematic, telling intricate tales with each tone and swell.
Raised on a strict piano technique, the discovery of the guitar late in her teens allowed for an escape from formalism and unlocked the hidden realms of her creativity. Taking an anti-theoretical approach, suddenly music was no longer a series of notes, rests, and time signatures, but a means of intuitive expression. Her deepened interest in experimental music, fueled by the discovery of the bold noise of Sonic Youth, the epic scope of Glenn Branca, the delicate formularies of Brian Eno and the no wave discordance of Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, only furthered to inspire.
A yearning to explore and feed that creativity took her from Louisiana to Austin, then Brooklyn to LA. Arrow is her first album since the move to the edge of the canyons of Los Angeles, and you can hear the destabilizing effect this had on her in the music. Out of her comfort zone in a new city, with a rolling expanse in front of her and an urban sprawl over her shoulder, Lipstate built her new album as she contemplated this change in her life.
The resulting record feels as if it is filled with dreamscapes and contemplation intersecting with tension and drama, a journey that plays out over its dynamic sequence. Tracks like "Effektology" open up like a vivid view of the night sky, before the darkness settles in and envelopes you, finally quieting your racing mind and bringing about much needed slumber. "Canyons" pings about and stings at the mountainside with its syncopated melodic echoes. "Pre-fabled" walks you straight into the crashing ocean waves like a desperate cleansing. A mournful "Remainder" closes the proceedings, steadying itself for what the future might hold.
With her ability to add such unique sounds and textures, Lipstate has been sought out as a frequent collaborator, recently writing songs with Iggy Pop and performing as a member of his band on his worldwide tour. Past partners in crime have ranged from JG Thirlwell to Lee Ranaldo and she has performed as part of Rhys Chatham's Guitar Army, Nick Zinner's "41 Strings," Ben Frost's "Music for 6 Guitars," and Glenn Branca;s 100 guitar ensemble. She has also toured in support of big fans in St. Vincent, Wire, U.S. Girls, The Jesus Lizard and Helium.
Those prized abilities have also led her to her being a leader in the conversation around the gear that has unlocked the full range of her abilities. As she began posting videos of her explorations to social media, a dedicated and inquisitive audience emerged and continues to grow, as she appeared in magazines and documentaries. With Arrow, Lipstate has emerged with an album that is sure to delight and challenge all of her followers, as that fanbase widens further.
Before his untimely passing in 2017, Matt Shoemaker had a number of releases completed and ready to be released, including Mercurial Horizon. Recorded at various times between 2008 and 2012, during one of his most prolific phases, the album was completed five years ago, but just now being released. Split into two half hour pieces, it almost seems built for cassette, but thankfully presented as a gorgeous CD by the Elevator Bath label that does wonders to capture the depth and nuance of his work. Beautiful, unsettling, and bleak, it makes for an amazing disc that was worth the wait.
Shoemaker’s trademark use of field recordings and electronics appear throughout, but never being deployed in any easily identified form.Matt opens the first piece with a wet canyon of sound:a shimmering expanse covered in sticky reverb.Complex layers of sound define the piece, with a slew of weird, indistinct sounds and electronic pulses appearing throughout.A mysterious clanging and buzzing, serrated noises give a sense of menace that will soon take over, with a subtle, drifting melody that offsets the darkness.
It is an extremely dynamic work, but that sinister feel becomes even more notable when grinding noises and unnatural sounding bells toll away.Bubbling, organic textures and strange grinding layers keep the malicious sensibility in place, and a far off heartbeat like thud conjures some notable "strange thing in the darkness" moods.Coupled with the murky, jungle-like field recordings (not unlike his work with Indonesian field recordings as Fosil Sangiran), it ends on an extremely unsettling note.
This carries directly over to the second piece, which is comparably more open but no less dark.The mix is wide open at the onset, with processed animalistic noises rising up as sinister outbursts throughout.He retains this pattern for a while:passages of near silence interrupted by creepy noises and a faster rate, with additional electronics coming in to maintain that feel of looming menace.That oppressive jungle feel comes back with some excellent crunchy textures, punctuating that alien, unnatural feel.
