18 July 2022

Duncan Edwards

Albums and Singles

Originally a musical radio play, these twelve tracks excavate and spotlight the life and work of original Beat poet Bob Kaufman; and with Kaufman the life and the work are genuinely inseparable. A mentor to Kerouac, and dubbed the Black American Rimbaud, Kaufman endured savage SFPD brutality, electroshock treatment, and incarceration, before his young and obscure death in abject poverty. Kaufman had purposefully stilled his own voice with a vow of silence stretching from the JFK assassination until the end of the Vietnam War, yet here it still resounds with the speed and spirit of surrealist jazz, forever “lost in a dream world, where time is told with a beat.”

Alien Transistor

The Plastik Beatniks, alias Andreas Ammer, Markus and Micha Acher of The Nowist, and Leo Hopfinger aka LeRoy) formed for that September 2020 radio play, “Thank God For Beatniks.” There is also a bit of Ginsberg and Patti Smith, but it’s the contributions from Angel Bat Dawid and Moor Mother which really breathe life into this project. Angel Bat Dawid has consistently exceeded the high expectations generated by her debut The Oracle, and her vocals and clarinet have a perfect air of improvisation, joy, and pain, especially on “West Coast Sound 1956.” Similarly, Moor Mother drives Kaufman’s "War Memoir" with empathy and passion to match the wild, slithering, Eastern-tinged guitar lines. There’s a note of defiant optimism, too, in the simple act of changing the final word of Kaufman’s “O-JazzO War Memorial: Jazz, Don’t Listen To It At Your Own Risk” from “die" to “live."

What tops it all off is the fact that we get to hear Bob Kaufman himself reciting brilliant pieces such as "Hollywood Beat,'' full of dazzlingly psychedelic imagery. It’s a kick to hear him: as if he’s chewing, trance like, on holy existential gum, spitting out near-Dadist lines exploring freedom and mocking the fashionable: “ugly Plymouths swapping exhaust with red convertible Buicks...teenage werewolves, sunset strippers, plastic beatniks… bisexual traffic lights ...disc jockeys with all night shows and all day habits… Hindu holy men with police records clear back to Alabama…hamburger broiled charcoal served in laminated fortune cookies... death-faced agents living on ten percent of nothing…unlit starlets seeking an unfulfilled galaxy..impatient Cadillacs trading in their owners for more successful models.. lanky calypso singers caught with their fads down”"

“Harwood Alley Song'' has a great loop of Kaufman saying a line—“Jazz never made it back down the river”—from the "$$ Abomunus Craxioms $$" section of his Abomunist Manifesto published in Beatitude magazine (1959, founded by Kaufman and William Margolis.) Bob Kaufman was born in New Orleans, the seventh of thirteen kids from a Caribbean mother and German/Jewish father. He journeyed as a seafaring merchant marine where he met Kerouac, dipped into New York, before relocating to San Francisco with Burroughs and Ginsberg. He created his poems despite being beaten nearly to death by the cops, plucked for electric shock treatment, de-carded by the coast guard and blackballed by the FBI for union activity. And after sparking the Beat scene, he surely felt swamped as it changed and diluted with the tide of too many hipsters. At any rate, he never made it back down the river to the Crescent City.

The aching horns which bleed like tragedy across the fabulous title track as Kaufman recites lines from the seventh of his “Jail Poems” written in Cell 3 of San Francisco City Prison are the kind of glorious adornment his words deserve. Words such as “My soul demands a cave of its own, like the Jain god: Yet I must make it go on, hard like jazz, glowing.” Words like “What of the answers I must find questions for? All these strange streets I must find cities for.” This great album is a much more fitting tribute than the city’s gormless naming of "Bob Kaufman Alley" for the spot where he died, destitute, on a borrowed mattress.

sounds available here

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence proudly announces the addition of Logout to its roster of artists, presenting his new mini album Instrumentals.

Logout is the solo project of a multi-instrumentalist, born in Athens, Greece, who for over a decade has been producing his wonderful music, ranging from acoustic folk and lo-fi to dream pop and electronica, having released four albums on labels such as Inner Ear and Tiny Room Records. He has collaborated with artists such as Nalyssa Green, Christos Lainas, Orestis Petrakis, Kalliopi Mitropoulou and others, while back in the mid 2000s he was a member of the indie/alternative band The Place Within which was active between 2005 and 2010.

