Posts Tagged ‘Ambient’

Saloli – Canyon

Posted: 15 July 2023 in Albums
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Kranky – 7th July 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

If the prospect of an album from a solo pianist whose recording moniker is the Cherokee word for ‘squirrel’, and which is intended to evoke ‘a day in the life of a bear in a canyon in the Smoky Mountains,’ with each track channeling a different emotion or experience in its daily explorations, sounds as if it may be soft, neoclassical tinkling, Canyon will come as rather a surprise.

As the accompanying notes explain, ‘Canyon was composed and performed live on a Sequential Circuits MultiTrak synthesizer…routed through a delay pedal. This refraction adds a lyrical spatial quality, as though “echoing off canyon walls.” It’s music both gentle and adventurous, curiously rooting through soils and streams, in a sustained state of discovery’.

It’s a proper vintage piece of kit, an analogue synthesizer only produced for a couple of years in the mid-1980s. Described by Vintage Synth Explorer as ‘a six voice analog synth with sophisticated filters, envelopes, modulation capabilities and built-in sequencing’, it’s clearly got versatility in its favour – which means Saloli has a broad range of sounds and effects at her disposal to articulate the range of moods and emotions of her subject. But above all, it has that classic analogue warmth of tone, the rich, organic texture that resonates in a way that’s almost biological. It’s something that’s both affecting and in some way comforting, the fuzzy edges conjuring a sonic blanket, and even when venturing into more abrasive territories, analogue synths very much have the capacity to reach the parts their digital successors somehow can’t.

The album starts strong: ‘Waterfall’ spirals and cascades in a swirl of synth that doesn’t necessarily evoke – at least to me – anything bear-like, but the more ambient end of Krautrock ‘Lillypad’ drifts soft-edged semi-ambience strolling and ‘Snake’ is unexpectedly graceful. But then, if you’ve ever watched a snake move, it is a graceful, supple movement, and snakes have an undeservedly bad reputation among humans. Very few of them are dangerous, and they’re certainly not the only creature to shed its skin. Again, the notes provide an insight which perhaps has a bearing on the tone here, explaining that ‘In Cherokee teachings, humans and animals are considered to have no essential difference – originally, all the creatures of the earth lived together in harmony’, and as such, ‘Canyon captures shades of this Edenic notion across eight elegant pieces, alternately meandering, pensive, playful, and pure. Sutton’s playing, as always, is dexterous and dimensional, mirroring the dazzled senses of its muse. If then, the compositions don’t quite confirm to our expectations, based on our perceptions of the various inspirations, it could well be on account of Saloli approaching them from a very different perspective. Why are we scared of snakes? Some of it is likely biblical in origin, some to popular portrayals in movies and media. But one is not afraid of one’s equal, and living together in harmony means there is no reason for distrust.

Such belief systems may be difficult to comprehend, but how much better, more pleasant, more bearable, would life the world over be if everyone held these views? There would be no social hierarchy, there would be no capitalism, there would be no war. Consider that for a moment.

The beauty of Canyon is that it’s a work which encourages and inspires contemplation.

It’s the playful side of Saloli’s songwriting that comes to the fore on the slowly bouncing ‘Yona’. It’s mellow, light, uplifting, and contrasts significantly with the introspective ‘Silhouette’ which follows, a reflective, melancholy pie, which makes you ache ever so slightly inside: you can’t quite pinpoint the reason, but that’s the power of music. Moreover, it’s the power of Saloli’s music, as the forms shift from string-like elongated notes to shorter, more piano-like sounds, with all of the variables in between.

‘Full Moon’ is positively bloopy and gloopy, trilling tones like synthesized pan pipes echoing out over a bubbling, bass, and it works nicely: there is contrast, there is movement. And in an abstract way, it captures the energy that seems to emanate from a full moon. And there is an energy which affects creatures and humans alike: some if it’s mystical and mythical, but I’ve often felt hyper without even realising it’s a full moon.

There’s something buoyant but also stealthy and predatory and then again, at the same time, increasingly discordant and with shades of darkness, about ‘Nighthawk’, a seven-and-a-quarter-minute monster with transportative qualities, before the true closer, the eight-minute ‘Sunrise’ heralds the arrival of the new. A new dawn, a new hope. Breathe deep. This could be our reality too.

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Bleaklow – Glume EP

Posted: 4 July 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Gizeh Records – 30th June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

In this sense, Bleaklow is a rather different proposition, and in some respects, the instrumentation is a significant factor in the shape of the sound, with Claire contributing ‘Voice, Nord Electro, Yamaha PSS-170, field recordings, Moog Taurus’, and Richard contributing ‘Electric gtr, drones, field recordings, Yahama PSS-170, Moog Taurus’. But by the same token, there is something about anything Richard Knox does which has something of a signature – not a signature sound as such, more of a signature feel, which comes from the kind of wispy ambience and dense atmospherics.

The overall effect of Bleaklow’s debut, Glume, is mellow, amorphous washes of cloud-like sounds drifting softly on invisible air currents, but there are moments where the textures are coarser, more abrasive, and these provide vital contrast. ‘Husk’ scrapes in with a wash of distorted guitar before tapering tones supple piano and vocals, layered to a choral effect surge and swell.

