Archive for the ‘Albums’ Category

Esmerine – Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More

Posted: 6 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More is such a quintessentially post-rock album title: without hearing a note, it evokes the spirit of 2003-2006 or thereabouts. On listening, it’s perhaps not as overtly post-rock as all that – it’s not a slow-building crescendo-fest with chiming guitars like Explosions in the Sky or even lesser-known acts like And So I Watch You From Afar, but with ties to legends in the field, it is every inch of that milieu, with ‘the cello of Rebecca Foon (Saltland, Set Fire To Flames, Silver Mt Zion) and the marimba of ex-Godspeed You! Black Emperor percussionist Bruce Cawdron at its core’.

It’s been a full five years since their last album, 2017’s Mechanics of Dominion, and during this time the Montreal-based collective have been doing what, it seems, the Montreal post-rock scene does best – detaching themselves from the world and conjuring magnificent, magical soundscapes that offer a conduit to planes of pure escapism.

Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More presents a rich sonic tapestry that incorporates a broad range of elements. The press released makes mention of ‘emotive chamber works using threads of post-classical, post-rock, Minimalism, neo-Baroque, jazz, pop and a wide array of folk traditions’ as being Esmerine’s palette.

‘Blackout’ opens the album with a soft, elegant piano draped with brooding strings that’s graceful, subtly emotive, and easy on the ear. ‘Entropy: Incantation – Radiance – The Wild Sea’, the first of the two-part ‘Entropy’ suite is a nine-minute journey through atmospheric ambience, where one treads with trepidation, uncertain of what may be hidden in the shadows. There’s an aura of ancient mysticism that echoes before eventually, the track refocuses toward a driving prog rock finale.

The beauty and joy of such a work is that while there are undoubtedly inspirations and emotions poured into the compositions, such wide spaces without words offer the listener a vessel into which to empty their own experiences and interpretations, and as such, a piece like the seven-minute ‘Imaginary Pasts’ with its lilting piano, roiling drums, and textured guitar work which trips out into hazy space offers so much scope for the listener to invest and reflect upon their own imaginary pasts. Such invitations to meditate on life and to journey into inner space are extremely welcome when life is so relentless.

Despite the title seemingly alluding to a sense of nostalgia, Everything Was Forever feels more like a work that creates its own space in time, rather than reflecting on a time past. Three of the four final tracks are under three minutes each in length, and as such, are almost dream-like fragments, and the listener finds themselves wandering through chiming bells and rippling notes that dapple like sunlight through trees in a breeze on ‘Wakesleep’, before ‘Number Stations’ guides the way not towards the light, but through a murky sonic swamp or eerie echoes before taking its final magnificent form, and reminds us that, ultimately, nothing is forever, and everything is just a fleeting moment in the scheme of eternity.

AA

a2000110854_10

elkyn – holy spirit social club

Posted: 5 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

Curation Records

Christopher Nosnibor

Elkyn is very much about the slow burn, the gradual diffusion, both musically and in terms of career trajectory. Joey Donnelly unveiled elkyn in 2020, having made the subtle shift from performing as elk and releasing the magnificently understated beech EP in 2019. Since then, he’s continued to release a steady stream off beautifully-crafted singles as teasers for the album, the most recent of which, ‘if you’re still leaving’ emerged in March of this year. Interestingly, the melody bears certain parallels with U2’s ‘Where the Streets Have No Name’, but nothing could be further from the bombast of the stadium-fillers’ epic: this is introspective bedroom indie, quiet and contemplative; there’s no ego, no pomp, no big production. ‘So this is it,’ he sings with a weak resignation.

So while progress certainly hasn’t been slow, it’s not exactly been swift, either, and listening to holy spirit social club seemingly explains why. To begin with, there’s the level of detail in the arrangements: on the surface, they’re fairly sparse, simple, acoustic works, but listen closely and there is so much more to hear, from delicate bass and washes of synth, rolling drums and incidental interludes with rippling piano and more. Reverb and layering are applied subtly and judiciously, too, and these things don’t happen by accident, but through a close and careful ear on every bar. The absence of capitalisation may niggle a pedant like me, but it’s clearly another conscious decision and rather than coming across like an irritating affectation, feels more like another aspect of elkyn’s self-opinion, the small ‘i’ indicative of a kind of abasement, while in no way seeking sympathy or validation. It’s a cliché to the point of a running joke when musicians say they write songs for themselves and aren’t bothered if anyone likes them, but with elkyn, it seems genuinely plausible: these songs are so intimate, it’s as if he’s playing them under the assumption no-one else will ever hear them.