Instrumentals, Logout’s fifth release, finds him returning to the classical guitar, the instrument with which he started his musical training as a kid. While his previous four albums have been focused to songwriting, this is his first release without lyrics. It explores musical themes written in the span of more than twenty years, with the resulting seven tracks ending up somewhere between classical & indie folk genres. On all the tracks Logout is supported by the beautiful violins of Kalliopi Mitropoulou, a classical violinist who also performs in multiple classical and indie projects in Athens and London.
Carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), Instrumentals is a brilliant release that will appeal to anyone moved by the music of artists such as Matt Elliott, Manyfingers and Message To Bears.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence proudly announces the addition of Nowherians to its roster of artists, presenting his official debut album That Is Not An Acceptable Lullaby.

Nowherians is an alias created by Crawford Blair, a musician/sound designer who is most well known as a founding member of the band Rothko, a band entirely comprised of three bass players, who coalesced at an unlikely and opportune moment in North London during the late 1990s. With Rothko he released several albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Lo Recordings, Bella Union (the label of Cocteau Twins' Simon Raymonde, with whom they collaborated too) and others, as well as 7” split releases with artists such as Four Tet and Tarentel amongst others, before their original lineup disbanded in 2001. Years later, in 2010, Blair alongside Mark Beazley (also founding member of Rothko) formed Rome Pays Off, at start as a duo project, then later expanded into a trio when Chris Gowers (Karina ESP, Lowered) joined them. Blair has also been a member of several other bands in the late 1990s and 2000s such as Geiger Counter (along with Jon Meade, the third founding member of Rothko, amongst others), Foe and High Above The Storm. Since the early 2010s and under the alias of Nowherians he has released some tracks on various compilations and an unofficial self-released, digital only, compilation of stray tracks in 2012.

Since a move to rural Norfolk in 2018, he has been involved in various musical gatherings and collaborations. These recordings, begun during the spring of 2020, developed from a love of the composer William Byrd and by looking into some of his choral pieces, extracting lines as chords to be used as seeds for further pieces, mostly keyboard sketches. This then led to more thematically similar tunes and with the influence and remote help of fellow musicians Elise Bjarnadóttir (violin, vocals), Olrun Bjarnadóttir (cello, viola), Matthieu Reifler (violin, trumpet, vocals) and Jason Emberton (mastering) throughout the summer months, it was finally finished that December. During that period Blair watched documentaries and read about the eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980, it became an inescapable companion to the making of the album and influenced the sounds, shape and names of some of the pieces.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence proudly announces the addition of JARR to its roster of artists, presenting their new album Talking About X.

JARR is a collaborative project between British ambient guitarists Yellow6 and Wodwo.
Jon Attwood started Yellow6 as a solo guitar project in the late 90s, initially inspired by space/post-rock, electronica and reverb soundscapes. From his debut single on the Enraptured label, Attwood’s discography runs to over 150 releases, spanning a wide spectrum of atmospheric post-rock and minimalist ambient music. Throughout Attwood’s illustrious career, his music has featured on The John Peel Show and Resonance FM, has provided the soundtrack to several films and TV documentaries, and found homes on labels such as Make Mine Music, Resonant, Cathedral Transmissions, Silber and Somewherecold.
Wodwo is the alias of Ray Robinson, an award-winning novelist and screenwriter with literary works that have been adapted into major motion pictures. Inspired by artists such as Yellow6, Yutaka Hirasaka and Marcus Fischer, Robinson’s foray into ambient music began in 2018 and his compositions have quickly attracted a blossoming legion of fans.

Talking About X is JARR’s second full-length album, following their debut An Echo In Her Skin, released on Hush Hush Records in 2021 to critical acclaim. Their new album, made up of nine new tracks with a total duration of about 50 minutes, is stylistically different to their debut, being more heartfelt and emotional. Its sound is far more expansive and melodical, while the soundscapes are still solidly post-rock but with a much dreamier, more ambient feel.
Talking About X is a captivating album with a dreamlike quality, carefully mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave) and highly recommended for devotees of Labradford, Roy Montgomery and Harold Budd.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is proud to welcome back Test Card, presenting his new album Patterns.

Test Card is the solo project of Lee Nicholson, based in Vancouver, Canada. Nicholson was a member of Preston’s Formula One in the late 1990's and Brighton’s Domestic4 in the early 2000's, releasing albums, singles and EP's on various independent labels such as Kooky, Fierce Panda, Liquefaction Empire, Shifty Disco, Invicta Hi-Fi, Vaclav, and Star Harbour.