As the piece progresses, modular electronics do an impressive imitation of a helicopter signal a transition to different, but no less unsettling environment.The mix collapses, leaving only a frigid tinnitus drone, which fits his photographs of ice that adorn the digipak perfectly.There is a distant shimmer of light in the horizon, but the isolation is strong and cold.A strange clanking noise appears and the mix becomes even denser, again capturing that feel of something that is out of sight closing in, and he retains that sense of danger all the way to the end.
It is quite sad that Mercurial Horizon was not released before Matt Shoemaker's passing, because the depth and fully realized nature of this work would surely have garnered him some well-deserved accolades.Every one of his works that I have had the pleasure of hearing have been amazing, but everything seems to mesh beautifully here.His field recording treatments, unique electronic experimentation, and ability to conjure a heavy, cinematic mood throughout make this disc especially unique.While I hope this is not necessarily the last of his completed works that we will hear, if it is, it is a brilliant postscript to a tragically short career.
The first foray into Warren Defever's teenage tape archive (last year's All The Mirrors in the House) was an absolute revelation that actively courted disbelief, but this second installment is a bit more modest in its scope. As a result, Return To Never unavoidably feels a bit underwhelming and insubstantial by comparison, but it is still a likable album that scratches roughly the same itch, as I am very much a fan of Defever's homespun, early lo-fi experiments. While there are still a healthy number of melodic guitar pieces strewn throughout the album, Return to Never is generally a more experimental and abstract affair than the previous volume. Phrases like "analogue murk" and "greyscale industrial drone" are tossed around in the album's description and they are fairly apt: if All The Mirrors captured a teenage Defever accidentally inventing shoegaze, Return to Never captures him accidentally mirroring the sounds of the early '80s noise underground (or at least calls to mind someone playing shoegaze-style guitar over such a tape). The warmer, more "ambient" passages still tend to be the best ones, but if some moments from Return to Never had found their way onto an early Broken Flag tape, I doubt anyone would have blinked or raised an eyebrow.
In Dominic Foster's haunting and beautiful short promotional video for Return to Never, the album is described as the work of a "compulsive 13-year-old with no social life" that has now been "blended together with an adult hand."Such a description could certainly apply to All the Mirrors in the House as well, but it definitely feels quite a bit more believable this time around, as most of these pieces plausibly sound like the cooler excerpts culled from hours and hours of precocious experimentation with effects and field recording.Consequently, I do not at all envy Shelley Salant for being the one who had to listen to all of the indulgent juvenilia that must have surrounded the gems that ultimately wound up on this album.I am quite curious about what the original context was for some of the briefer pieces though.For example, the gorgeously quivering shimmer of "Chords" only lasts about thirty seconds, which makes me wonder what happened to the rest of the piece and how badly it must have derailed to leave behind such a brief snatch of beauty once the editing was complete.I feel similarly about the album's most improbable piece, "From The Night Tape," which feels both fully formed and years ahead of its time: a blown-out bass thrum and out-of-phase, backwards high hats propel a swirling miasma of shoegaze guitars for roughly thirty seconds and then it all vanishes abruptly.Obviously, the perplexing brevity of some of the album's strongest pieces creates some enticing mysteries, yet "Night Tape" goes one step further in making me wonder why such an immediately gratifying and cool aesthetic was not explored further or revisited: there are fourteen other songs on the album, yet none of them flirt with beats or grooves again.My guess is that "Night Tape" was either a newly assembled collage of multiple pieces or that it immediately predated the blossoming of His Name is Alive into a more song-based project.
For the most part, however, Return to Never is devoted to a series of atmospheric vignettes that bounce between dreamlike guitar soundscapes and hiss-soaked field recordings of crashing waves and heavy machinery.Both sides have their merits, of course, but the album's more melodic pieces are definitely the ones that play more to Defever's strengths.The best of the lot is the swooning "To Remember," which takes a woozily lovely, seesawing loop and ravages it with sputtering snarls of static.The shimmering and chiming drift of "Guitar Echo" is quite nice as well (albeit a bit unformed/improvisatory by comparison).There are also a handful of pieces that combine gently swaying soft-focus guitar drones with primitive sound collage, though the inherent hiss and murk of recording on a boombox tends to overpower the nuances of the latter.Still, some are quite good, such as the lovely and meditative title piece, which is slowly eclipsed by crashing waves that segue into the similarly fine "Lake Night."