If ‘found the back of the tv remote’ (another single cut) sounds like dreamy, winsome indie, it’s equally reminiscent of Dinosaur Jr’s more stripped back moments, and Donnelly shares that sense of almost being embarrassed to be audible as he sings comes through in J Mascis’ delivery. But then, this leads us to the second reason why elkyn isn’t banging stuff out every few weeks – these songs are intensely intimate, and filled with vulnerability and self-criticism, and one suspects that tendency to self-critique extends to his recordings in the same was as social situations, relationships, and life in general.

But while the tone is plaintive, mournful, regretful, sad, that isn’t the vibe of the songs in themselves, because elkyn manages to infuse every song with a certain optimism, the melancholy flavoured with hope. There’s a breeziness, a brightness, I might even say a ‘summeriness’ about many of the songs on holy spirit social club that renders them uplifting. But even at its saddest, most disconsolate and dejected, holy spirit social club brings joy simply by virtue of being so achingly wonderful in every way.

AA

a2130838683_10

Crooniek – Trail Of Time

Posted: 1 August 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , ,
0

Christopher Nosnibor

And here I am, presented with Trail Of Time, the new album from Darkwave/’Neo-Fanfare" Band, Crooniek, and album which, thematically, ‘reflects on the concept of time. In particular, the inspiration for Trail Of Time is the conflict between the known past and the unwritten future. The future remains hidden and we do not yet know it. But we do know the past’.

It’s a relatable concept, and according to the blurbage, ‘This album is a nostalgic journey through the past of driving force Gerry Croon, his musical projects (‘Parade of the ‘Funeral Fanfare’) and his relationship with his own birthplace Kampenhout, a small village in Belgium, known for his chicory cultivation.’

I much prefer chicory cultivation to Chicory Tip, because ‘Son of My Father’ is limp glam toss, and as such, Crooniek also win my approval for this altogether darker, non-glam album effort.

With slow, plodding beats and mournful brass, Trail Of Time is the absolute in nostalgia, the sound of cobbled streets and horse-drawn carriages, of bygone ages captured in black and white in sepia stills.

‘Would You Wake Me In Time’ is more a triumphalist medieval / martial oompah, and then again, there’s ‘At the Lemmeken Monument’ with its samples and sparse synths and eerie glockenspiel.

You could never call this album dull. For the most part, it is very much a work of nostalgia-laden post-rock, and it’s layered deep with sad strings and detailed but dolorous orchestration. ‘Condemned to the Fire’ somehow straddles ‘Greensleeves’ and I Like Trains circa Elegies to Lessons Learnt, and ‘Melancholy at Toorfbroek’ is classic post-rock.

It isn’t until halfway through that we get vocals, and for the most part, Trail of Time is an instrumental work, making single cut ‘G_B’ both a standout and an anomaly. It’s also a killer tune, in any context.

Perhaps ironically, as steeped in turn-of-the century and interwar nostalgia as it is, Trail of Time evokes – at least for me – more of the spirit of the turn of the millennium and the post-rock explosion if 2001 to 2005 or thereabouts. I say thereabouts because no time period has a definite start or end: there is a blurring, crossover, an intersection. And painful as it is to admit, 2004 is receding rapidly into the past: there are children born in 2004 who are now adults.

Time marches on, whether you like it or accept it or not. Breathe in, and breathe deep. Smell the present; smell the past: you never know if or when you will again.

AA

2f73e0cc-3cb9-ccc7-d7b9-fa85a6c5e466

nihiti – Sustained

Posted: 31 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , ,
0

Lo Bit Landscapes – 7th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Life has felt somewhat relentless of late. I do mean this on a personal level, although this is perhaps as much a result off external factors as anything else. The pandemic turned me into an addict. An addict of 24/7 steaming news, of doomscrolling, of relentless checking of social media. When things are constantly happening constantly evolving, it’s easy to find yourself dragged into the whirlwind, and ultimately to depend on the maelstrom. Silence becomes scary. You’re overwhelmed by the volume of emails, texts, FaceBook messages and WhatsApps and find yourself begging for them to stop, but when they do, you panic that something is wrong, that there’s something more sinister afoot, something isn’t working, or that perhaps you’ve died and haven’t realised.

