08 February 2019

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Albums and Singles

Nihiloxica's highly anticipated new EP featuring 4 new tracks of Bugandan percussive experimentation. Comprised of four percussionists, one kit drummer combined with an analog synth player. Recorded live in single takes at Boutiq Studios in Kampala, Uganda between October- December 2018.

More information can be found here.

08 February 2019

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Albums and Singles

This recording is released in 3 formats -

1.) 23-track download

2.) CDr + 23-track download

The CDr contains a 46 minute track ("The π Key") which will not be available for download. This item is released in an edition of 25.

3.) The π Key - Deluxe Edition

WOODEN KEY + ANTIQUE 6" RECORD HOUSED IN SIGNED AND NUMBERED BESPOKE COVER + CDR + 23 TRACK DOWNLOAD

Each individual CDR is unique to each order as it contains the 46 minute track ("The π Key") plus the two tracks from the 6" record included in your package. This item is released in an edition of 23.

The Geometry of Social Deprivation is constructed from samples and manipulated sounds garnered from twenty-three 6" shellac records from the 1920's.

Each track contains a blend of loops and sampled fragments constructed from one record using the sound found on both the A and B sides. Each track is created from a different record. No additional instrumentation has been added.

This sometimes soft and ambient but challenging and abstract 8-hour suite of crackling, dusty and forgotten sounds of yesteryear has been designed to be played as a functional piece of music, to while away the hours as you go about your daily routine... a faint drone in the background or a suffocating, all encompassing sonic assault. Equally it can be utilized as an aid to spend your evenings "researching" a field of your choosing.

More information can be found here.

06 February 2019

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Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Tim Linghaus to its roster of artists, presenting his new album entitled About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings).

Tim Linghaus is a musician and composer based in Cuxhaven, Germany, who creates his compositions blurring the lines between modern classical and ambient soundscapes. Since 2016 he has released an EP in 2016 on Moderna Records and an album in 2018 on Schole and 1631 Recordings.

About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is a wonderful collection of thirteen new unreleased tracks in conjunction with four reworked versions of tracks from his highly acclaimed debut album which was released last year. It is in line with his debut album as all tracks were recorded around the period of the Memory Sketches sessions, trying to preserve particular personal memories in form of music. The album’s instrumentation is centered on wistful piano lines, warm synth arpeggios and layers of swirling drones, enhanced by cello, violin and saxophone performances by Sebastian Selke of CEEYS, Jean-Marie Bø and Tobias Leon Haecker, while field recordings and other sounds, like vinyl crackles and subtle electronics, perfectly fill the background atmospherics.
Mastered by George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), giving an intimate warmth to its sounds, About B. (Memory Sketches B-Sides Recordings) is an album full of gorgeous textures and stunning atmospheres, highly recommended for fans of Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Max Richter.

More information can be found here.

06 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is proud to welcome The Gentleman Losers to its family, presenting their new album Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter.

The Gentleman Losers is the experimental musical group of brothers Samu and Ville Kuukka, based in Helsinki, Finland. Since their formation in 2004, they have released three albums and one EP on labels such as Büro, City Centre Offices, Grainy Records and Standard Form. All their releases have gained high worldwide praises and placements on several year-end lists. They have contributed their music to various compilations, including an original track for Duskscape Not Seen compilation on Nothings66 label, along with the likes of Helios and Stafrænn Hákon, amongst many others and a feature on Nils Frahm’s LateNightTales compilation album. They have also written some commissioned music, including a film score, done remixes for the likes of Bibio, Epic45, Will Samson and others, and released an EP with their synth pop side-project Lessons, along with singer Patrick Sudarski, on Sinnbus label.

Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter is The Gentleman Losers’ fourth full-length album, featuring eight new compositions, most part of which was written during the summer of 2018 at a cabin by a lake in southern Finland. All in all, this is a much more spontaneous record than their earlier ones. After being stuck with the previous album for many years, the Kuukka brothers wanted to make a simple, quiet album this time around. It was all much unplanned, but as the songs were nearing completion, it was clear that there was a coherent whole there, a feeling. They felt that this album has a sense of introversion to it, a feeling of winter approaching, and of holing up to wait for the seasons to change.
Make We Here Our Camp Of Winter is a sublime album that intelligently mixes elements of ambient, lo-fi, electronica and post-rock. Recorded using both vintage analogue equipment and modern production techniques and with a sound palette that blends layers of haunting guitar melodies, slowly picked lap steel guitar, warm analogue synths, subtle bass lines, minimal beats and spoken word, it’s an emotive album that showcases the trademark sound of The Gentleman Losers at its best.

More information can be found here.

06 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the addition of Umber to its roster of artists, presenting his new album This Earth To Another.

Umber is the solo project of multi-instrumentalist Alex Steward, based in Leicestershire, UK. For about a decade, he has been producing his sublime music, inspired by his life in the heart of the English countryside, having done several wonderful releases, either on labels such as Oxide Tones and Hawk Moon Records, or self-released, including an album, an EP, a single and a split EP with Drops (aka Liam J Hennessy). He has also released a remix album, including remixes by Stray Theories, Row Boat, Gavin Miller and Circadian Eyes, amongst others, while he has also done remixes for worriedaboutsatan and Ghosting Season, and has collaborated with artists such as Tom Honey (Good Weather for an Airstrike) and Sophie Green (Her Name Is Calla).

This Earth To Another is Umber’s second full-length album, five years since his debut came out. Utilizing both electric and acoustic instrumentation, including dreamy electric guitar melodies, nostalgic acoustic guitar arpeggios, soothing synth layers, glacial drones, gentle beats and subtle electronics, Umber creates an album full of shimmering ambient textures and ethereal soundscapes, with hints of atmospheric post-rock and slow moving electronica.
With the finishing touch on its evocative sound applied by the carefully done mastering of George Mastrokostas (aka Absent Without Leave), This Earth To Another radiates a deep majestic warmth that will appeal to anyone moved by the music of artists such as Helios, Hammock and Epic45.

More information can be found here.

03 February 2019

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Albums and Singles

I am hesitant to state that Private Parts is one of the most unique and weirdly beautiful albums of the 20th century, as that will likely sound like overheated hyperbole to anyone who has not heard it. Nevertheless, it is exactly that. Originally released back in 1978 and newly reissued, Ashley's hushed and intimate second album was unlike anything that came before it and no one else has since come anywhere close to replicating its precarious magic. That includes Ashley himself, as he revisited and expanded upon this album's themes with his ambitious television opera Perfect Lives, an ‘80s avant-garde landmark that has comparatively aged quite poorly. The elegantly simple piano-and-voice palette goes a long way towards making Private Parts feel timeless, but not nearly as much as the fact that it does not even sound like it was recorded on earth. Rather, it evokes the feeling of sitting next to an incredibly interesting, enigmatic, and gregarious man in heaven's waiting room.

Lovely Music

In the pantheon of a major 20th century composers, Robert Ashley (along with possibly Alvin Lucier) stands out as a glaring and bewildering anomaly, as if he was an alien dropped to earth rather than someone who had devoted their life to diligently learning and mastering the intricacies of music.That said, there are some key details from Ashley's early life that help explain how he wound up taking the direction that he did with Private Parts.For one, after studying music in NYC and doing some time in the army, he took a job at the University of Michigan’s Speech Research Laboratory and took to it so well that he was offered a chance to pursue a doctorate in the field (he was not a student at the time).Later, still in his home state of Michigan, Ashley and Gordon Mumma became involved in a multimedia art group that organized regular performances in a loft dubbed Space Theater.During this phase (1957 -1964), both Mumma and Ashley became very interested in building and modifying synthesizers and electronics.Curiously, there is not any evidence of that on Private Parts, as the underlying music feels purposely generic (to great effect).However, it is likely that Ashley began seriously thinking about how to blur disciplines and transcend the existing boundaries of music around that time, as the radical projects that immediately followed (the ONCE festival and Sonic Arts Union) very much made a point of challenging expectations and gleefully subverting rules and boundaries.Private Parts was recording soon after the dissolution of Sonic Arts Union, but Ashley managed to cram in one last significant window of absorbing strange and disparate influences, as he moved to San Francisco and took director jobs at both the Tape Music Center and the fabled Mills College Center for Contemporary Music.