"My Thoughts to Thee are Drawn" is another sublime treat, as languorous, hazy strings drift over something that sounds like a field recording of a passing train heard from underwater.The album also features a pair of unexpected and abrasive surprises at the end in the form of "White Snake" and "Gone."Neither is particularly substantial, sadly, yet both share an endearing "anything goes" sense of gleeful derangement.In the former, a rock frontman asks a cheering crowd how many of them are going to see Whitesnake that weekend before the piece plunges into a simmering maelstrom of buzzing, pulsing, and crackling noise.That cacophony then segues into a half-gnarled/half-anthemic piece that calls to mind a Jesus and Mary Chain gig in which all of the band’s amplifiers explode as soon as they launch into their first song, leaving only a muscular bass line in a squall of harsh feedback and howling noise.
My only real grievance with Return to Never is that "To Remember" is the only piece that feels like a strong, stand-alone "single."Obviously, that is somewhat unavoidable given the nature of this collection, but All the Mirrors in the House managed to pull off the illusion of being a substantial, deliberate, and thematically focused whole anyway.I imagine that is an incredibly hard trick to repeat though and Defever admittedly does a fine job editing these disparate sketches together into something that flows quite well.In fact, it could be argued that he actually did quite an amazing job of curating and editing these pieces, as this album has distinct "winter" feel that is very different from its more autumnal and sun-dappled predecessor.Maybe this album is every bit as good as Mirrors and I just do not like winter as much as I like fall.Or maybe I am projecting all of this.Anything is possible.Only Defever knows what his intentions were, of course, but Return to Never does feel like its own statement rather than a lesser version of Mirrors.Mike McGonigal is not far from the mark when he claims in the liner notes that all of these pieces would probably be considered "lost classics of modern minimalism" if they could be stretched and expanded to fill a whole side of vinyl.I only take issue with the "all" part of that statement, as I probably would have loved this album if two or three of its best pieces had been stretched out for 10 of 15 minutes each.Alas.Given all of my unanswered questions and unmet aspirations for this album, I am very curious to see what the next (and final) installment of this series will be like, as it will clarify once and for all whether or not Mirrors got the lion's share of teenage Defever's best moments or if he still has a mountain of great unreleased material that he is merely categorizing by mood.In any case, I enjoy Return to Never, but it is not quite on the same level as previous bombshell compilations like King of Sweet or Mirrors, as Defever has set a very high bar for how truly wonderful his vault scraping can be.
Horsey & Sleep Has His House come in the form of expanded DLP and 2CD editions, remastered from the original analogue and digital master tapes, including previously unreleased mixes and versions of classic songs.
David Tibet, writes of both albums:
"Born after the Death of my father, SLEEP HAS HIS HOUSE was a Threnody and a Requiem to him and a series of blinks at the passing of TREE and BIRD. Down by the River, Beside the Water, and none of these run ETERNAL, except the Immortal Bird, as high as sky. Now, in BED with House of Mythology, C93 are OverMoon to SLEEP again."
"My one Leg was in Tokyo, and my other Leg was in London, and I watched in Horror the Horsies rage by and I flew by and the Corn waved and the Trees bowed. This was BaddenedBlackenedTime, as I watched friends spin down and fall and fall—it is hard to keep riding when the structure is sliding. So that’s what I called HorseyTime, and I can still hear their fear. Now, in SADDLE with House of Mythology, C93 are OverMoon to RIDE again with this extended reissue."
Each 2xLP set is released as a limited edition in colored opaque vinyl, as well as a standard edition in a different-colored transparent vinyl, with both editions packaged in a single sleeve with a thicker 5mm spine. There is also an accompanying lyric-insert, as was the case when Sleep Has His House was originally released.
The 2xCD is packaged in a gatefold mini-LP sleeve with deluxe card sleeve, containing a lyric booklet.