Lately, there’s been a tidal wave of music that’s been created as a reaction to life in lockdown, to social tension, to the mental health pressures of contemporary living. And I’ve been lapping it up, I’ve been loving it. Because people are bringing issues out into the open, and speaking in their own voice about the difficulties we’ve all been facing, relaying those relatable traumas. But I’ve started to feel more like a silent counsellor rather than a music critic. It’s a truism that a problem shared is a problem halved, unless you’re the recipient of all of the sharing. Sometimes, you need a break. Sometimes, you need to let all the tension go, and to simply float.

Nihiti’s Sustained is the perfect antidote to all the tension. It consists of three slow-moving ambient works, extensive in their duration. The shortest, ‘Tetrachrome’ is almost ten minutes long, and it opens with the immense, twenty-one-and-a-half-minute soft soundscape of ‘Stellar Observer’. I sit back by candlelight and close my eyes, and feel my jaw slowly unclench, and my shoulder blades gradually begin to loosen. It’s soporific, deep ambience that washes over you and with washing waves of sound and soft, elongated mollifies drones that drift like vapour. It isn’t without turbulence, but said distortion and treble waves crash a way in the distance and charge against a backdrop of slow undulations. The broad, textured sounds are indeed sustained, for what feels like eternities, and the yawn that swells in my jaws is one of relaxation rather than boredom.

There are glitches and switches in ‘If the Colour’ that disturb the flow, and you almost feel yourself tripping momentarily, like a sleep twitch, but things soon right themselves again, and you resume your calmness, despite scratchy samples and moments of dissonance, because in the overall sensory experience, Sustained is slow and gentle.

Breathe it in, absorb the vapours. Ignore the distant voices as they whisper and echo, and assume they mean no harm, despite the darkening sky toward the end. Let it simply hang in the air: sit back, turn down the lights, and tune in to your inner voice instead of the inaudible mutters. Trust your instruct. Trust the space. Absorb the calm.

AA

a0264725976_10

Daniel Ouellette – El Salon

Posted: 27 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , ,
0

7th July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

Well, this is a lot to take in: the pitch alone is a back and forth slap around the face of information overload as I struggle to absorb the idea of a ‘post-punk, synth-pop, new wave concept album that sings of the pleasures and difficulties of life within a haunted house’ which is ‘also multi-lingual’ whereby ‘Daniel will sing to you in Spanish about a werewolf, in English about a Ouija board, in Portuguese about a haunted house and in French about bats at Christmas time’.

Is anyone equipped to deal with this in our tiny-mind, hyper-anxietised, attention-short culture? I don’t really know if I am, and rather suspect I’m not, or even if I want this, and ‘m not sure I do, but there’s really only one way to know for certain, and that isn’t to ask someone who’s heard it.

According to the accompanying notes, ‘The title of the album, El Salón has multiple meanings. In Spanish it can reference a classroom, an art studio, a living room and of course, a salon. Daniel Ouellette says, “The best place I have learned to speak is in living rooms with loved ones who speak Spanish and this the title is in honor of my mates, my loved ones to whom I speak Spanish.”

As such, it’s a polylingual cocktail that draws on pan-cultural sources and a host of genres. This doesn’t make it any easier to assimilate, and the resulting product is a mixed bag to be polite, something I’m not always given to being. What do you get if you throw together Rammstein, Young Marble Giants, and Flying Lizards? The absolute toss of ‘A Planchette’. Pretentious, precocious, corny theatricals… it’s hard to swallow. It has novelty value, and I can accommodate that, but it just feels so painfully self-absorbed.

‘Duérmete’ is more palatable, 80s synth pop with a dash of Cure in the mix, and ‘O Lindo Sonâmbulo’ is a tidy slice of vintage electropop with a crisp and dominant snare. ‘The Kitchen Witch Who Stayed.’ is more bleepy, bouncy, and it’s wincey. It sits somewhere between Erasure and St Michel Front, but has the panache or aplomb of neither. St Michael Front demonstrate a winking knowingness, whereas Daniel Ouellette lacks that same sense of self-awareness, resulting in a clunky, awkward delivery made without a nod or a wank – and Ouellette is no Throbbing Gristle either. As a consequence, El Salon is a mixed bag and a shade patchy: at its best, it’s dark, stark, brooding and theatrical electropop: at its worst, it’s pretty cringy. In favour of El Salon, the best is proportionally better represented than the far from best, which is simply grating and cheesy. With its shifting forms, it’s hard to digest. Or maybe I’m just not ready to take it in all at once.