If it resembles anything, Private Parts feels most like a Raymond Carver short story, albeit a very "meta" and abstractly poetic adaptation of one.At its core, the two halves ("The Park" and "The Backyard") seem to be the imagined interior monologues of a recently divorced or separated couple.In "The Park," a lonely man living in a hotel room recounts a visit to a park in increasingly fragmented and circular fashion.On the flipside, a woman standing in her parent's backyard experiences a similarly flickering and elusive stream-of-consciousness that unpredictably plays with numbers, muses about Giordano Bruno, and contemplates the constellations (among other things).As an aside, Ashley may have been uniquely gifted as an explorer of the mind's mysteries, as he had mild Tourette's Syndrome and later released an entire album based on his experiments with "involuntary speech."

Aside from the actual words being spoken, however, the two pieces are nearly interchangeable: Ashley delivers his elliptical, deadpan monologues with a soothing drawl over a radiant synth shimmer.He is joined by "Blue" Gene Tyranny on piano and Krishna Bhatt on tablas, but there is nothing about the pieces that feels "composed" at all.Rather, their lazily twinkling and burbling improvisations feel like they are there primarily to provide texture and a "natural" sounding veneer of life and spontaneity.Both are purposely low in the mix though, which makes it seem like they are either drifting in from another room or through the veil of consciousness.It is a weirdly appropriate backdrop, sounding vaguely like background music in a spa, achieving a wonderfully dreamlike and unreal sense of place for the real show: Ashley's twin narratives.Structurally, the album is a work of true genius, achieving an elegant symmetry by showing two sides of the situation in a teasingly semi-linear arc that regularly digresses into philosophical asides, mundane details, non sequiturs, fleeting acknowledgments of deep existential pain, and apparent stage directions for the memories.Also, crucially, Ashley's monologues can be unexpectedly and perversely amusing (my favorite lines are "he is expected to positive and helpful about breakfast" and "the sculptor has made the horse look stupid").

Aside from the inventive structure and the absorbing and elusive narrative arc, Private Parts also benefits from an uncanny lightness of touch that makes its bizarre tableaux feel effortless and natural. In lesser hands, an album in this vein would almost certainly descend into New Age toothlessness or wallow in the maudlin nature of its premise.Neither ever happens here–Ashley’s sensibility is too subtly clever, pleasurably disorienting, and deliciously ungraspable.There is a deep sense of regret and heartache to the album, to be sure, yet all of the darkest emotions remain simmering just beneath the surface: the monologues playfully dance around revealing too much and endlessly stumble and fixate on individual moments of cryptic importance and meaning.As such, the album manages to be a poignant meditation on the human condition, the emptiness of modern life, and the precariousness of happiness, as well as an enticingly incomplete puzzle and tabula rasa.It is possible that Private Parts is one of the most tenderly, insightfully human albums ever recorded, but it equally possible that Ashley intuitively painted an evocative and unfinished picture that left enough empty space for listeners to subconsciously project their own buried dreams, desires, and recriminations onto its ambiguous tale of lost love.More likely, it is both.In short, Private Parts is a visionary masterpiece from start to finish.The world is full of truly great albums, but this one is unique among them as an improbably perfect and comforting riddle that I can dive into a thousand times without ever feeling like I have solved anything.

Samples:

• The Park
• The Backyard

 

03 February 2019

Albums and Singles

As someone who already reviewed Bowery Electric's third album 19 years ago, I can't discuss it now without recognizing the importance of their second album and the differences in the world where each existed. Whereas Beat was very much the right record at the right time, Lushlife, in hindsight, feels like the wrong record at the wrong time. What made the world listen to Beat was its seemingly effortless mastery of sound, structure, and songcraft. The group didn't follow a particular formula between tracks and it never felt as if they were obliged to reach for a hit single. Released originally in late 1996 on Kranky in the USA, it grabbed the attention of Beggars Banquet for a release in Europe followed by two remix 12" singles, a remix album, and worldwide distribution to the follow-up. While they may have not explicitly been tasked with the duty of creating a pop-breakthrough, Lushlife feels at times like Bowery Electric are aiming for it. The songs were certainly more consciously composed, lyrically dense, and the sounds on the whole were much more vibrant and stunning than previously. Martha's vocals are more pronounced and confident, the bass riffs are a thunderous force, the guitars are sublime, and the strings are gorgeous. The dominating backbone of the record is the hip-hop beats, which eventually becomes its weakness.