Patterns is Test Card's fourth full-length album having released his debut album on Symbolic Interaction (2016) followed by two albums on Sound In Silence (2017 and 2020), as well as an EP release on The Slow Music Movement (2018). Patterns consists of ten instrumental tracks with a total duration of 45 minutes blending laid back retro beats, shifting guitar patterns, melodic ambient, subtle piano riffs, and analog synth-scapes. Imagine if you will Hood meeting July Skies at an autumn BBQ hosted by Durutti Column with Labradford flipping the burgers and Epic45 making the mulled wine. 

More information can be found here.

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence proudly announces the addition of The Kids And The Cosmos to its roster of artists, presenting his debut Ambient Mixtape Vol.1.

The Kids And The Cosmos is the alias of British producer/composer Justin Lee Radford. He is already known as one half of the ambient/electronic duo HIN, along with Jerome Alexander (Message To Bears), having released their highly acclaimed debut Warmer Weather EP on Sound In Silence in 2019. Radford has cultivated extensive collaborations with film makers, environmentalists, astronauts, scientists and social activists whilst composing music for film, VR, commercials, art installations and theatre. In late 2018 he released a 2-track single of solo piano pieces under his own name and, along with his childhood friends Jerome Alexander (Message To Bears) and Maximilian Fyfe (Paint Splat Faces), he is also member of the project Human Suits composing original scores for the documentaries of Planetary Collective.

Ambient Mixtape Vol.1 is made up of five soothing tracks, with a total duration of about 28 minutes. Ambient Mixtape Vol.1 is a slow and meditative exploration into the life and spirit cycle of a human being. The roots of these tracks grew when Justin held his Nan’s hand as she died, a powerful and transcendent moment he has carried with him ever since.
Utilizing crystalline electric piano chords, delicate electronic textures of calm synth-tones, subtle beats and choral voices, enhanced by the additional mixing and vocals by Jerome Alexander (Message To Bears) and cello performances by James Gow, The Kids And The Cosmos creates a wonderful debut release of warm ambient and dreamy electronica.

More information can be found here.

13 June 2022

Sound In Silence

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is proud to welcome back Sweeney, presenting his new album Stay For The Sorrow.

For over twenty years Jason Sweeney, based on Kaurna Country in South Australia, has been composing and recording either solo under his own name, in various electronic bands (Other People’s Children, Pretty Boy Crossover) and under the composer alias of Panoptique Electrical.

Stay For The Sorrow, Sweeney’s fourth full-length album under his own name, consists of ten emotional songs, carefully mastered by Antony Ryan of ISAN, with a total duration of about 38 minutes. The album’s instrumentation is centered on Sweeney’s fragile vocals, wistful piano lines, warm synths, acoustic guitars and minimal beats, enhanced by saxophone performances by Melinda Pianoroom, while subtle electronic glitches, vocal samples and field recordings perfectly fill the background atmospherics.
Stay For The Sorrow is a collection of queer, melancholy, ambient pop tunes that traverses the tender territory of companionship lost whilst searching for a brave new heart.

In Sweeney's words:
A heart broke open.
A queer melodrama.
An album was written.
A house was not a home.
But then a landscape appeared.
And in the midst of melancholy there was another love.
He might be replaced with another him but the heart remains true.

More information can be found here.

05 June 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

Originally released on cassette back in 2017 on London's seemingly now defunct ACR label, this absolutely brilliant album failed to reach enough ears to make much of an impact the first time it surfaced.  Thankfully,  the Slovakian Warm Winters Ltd. label has now reissued this obscure masterpiece (now remastered by Lawrence English) to appropriately universal acclaim.  The premise of the album is admittedly a modest one on paper, as Scheible simply presents some excerpts from a cassette scavenged from a second-hand store over a minimal backdrop of ambient/drone music.  The crucial detail, however, is that the appropriated recording feels like a strong contender for the greatest thrift store find of the century, intimately documenting the joys and heartaches of a lonely but irrepressibly hopeful middle-aged woman as she waits to be reunited with the love of her life.  Beyond that, virtually nothing is known about the album's anonymous heroine or what series of circumstances led to something so personal winding up in a Virginia thrift store.   Everyone loves a good mystery, of course, but that aspect of this album feels almost irrelevant once the unknown woman starts talking, as her openness and vulnerability pack one hell of an emotional wallop.  Sadly, life was not easy at all for the album's unwitting protagonist, so there are some truly heartbreaking passages to be found, but they are mingled with some others that fill me with an uncharacteristic sense of warmth and connection for the rest of humanity.  In short, Fairfax essentially distills all of the joy and pain of life's rich pageant into one perfect record.  