AA

a2394515336_10

Sever The Servants – Sever The Servants

Posted: 25 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
0

20th July 2022 – Produkt 42

Christopher Nosnibor

Sever The Servants – a nice play on words – have dished up an eponymous debut that’s as dark as darkwave gets, with subsonic bass, thudding beats and hushed, deadened vocals. As much as anything, I’m reminded of Test Department’s The Unacceptable Face of Freedom, only much more muted, and less abrasive, antagonistic, and slowed to a crawl.

Sever The Servants are no less political, skewering slabs off both ‘political and social commentary. From the ‘right wing hivemind’ theme of the title track to the things that slowly kill us day to day’, STS are seething… but with a taut musical restraint. It’s stripped back, minimal. No samples, no loops, just an undulating larval creep.

Instead of going all-out raging, industrial-style either by means of guitars (e.g. Ministry) or snarling synths (e.g. Nine Inch Nails), Sever The Servants create a dense, suffocating soundtrack that recreates the pressure of oppression with a sonic density and uncomfortable weight. Listening to this album is like having a heavy cloak pulled over your head. Everything is muffled, and you can’t think straight. You panic. The drum beats are like kicks to the chest. It’s hard to breathe. And they never let up. You feel the atmosphere thicken.

I was sold on the pitch that ‘The album’s themes are generally apocalyptical with some each of the album’s six tracks represent the freedom to explore with a complete lack of care towards staying in a “box”.’ Having spent the last couple of years effectively living in a box, I’ve grown accustomed to a certain sense of claustrophobia, but Sever the Servants manage to intensify this with the six tracks on the menu here. As for the apocalyptic… the world is quite literally burning now. And yet right-wing boomers are decrying those who dare to mention climate crisis as ‘woke’. We are fucked beyond fucked. The end of the world is truly nigh, and I’m out of words to describe just how fucked we are. But Sever The Servants at least manage to create a soundtrack that goes some way to articulating it – for as long as we have power, before the blackouts commence.

The vocals wheeze uncomfortably amidst tense soundscapes that roll and lurch, and the weight doesn’t come from volume or abrasive, but a menacing dark force.

AA

a4218863382_10

Various Artists – Rental Yields Vol 1

Posted: 18 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
0

Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community – 5th August 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

There’s so much to love about Front & Follow and the Gated Canal Community, and I’m absolutely not mocking when I say that Front & Follow have called it a day as a label almost as many times as Status Quo have announced farewell tours, because I deeply admire the fact that label head Justin Watson simply cannot resist a good project, and always returns after every break with a new release beyond bursting with great new music. This leads me to the next reason to love the label: every project that brings the label out of mothballs is for a worthy cause, and to see a label channel its energy into raising funds for charitable causes (without being preachy or holly about it) is truly heart-warming and goes a long way to remining us that human nature is, by and large, giving, and that it’s just the current government and the selfish / stupid anuses who keep voting for them who don’t give a fuck about anyone else. And then there’s the fact that – as previously mentioned – each release contains great new music, and the fact is that Front & Follow’s commitment to providing an outlet to lesser-known acts, including many who’ve not been previously releases, is unstinting. Just as it’s hard to find venues who will give gigs to bands who have yet to play and establish a fanbase, so it’s hard for those same acts to find an outlet other than doing it themselves on Bandcamp and Spotify, with their work being completely buried and diving under all radars in the process.

And so, here we have the first instalment of Rental Yields, a ‘multi-release collaboration project raising money to tackle homelessness in Manchester’. As the press notes explain, ‘Inspired by our current housing system, the project encourages artists to steal (or borrow, nicely) from another artist to create their own new track – in the process producing HIGH RENTAL YIELDS… Over 100 artists are now involved (the spreadsheet is fun), each one tasked with creating a new track from the sounds created by someone else – we are then collating the tracks and releasing them over the course of the next year.’

This is Volume One, and contains twenty tracks, ‘featuring the likes of Polypores, Elizabeth Joan Kelly, The Leaf Library, yellow6, Spaceship and more’, and it’s a cracker. This is no surprise on the basis of the label’s track record, of course. Most of the artists are super-obscure: Solomon Tump, The Incidental Crack, and yol are about the limit of my a priori knowledge, and that’s good: it means the collection is about the music rather than the artists, and people should be interested because it’s good, not because it has some shitty remix of acoustic version of a mediocre name band. It’s good because it’s good. And weird.

And there is nothing mediocre about this. It is a big compilation that showcases the exploratory, the experimental, the oscillating, the avant-garde. Dig, it, and dig it deep.