Read more …

03 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

This is arguably the formal debut album from Portland harpist Sage Fisher, though she previously surfaced with a fine cassette (Orchid Fire) back in 2016. Liminal Garden is on a completely different level than its more homespun predecessor though. If someone had told me fifteen years ago that several of my favorite artists would be harpists in the not too distant future, I would probably have thought they were completely delusional, but the instrument has undergone quite an incredible renaissance since Joanna Newsom's early albums blew up. While it is probably too soon to tell whether the more mysticism-minded Fisher has definitively earned a place in the same illustrious pantheon as Newsom and Mary Lattimore, her inventive use of effects and processing here frequently transcends harpistry altogether and calls to mind some of the most iconoclastic laptop composers of the early twenty-first century (if they lived in a fairy tale-like crystal palace in an enchanted forest). This is a wonderful and unexpected gem.

Beacon Sound/Sounds et al

Sage Fisher is an quite a complex, curious, and inscrutable artist, as her "Druid high priestess" look and her self-description as a "portal opening reverberating witch sister" suggest that her work would share a lot of common ground with some of the more pagan-minded proponents of the largely dispersed and forgotten Freak Folk/New Weird America milieu.That would be just fine by me (as long as the album was good), as I remain a devout Fursaxa enthusiast and likely will be one forever.Fisher, however, takes that foundational sensibility in quite an unexpected direction, combining folk instrumentation, a deep connection with natural world, Hindu philosophy, and a fascination with geometry to yield something altogether her own.In fact, Liminal Garden almost feels perversely futuristic–like the kind of art a mysterious feminist revolutionary would be making in a William Gibson or Blade Runner-esque dystopia.Wielding a battery of pedals, Fisher frequently transforms her harp's tumbling arpeggios into an unrecognizably squirming and snarling electronic abstraction.In fact, on the most experimental pieces, such as the roiling and churning "Labyrinth I" or the chirping and bleeping "Iridesce," it is nearly impossible to discern that a harp was involved at all…at least, not from the sounds.From a compositional perspective, however, Fisher's choice of instrument seems to play an extremely crucial role in the shape her vision takes, as these ten pieces could all be roughly described as variations of gently hallucinatory soundscapes built from rippling lattices of notes.

Fisher sings sometimes as well, an occasion that yields two of the album's most strikingly beautiful pieces: "Grass Grow" and "Mirror."The former resembles kind of a time-stretched and smoky choral work punctuated by dense swells of exotic-sounding backwards melodies."Mirror" is even more gorgeous still, as Fisher unexpectedly sings an actual melody (with words!) amidst a swooning, fluttering, and cooing web of hazy vocal layers.For an artist this devoted to effects, processing, and experimentation, Fisher has a remarkably strong intuition for nuance and clarity, subtly embellishing the piece's simple motif with unpredictable disruptions and fitful glimpses of a glimmering descending harp melody. According to a recent interview with Self-Titled, "Mirror" is the album's most conceptually heavy and personal piece, as Fisher attempted to evoke the feeling of "being devoured by a gaze…looking in the mirror and seeing someone you weren’t expecting to see looking back."While I suppose that rightfully makes "Mirror" a strong contender for the album's centerpiece, it was actually the languorously lovely "Junglespell" that initially won me over to the album, as it unexpectedly blossoms into a passage of visceral, churning catharsis that recalls prime Tim Hecker.That is not something I would expect to encounter on an album by a harpist at all, yet Fisher makes it feel convincingly earned and authoritative.The following "Castleshell" pulls off a similarly inventive twist, as its pretty descending melody gradually becomes engulfed by layers of backwards countermelodies as it inexorably builds towards an increasingly heaving and vividly chaotic climax.