To Kiss Earth Goodbye, Teleplasmiste's second full album, sees their sound-vision expanding and deepening, phantasmally and fantastically, opening onto thrilling new vistas of euphoria. The music is informed by a deep awareness and respect for prior esoteric traditions and counterculture currents, but forges a new and fertile synthesis very much its own.
The mesmerizing cover art is by spirit painter and medium Ethel Le Rossignol, whose 1933 book of spiritualist teachings lends its name to the album’s second track: "A Goodly Company." Another composition, "An Unexpected Visit," incorporates a previously unheard trance recording of occultist Alex Sanders (aka the UK's "King of the Witches"), made by Sanders himself in the 1980s.
ALTER presents a remastered edition of Cremation Lily's second album, on vinyl for the first time. Recorded whilst living in Hastings and originally released as a double cassette on his Strange Rules label in 2017, The Processes… forms a trilogy of albums in the CL canon that were influenced by the life and atmospheres within British coastal towns. Composed using a rudimentary set-up of synth, drum machine and two modified walkmans, CL draws upon a broad range of influences from the underground electronic music spectrum. Noise, tape music and ambient techno are all referenced and align to form a cohesive collection of tracks, flowing fluidly in sequence. Melancholic synth pads and deep kick drums intersect with crude field recordings and occasional bursts of feedback, evoking a claustrophobic uncertainty that feels more like being pulled under than carried above.
Features additional piano and violin by Theodore Cale Schafer.
Through A Vulnerable Occur is the result of a dialog between the photographer Sophie Gabrielle and the musician Seabuckthorn, initiated by IIKKI, between June 2019 and February 2020.
The complete project works in two physical imprints: a book and a disc (vinyl/cd)
it should be experienced in different manners : the book watched alone the disc listened to alone the book and the disc watched and listened to together. ___________________________________________________ Seabuckthorn is an alias used for the solo work of English acoustic guitarist & multi-instrumentalist Andy Cartwright since 2009.
He uses finger picking & bowing techniques combined with various open tunings to form a mixture of approaches, often with layered accompaniments. Generally the songs lean towards to the experimental genre, whilst on the edge of the ambient and folk.
Through A Vulnerable Occur is his 9th releases. ____________________________
Sophie Gabrielle is a Melbourne based contemporary photographer and curator working in both analog and digital mediums. Graduating from Photography Studies College, Melbourne in 2015, she has been one of the Lensculture Art Awards finalist in 2018, then Foam Talent winner in 2019. Her work has been exhibited in Australia, Malaysia, New York and the UK. Through her fine art practice, Sophie has channeled her interest in mythology, spiritualism and psychology to create poetic works that reflect our sense of self, place and the ambiguity of memory. Her works are an exploration into the world of the unseen, through optics, chemical interactions and the investigative processes used to photograph something invisible to the naked eye.
Five years on since their last joint outing in Stroboscopic Artefacts Monad series, Speedy J and Lucy team up again as Zeitgeber on Seventeen Zero Four, a new three-tracker descending deep into the filthy, tenebrous outskirts of club music. Torchbearers of techno as a life-affirming vehicle for human expression, as can be experienced through their multi-dimensional back catalogue of solo records and shared extended performances at some of the finest clubs and festivals around the globe, it's safe to say Jochem and Luca share a certain taste for taking things off the beaten path and into new perspectives. True to their bold approach towards production, "Seventeen Zero Four" proudly continues the pair's tradition of chiselled floor-focused shifts and divagations outside the ring-fenced domain of no-nonsense 4/4 mechanics initiated on their self-titled debut album in 2013.
Drawing first blood, the title-track "Seventeen Zero Four" submerges us in a state of amniotic solitude as hell’s all set to break loose around. Sonar bleeps drip and dissolve across invisible plateaux as thunder rumbles and roars in the distance, mirroring and shattering all linearity between the bars. "One Zero Five" then implements a further straightforward groove, sequenced hats and kicks carving out a more familiar scenario for the dancers to appropriate, whilst maintaining that oddball, slightly off kind of minimal, dubbed-out blur. Rounding off the package, "Twenty Zero Two" throws further jazz into the mix, letting its sine curves hula hoop into the upper layers of the outer-audio-space as a shrewdly engineered industrial swing drops the hammer for an epic last stretch.