Warm Winters Ltd.

The album opens with quite an emotion gut punch, as a simple message of "good morning, my love" immediately turns dark, as the unknown woman immediately realizes that she has confused October and April and announces that she is "not well" (a message furthered darkened by Scheible's minimal backdrop of brooding drones).  Things initially seem like they are brightening a bit in the following "After Work on Monday Afternoon," as she talks about how excited she was to receive a letter from her love, but the situation quickly becomes unsettling once more when she mentions that she has read the letter over and over again and gently chastises the letter writer for being "about nine letters behind" (there were some letters that she forgot to number).  She then fades away to leave behind a gorgeous coda of swaying, spacey ambiance with frayed, hissing edges.  It feels like reality has unexpectedly dissolved into some kind of immersively hallucinatory state of suspended animation.  Thankfully, our heroine briefly brightens up for "Our Doubts Are Traitors," as she recites an inspirational poem over some pleasant ambient shimmer.  That shimmer gradually becomes curdled and darkened by ugly harmonies and gnarled textures though, which paves the way for next two devastating gut punches: the stand-up bass jazz noir of "Made to Feel Special" and uneasy spectral drift of "Thrilled to Death."  

Both pieces are likely to haunt me forever, as will the bittersweetly beautiful "With Any Kind of Luck" that follows, in which the protagonist struggles to keep her composure as she laments how lonely she is and how much she longs for her lover's arms around her.  While it features some of the most poignant and lovely music on the album, I am damn glad that the album does not end there, as I would probably be sobbing uncontrollably right now.  Fortunately, it does not, as it is followed by an instrumental reprise of "Monday Afternoon" entitled "Together Again" and a crushingly beautiful final piece ("There's Nothing That Says I Cannot Dream") in which the woman sounds genuinely happy and hopeful ("Fairfax today is looking unusually beautiful...it's one of the days like it was when we first met").  That final piece is probably one of the most moving and hauntingly beautiful pieces of music that I have ever heard, which is fitting given that Fairfax is one of the most moving and hauntingly beautiful albums that I have heard as well.  This is a stone-cold masterpiece from start to finish.  

Samples can be found here.

05 June 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This is my first exposure to Netherlands-based composer Kate Moore, but I probably would have encountered her much sooner if I paid more attention to the modern classical music scene,  as she released a well-regarded album of piano compositions on ECM back in 2014.  Revolver is an entirely different animal though, as Moore composed for a small string ensemble augmented by a percussionist and a harpist.  The album draws inspiration from the "kinetic physicality and aesthetics" of Australian artist Ken Unsworth, which Moore (a fellow Australian) attempted to translate into a "feeling of suspension between movement and stasis."  The few Unsworth pieces that I have seen certainly share that feeling, but translating a vision of hanging rocks in an art gallery into eight strange and beautiful string pieces is not a simple and linear path, which is where the album title comes in: Moore attempted to recreate the same feeling of suspension through "evolving and revolving melodies, poised skilfully in polyrhythmic structures."  To my ears, the result shares plenty of common ground with the repeating arpeggio patterns of modern classical minimalists like Reich and Glass, but enhanced with a considerably lighter touch, more human-scale intimacy, and a healthy appreciation for subtle psychedelia.

Unsounds

The title piece kicks off the album with quite an impressive statement of intent, as violinist Anna McMichael unleashes a sad and lovely melody over a repeating two-chord backdrop of xylophone and harp arpeggios.  It is elegantly simple and uncluttered and occasionally feels like some kind of zen meditation on water and the transitory nature of all things, but it ultimately builds into a swirling and intense finale of ascending violin patterns that feels wonderfully out of phase with xylophone motif beneath.  While my favorite pieces on the album all fall in a stellar four-song run on the second half, "Revolver" is an excellent piece that showcases Moore's distilled vision of strong melodies and shifting patterns beautifully.  The second piece ("The Boxer") showcases further exquisite pleasure, as a mournful violin melody slices nicely through a gently hallucinatory backdrop of harp, xylophone, and a kick drum pulse that calls to mind an erratic, slowed-down heartbeat.  I especially love how Moore balances the sharp physicality of the violin with soft-focus arpeggios that feel like harmonics that dreamily linger in the air.  