AA

RENTAL YIELDS - VOL ONE

Hanging Freud – Persona Normal

Posted: 17 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

Christopher Nosnibor

Having just spent a depressing afternoon hearing the new Interpol album for the first time, I decided I needed cheering up. Scanning my immense backlog of releases for review – and, with new submissions landing faster than I can open emails, let alone download and listen to albums, I realise that Hanging Freud’s album has been lurking unplayed for far too long for an album I’d been excited to hear since ‘Antidote/Immune’, released as a taster of album number six, Persona Normal back in June last year, landed in my inbox.

The release / review cycle is in itself a pressure we would all do without, since albums by their nature have a slow diffusion. In an accelerated world, PR campaigns are over a month or so after release, and I suspect that under the current model of pre-release hype followed by a rapid burndown, most releases shift 90% of their units within the first months of release, before things taper off and pretty swiftly drop off a cliff. But I digress, as I’m prone to doing.

Persona Normal is not the kind of album you’d expect to provide joy, but, in context, it’s a welcome reminder that there are still bands who are at a more advanced stage in their career delivering albums that channel difficult emotions and explore them in real depth.

‘Cureseque’ is a term that’s passed into parlance to make a shorthand reference to anything that draws inspiration from The Cure, but it’s trouble some and rather inadequate given the band’s range. More often than not, it seems to translate as ‘lots of layered synths like Disintegration’. Not so Persona Normal, an album that condenses the style and atmosphere of the unparalleled trilogy of Seventeen Seconds, Faith, and Pornography into a single set. The atmosphere is bleak, and the production sparse, but there’s some monumental percussion that’s more akin to Pornography.

It opens with the droning, wheezing synth of ‘Too Human’. It’s pitched against a trudging, monotonous drum beat with a dominant snare, and this provides the backdrop to a gloomy yet elegant vocal that aches with resignation, before ‘We Don’t Want to Sleep’ pounds in on a rhythm reminiscent of ‘A Strange Day’, and this is around the level of the bleak, brooding atmosphere. It’s thick and heavy with angst.

But then, amidst the doomy, droning synths and metronomic, motorik drum machines, Paula comes on with the sass of Siouxsie, with her enunciation and her glacial cool post-punk intonations. And as such, while Persona Normal really is pretty fucking bleak, dense, and dark, it’s uplifting to hear an album that so perfectly captures the spirit of the bands from which it draws unashamed influence. Elsewhere, I’m reminded of Chelsea Wolfe and Pain Teens; ‘Is This Why?’ may be sparse in its arrangement, but the sound is full, expansive, epic, and there’s something graceful and plaintive in its inward searching. An in an album of wall-to-wall quality, ‘Immune’ stands out as a snarling post-punk beast with the sharpest of hooks – and it’s all in the delivery.

More often than not, the sounds and overall sound and delivery convey so much more than words alone – and the production only enhances the experience. It’s dense, dark, drum-heavy, and even in the middle of a heatwave, it’s an album that will chill you to the core.

AA

a3740242382_10

Imperial Triumphant – Spirit Of Ecstasy

Posted: 15 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , ,
1

Century Media – 22nd July 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

New York’s enigmatic Imperial Triumphant are described as ‘avant-garde metal’. They’re certainly that. I mean, they’re overtly metal, with guttural, growling vocals, barrelling riffs, thunderous drums and booming bass – but Spirit of Ecstasy is a brain-lowling, bewildering affair that lumbers, lurches, and leaps between other genres within those solid metal parameters.

The tracks are all past the six-minute mark, and pack in a lot of action and a lot of range, to the extent that six minutes in, it’ll feel like the first three minutes were another song entirely. At least, that’s my experience – of an album that’s so expansive and diverse that it completely takes over. You stop following, and find yourself simply being transported on a journey with no clear trajectory, thrown this way and that, tossed about as if by turbulence, or something more.

Following the blistering percussive battering and jolting, sliding sonic deluge of the album’s opener, ‘Chump Change’, ‘Metrovertigo’ is exemplary: it slides into angular industrial discord, and there’s a lot going on – mostly jazz-leaning, but then there’s the megalithic bombast of the song’s climax which is more neoclassical, and ‘Tower of Glory, City of Shame’ also incorporates bold neoclassical elements along with samples and jarring, skewed guitar along with the demonic snarling.