I once heard a yoga instructor liken culture to nutrition, explaining that what your mind ingests determines the quality of your words and thoughts.That might not sound especially profound on its face, but it stuck with me and recently popped into my head when I was reading about the esoteric inspiration behind some Richard Skelton albums: artists with deeply restless minds and unusual, far-reaching interests tend to make some of the most fascinating and unique art.Liminal Garden triggered the same thought, as I was struck by how many interesting and divergent directions Fisher was able to take with an instrument that I always felt was fairly limiting.In hindsight, I now grasp that a harp is only limiting if the player's influences are primarily other harpists.Fisher seems blissfully unaware of such perceived constraints herself, as her instrument is merely a tool for realizing a much more expansive and ambitious vision teeming with Cambodian ruins, mazes, seashells, tropical plants, Hindu mythology, and significant moments from her personal life.Of course, realizing that inspiration lurks everywhere is just one piece of the puzzle, as the execution of one's vision is every bit as important as the vision itself.Fortunately, Fisher completely nails it with Liminal Garden.Some credit is probably due to Rafael Anton Irisarri's mastering work, as these pieces feel vividly and vibrantly alive, but Fisher gave him one hell of an album to work with: I can find something to love about nearly every song here.Part of me admittedly wishes the album was a little longer, as it seems to go by too quickly, but that is a fool's wish.  Liminal Garden is already a focused and near-perfect statement that seems to only get better each time I listen to it.No sane person would tamper with that.

• Junglespell
• Castleshell
• Mirror

 

 

03 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

As someone who already reviewed Bowery Electric's third album 19 years ago, I can't discuss it now without recognizing the importance of their second album and the differences in the world where each existed. Whereas Beat was very much the right record at the right time, Lushlife, in hindsight, feels like the wrong record at the wrong time. What made the world listen to Beat was its seemingly effortless mastery of sound, structure, and songcraft. The group didn't follow a particular formula between tracks and it never felt as if they were obliged to reach for a hit single. Released originally in late 1996 on Kranky in the USA, it grabbed the attention of Beggars Banquet for a release in Europe followed by two remix 12" singles, a remix album, and worldwide distribution to the follow-up. While they may have not explicitly been tasked with the duty of creating a pop-breakthrough, Lushlife feels at times like Bowery Electric are aiming for it. The songs were certainly more consciously composed, lyrically dense, and the sounds on the whole were much more vibrant and stunning than previously. Martha's vocals are more pronounced and confident, the bass riffs are a thunderous force, the guitars are sublime, and the strings are gorgeous. The dominating backbone of the record is the hip-hop beats, which eventually becomes its weakness.

Beggars Archive

The socioeconomic climate of 1996 and 1997 was exceptionally beneficial for innovative arts and entertainment as the dot com boom was fueling both economic growth and increased worldwide connectivity. This was perfect for musicians who weren't able to find a voice through typical mainstream media or distribution through established channels, which were stubborn at the time to adapt. Morale was on the upswing, young people were optimistic, and independent music was reaching more listeners in more remote places. Post-rock was a recognized movement (or non-movement), divisions between styles were blurring, music festivals became more diverse, and listeners tastes were expanding. Beat was championed in the independent music press, Bowery Electric toured extensively, recorded a Peel Session, and, in the wake of the success, Martha Schwendener and Lawrence Chandler built a studio in Brooklyn and began work on Lushlife.

The first half—or side one of the record—is remarkably dark for an opening, with songs like "Floating World," the title track, the creepy "Psalms of Survival," and instrumental side closer "Soul City," all of which are mid-paced, sonically rich, and set in minor keys. Much like the cover suggests, it is like a breathtaking soundtrack to a lonely journey through a well-lit but empty city in the wee hours of the night.