That same feature is central to the "Song of Ropes" trilogy that is arguably the heart of the album, though "Song of Ropes II" is a churning and intense exception. On "Trio (Song of Ropes)" and "Song of Ropes I," however, Moore works wonders with slow, mournful cello motifs that leave ghostly tendrils of harmonics or spectral violin in their wake.  Elsewhere, "Way of the Dead" unleashes an anguished-sounding violin melody over another heartbeat-like pulse, but unexpectedly blossoms into hypnagogically tropical-sounding second half.  It calls to mind a possessed-sounding string ensemble performing in the surreal, half-remembered environs of a dimly lit Hawaiian-themed restaurant that I used to frequent in which the decor was all murals of moonlit palm-trees and glowing neon aquariums.  The closing "Gatekeeper" is yet another divergent pleasure, as Genevieve Lang weaves a sad and lovely harp melody that has the feel of a tumbling, broken ghost waltz.  It all adds up to quite a mesmerizing and inventive album, as Moore and her collaborators consistently transform strong melodies into something that feels wonderfully haunting and enchanted.

Samples can be found here.

05 June 2022

Anthony D'Amico

Albums and Singles

This latest release from Jeremy Young is quite a different album from last year's eclectic Amaro, which is not surprising given the adventurous array of collaborators involved in the latter.  This time, however, Young keeps things simple and solitary and the result is similarly stellar.  In fact, this album amusingly calls to mind a sort of more punk/DIY/lo-fi Tim Hecker or Fennesz, as it is similarly fragmented and flickering, yet also sounds like Young just plugged a guitar straight into his amp and wove pure magic in his garage.  In reality, the magic was a bit less spontaneous and supernatural, but that does not make the album any less beautiful.  Much of the secret lies in the album's admirably literal title, as August Tape Sketches transforms Young's guitar sketches into complex and hallucinatory tape cut-ups that could reasonably be mistaken for the rough demo of a Kevin Shields ambient project.  While I am not yet ready to proclaim that Young is a one-man My Bloody Valentine, I do feel confident in proclaiming that he is very good at stretching, bending, and warping guitar sounds in extremely cool ways.  

meakusma

The opening "Untitled (For Ernst)" provides a largely representative introduction to the album's aesthetic: stammering chord swells and a fragmented melodic hook languorously convulse and flicker for roughly two minutes, then vanish.  The overall effect is quite "ambient," as the looping nature of the compositions lends itself nicely to hypnotic repetition, but the construction/deconstruction of Young's loopscapes is quite inventive and fascinating.  On pieces like the opener and "Untitled (For Kelly)," the raw material seems like little more than a single chord or arpeggio pulled apart and exploded into its own artfully blurred and stuttering micro-galaxy.  Those two pieces are both wonderful, but the strongest pieces tend to be the ones in which Young allows himself to stretch out into more song-like territory.  To my ears, the centerpiece of the album is "Earlier Than Energy," which casts a warped and blissed-out spell evoking a Phllip Jeck cut-up of a great Slowdive outro.  

The epic, slow-burning "Delphinium" is a quiet masterpiece in its own right, however, resembling a ghostly trumpet solo wending its way through gently lapping waves of broken, flickering arpeggios.  Fittingly, the following "August" could easily pass for a cannibalized fragment of its predecessor, as Young again combines shoegaze guitar washes with turntable-esque flourishes of speeding/slowing/warped tape loops.  I am also quite fond of the closing "Bloom/Wilt," which resembles a twinkling constellation of stars scattered across a cold night sky that lazily undulates, bulges, and stretches in a supernatural transcendence of earthly physics.   Nearly every single piece on the album is quite good, however, and I am curious about how much source material Young actually used for these collages.  If I was told that the whole album originated from a single two-minute snippet of guitar improv, I would probably believe it (and be even more impressed by the finished result).  August Tape Sketches truly does not sound like any other "experimental guitar" album that I have heard, as Young has an unusually strong melodic sensibility for someone so intent on mindfuckery and I was surprised by how much I loved the clean, resonant guitar sound at the heart of it all.  

At its best, August Tape Sketches feels like some kind of zen masterpiece in which immersive sound worlds blossom forth from just a single chiming and stammering moment suspended in time.    

Listen here