When they go all-out on the riffage, the density is eye-popping, rib-cracking, skull-crushing. When they go the other way, into orchestral territories, as in during the into on ‘Merkurius Gilded’, it’s sweet, sublime. Of course, those delicate segments are obliterated in the blink of an eye in swathes of immolating black metal. And then, there’s the all-out experimental jazz / noise no-wave racket of ‘In the Pleasure of their Company’ that really does drill And lurch, showcasing the duo’s capacity to explore different sound and textures.

It’s not exactly technical in its musicality – although there’s no shortage of technical ability on display here – but compositionally, Spirit Of Ecstasy is something else. Each song condenses so many ideas, so many segments into a single piece that it’s utterly bewildering at times.

The most remarkable achievement is that it doesn’t sound forced or false or corny, when by rights, none of this should work and it should be awful. But it isn’t. It is, however, intense, and draining so. You’re tossed this way and that, samples crackle in the distance, and quiet passages are disrupted by detonating drums and squalls of noise.

Everything spews from the satanic caverns of hell, and leaves you feeling worn out, battered, beaten. And buzzing.

AAA

~ai-49c5e0dc-82d2-440c-b6f2-5e40d506cd09_

Alberto Boccardi – Petra / Alexandra Spence – Blue Waves, Green Waves / PINKCOURTESYPHONE – All Intensive Purposes

Posted: 6 July 2022 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
0

ROOM40 – June 2022

Christopher Nosnibor

I feel like I’ m forever playing catchup. The simple fact is, there are more new releases – and remarkably good ones at that – than there are hours in the day to listen to them all. I can’t bee the only one who sees friends on FaceBook posting about how they’re loving the new album by X, Y. and Z, and who gets asked if they’ve head / what they think to this, that, or the other and wonder ‘how the hell do you actually listen to all this?’ These people must listen to music 24/7 and possess three pairs of ears by which to listen to all of this music simultaneously, or something.

Admittedly, it doesn’t help that my dayjob doesn’t really afford much opportunity for listening while I work, so I really only have a spell while cooking dinner, and evening, which, after everything else, tend to start around 10pm.

And so, presented with anything up to thirty new releases a day in my inbox, I simply can’t listen to everything, and I deeply envy those who can, and seemingly do.

One particular source of guilt, for wont of a better word, is my inability to keep up with ROOM40 releases. They may only be number three or four a months, but they’re invariably interesting, exploratory, intriguing. And tend to warrant for more detailed analysis than I can reasonably offer. Hence a summarising catch-up for the label’s June releases, on the day July’s have just landed with me.

Alberto Boccardi’s Petra (released on tape) is a comparatively short album of intense electronic drones: consisting of just five tracks spanning around thirty-two minutes, is sparse, ominous, sonorous, predominantly mid-range but with some stealthy bass and sonorous, trilling organs. Recorded over several years and partly inspired and assembled while Boccardi was resident in Cairo, it’s both chilling and soporific, it’s an intriguing minimal work.

RM4165_front

Blue Waves, Green Waves by Alexandra Spence isn’t receiving a physical release, and is an altogether different proposition. As the tile suggests, the ocean provides the primary inspiration, and sure enough, it begins with the sound of crashing waves, but this soon recedes to the background, while analogue organ sounds ebb and flow as the backdrop to low-key spoken word pieces. Noters drip and drop and hover in suspension like droplets of water hanging from leaves before their inevitable yielding to gravity, sliding off and into a puddle. ‘Air Pockets’ sloshes and sploshes, reverberating against empty plastic pipes. The flatness of sound and the shifting of tones as they bubble and sploosh is the aural equivalent of close reading, interrogating a source to microcosmic levels.

DRM4143_art

‘All intensive purposes’ is one of those (many) misspeaks that drive me fucking crackers. And this release by there inexplicably—monikered ‘Pinkcourtesyphone’ is an album likely to frustrate and bend the brain, albeit for different reasons. With the exception of the final mid-album interlude, ‘Out of an Abundance’, these are darkly mellifluous drones that stretch well beyond the five-minute mark, and ebb and flow slowly amidst rumbles and reverberating snippets of conversation and radio. The mood is tense, unsettling; not creepy, so much as just uncomfortable, spine-tingling, ominous, and at times, other-wordly.

BW RM#4188_pinkcourtesyphone_sleeve_final

Some will likely find something in one or another of these, while others will doubtless find all three of these releases to be of interest and collectively, they do very much provide a broad, wide-ranging view of matters experimental and ambient, presenting different perspectives of found sound and field recording. It’s credit to ROOM40 for giving space to these artists, and showcasing such a range of music from within what may, on the surface, appear a narrow field, and demonstrating otherwise.

Older Entries
Newer Entries