The second half—or side two—is where the album loses me, however. Here is where the beats become distractive. After over three years from release of Beat, I wasn't ready to hear the overused "Funky Drummer" sample throughout "Saved" or the Eric B & Rakim loop (the one which made up every Milli Vanilli hit single along with countless others) on the closer "Passages." "Freedom Fighter," the album's single, used Jay-Z's beats, samples from Kraftwerk, and guitar from Nick Drake, who was widely played at the time, thanks to the popularity of the VW commercial (he sold more records in 1999 in the weeks following that commercial's debut than he did in his entire lifetime). It is worth noting this was no intention of the group to capitalize on this, as the album was complete before the commercial aired yet came out in the wake of its popularity.

Unfortunately, the timing wasn't working in the group's favor, as the album was released on February 28th of 2000, less than 2 weeks before the stock market crash on March 11th. While it may seem unrelated to the success of this album, the ripple effects couldn't be ignored. The crash brought the dot com boom to a screeching halt. Morale began on a downtrend and so did incomes: less money was floating around for arts and entertainment. The music industry was exceptionally vulnerable: as technology and connectivity continued to advance, the popularity of filesharing increased, and the major label industry lashed out at consumers. Stuck in the middle were the independent labels and stores which began to suffer, and within a very short while, the major record store chain, as we knew it, was extinct. After a European and South American tour, the duo returned to the US for a few performances but soon called it quits.

Lushlife is a good record but it doesn't make a lot of lists two decades later. I have listened to the record so many times in the last 20 years that writing about it is difficult, as my mind has changed so many times about the record. It still has fantastic songs which have stood up very well but I find my attention wandering halfway in. Plenty of care went into the reissue and the result is quite pleasing. The clarity and range of the sounds on the record are fantastic and the packaging is very faithful to the original UK-only LP. Furthermore, it is also now available at a reasonable price and no longer "collector prices." I would personally love to hear a version of the album stripped of side B's hip-hop samples or to hear the demos surface but am no longer holding my breath after all this time.

 

03 February 2019

Administrator

Albums and Singles

Sound In Silence is happy to announce the return of Amp, presenting their new album Entangled Time.

Amp is the electronic/post-rock duo of Richard F. Walker (aka Richard Amp) and Karine Charff, based in London, UK. Amp's lineup has changed many times over the years, since their formation in 1992 by Walker, after his collaboration with David Pearce (Flying Saucer Attack) on The Secret Garden and the Distance projects. During the last years Amp have centered around Charff and Walker, while in the past the duo has been joined by a succession of collaborators, including Matt Elliott (The Third Eye Foundation, This Immortal Coil, Hood, Flying Saucer Attack, Movietone), Matt Jones (Crescent, Movietone), Guy Cooper (The Secret Garden), Gareth Mitchell (Philosopher's Stone, The Secret Garden), Ray Dickaty (Moonshake, Spiritualized), Robert Hampson (Loop, Main), Marc Challans (Fraud), Donald Ross Skinner (Baba Looey, collaborator of Julian Cope), Dave Mercer (Light), Jon Hamilton (Part Chimp, Drumm Chimp, Ligament), Kevin Bass (Moonshake, Snowpony) and many others.

To date Amp have released several highly acclaimed albums, EPs and singles on labels such as Kranky, Darla, Wurlitzer Jukebox, Space Age Recordings, Enraptured, Very Friendly, Ochre Records, Blue Flea, RROOPP, their own Ampbase and many others, while Walker has also released solo records as Richard Amp and Amp Studio.

Entangled Time is Amp's first full-length album of brand new material since their Outposts album back in 2011. Featuring five new compositions, with a total duration of about 44 minutes, and emerging out of the extended recording sessions for a new studio album, this concise album presented itself, serving as a soundtrack or pointer to the ongoing work in the studio.

Amp perfectly blend together soothing ambient, dreamy post-rock, slow moving electronica and fragile shoegaze, while the sound palette of Entangled Time includes drifting textures of resonant synths, tranquil pads, shimmering waves of heavily effected guitars, seductive vocals, deep bass, glitchy electronic beats and hypnotic loops of hazy drones, resulting in one of their most interesting works to date. Entangled Time is a mesmerizing album that will appeal to anyone moved by the music of artists such as Bowery Electric, Lovesliescrushing, Windy & Carl and Fennesz.

More information can be found here.