Claire’s voice by turns evokes Kate Bush and Cranes, haunting, ethereal, and as much as this sits in the post-rock bracket from which Richard and Gizeh emerged back in the early 00s (the label put out not only the The Heritage, the debut mini album by Her Name is Calla, but Knox also put out a super-limited CD of ‘Condor and River’ in a crazy corrugated card sleeve, as well as Arrivals, the debut album by worriedaboutsatan, wrapped in a chunk of blown vinyl wallpaper, which looks and feels amazing but is a real bugger to store… but I digress) it also very much harks back to 90s shoegaze, with a heavy debt to Slowdive and My Bloody Valentine, but then again, it’s impossible to listen to this without recourse to The Cocteau Twins. If this sounds like a catalogue of touchstones, it’s testament to how deftly they draw on myriad elements and whip them into a sonic souffle with the texture of candyfloss – not that this is particularly sweet, but it is lighter than a feather, lighter than air. And nowadays, the packaging is a little less DIY, but still very much focused on sustainability: the packaging for Glume is a recycled cocoa-card sleeve, whereby the ‘recycled card is made from 40% Post Consumer Waste and 15% natural fibres (by-products derived from the food processing industry which would otherwise go to landfill.) Turning a waste product into a natural, GMO free, raw material derived from nuts, fruits etc, resulting in distinctive colour shades’. It’s not just commendable, environmentally: it taps into the physicality of a releasing music and rendering the physical release a work of art rather than a commodity of plastic in plastic.

Everything on Glume happens at a sedate pace, and everything melts slowly together. The chances are that at some point, you’ve sat, stood, or even laid on the grass and simply looked at the sky and watched the clouds slowly shifting shape, rabbits and elephants becoming elongated and increasingly deformed, until they’re no longer rabbits or elephants, but abstract shapes stretching and fading to formlessness. The songs on Glume are by absolutely no means formless, but the sounds are like mist and the structures are supple. It’s a magnificently realised work: textured, detailed, nuanced.

It may not be bleak, but it’s dark, and it’s got detail. Bask in it.

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Suburban Spell – Falling Down EP

Posted: 25 June 2023 in Singles and EPs
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Suburban Spell Records – 23rd June 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

The pitch, which recommends Suburban Spell as being for fans of OMD, Boy Harsher, The KVB, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, The Cars, Rational Youth, piqued my curiosity, rather more than it did my interest. We’re clearly in retro synth territory here, but then there seems to be something of a glut of artists falling into this bracket right now. It can’t all be nostalgia: most of the current crop of artists emulating the late 70s and early 80s weren’t even born before the 90s or even the turn of the millennium. Some of it I suspect is kids discovering their parents’ music collections, while equally, per perhaps more so, it’s a sign of the times we live in. It’s hard to really explain in depth or detail precisely why nostalgia depresses me, but it does, and ersatz nostalgia several fold.

Suburban Spell, however, require less exploration or explanation: this is the solo project of Peter Endall, who was a member of Schizo Scherzo, who were, according to his bio, active in ‘the heady days of Melbourne’s 80’s music scene, playing alongside the likes of The Eurythmics, Pseudo Echo, Real Life and Fergal Sharky.’ These are names to conjure with, names to reflect on.

So when I read that Suburban Spell ‘combines the austere beauty of Kraftwerk, 80’s melodic sensibilities, driving rhythms and some noisy grind thrown in for good measure. Influenced by the heyday of new wave and 70’s-80’s electronica, this music carries the beautiful imprints of such artists as Ultravox, OMD, Visage, Jean-Michel Jarre, The Cars, Gary Numan and New Order’, it makes sense. This is the music of the era which is coded into his generational DNA. Not that I really get much sense of Ultravox, OMD, or Visage from the five tracks on offer here. But… they’re good.

The songs on the Falling Down EP are both much darker and much more sophisticated than those on Schizo Scherzo’s Back to Back EP – but then, that was 1985, and technology has evolved and people mature and evolve also.

The title track is the opener, and while it’s very much 80s in its stylings, it’s contemporary in its production. It’s driven by a pulsating synth and beat dominated by a whip-cracking Akai snare, while Endall delivers a vocal smoothed by reverb and EQ balancing. But it’s the echoey bass break, that evokes the spirit of New Order and Disintegration-era Cure that really makes this a winning groove.

‘Salvation Army’ explores deeper atmospherics through a starker musical backdrop before ’12 Causes of Pain’ thuds in with some hard dancefloor-friendly trance-pop. The looping pulsations cast a nod to Dionna Summer’s classic ‘I Feel Love’ – a song that feels like it belongs to the 80s, but was actually released in 1977 – and the vocals and rippling synth overlays are pure Kratwerk. It’s easy to forget that the sounds so commonly associated with the 80s actually came from the late 70s, but there’s always a lag between decades: s, too. songs from the early 90s can so easily be mistaken from the late 80s, too.

I’ve spent a huge chunk of my evening trying to figure out which 80s track ‘Natural Science’ reminds me of, and while I can’t quite pinpoint it, Depeche Mode’s ‘Enjoy the Silence’ is as closed as I can get, although it equally brings strong vibes of Howard Jones and the like.

The six-minute closer, ‘Side Car’ goes all out for spacious, atmospheric, and ambient, twisting into post-rock territory with the breaking out of a reverby guitar. Against a swirling synth backdrop with a slow, ponderous bass and shimmering textures, before fading to quiet in a wonderful fuzz of ambience.

Falling Down has much going for it: so much so, that by the end of the set, it’s more pick-me-up than falling down.

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Gvantsa Narim – Apotheosis Animæ

Posted: 13 May 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 26th May 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Having recently celebrated a decade of diversity, Cruel Nature Records continue to release a broad range of non-mainstream music – and the range couldn’t be more pronounced than placing two of May’s releases side-by-side: Gvantsa Narim’s latest offering, Apotheosis Animæ exists on another sonic plane form the grating industrial noise of Omnibadger’s Famous Guitar Licks Vol. III. They’re a sort of Yin and Yang: the world definitely needs both, and I personally need both, too, and it’s testament to Steve Strode’s singular commitment to releasing music of quality regardless of style or genre that they can both find a home on the same label.

Apotheosis Animæ, we learn, takes ‘inspiration from religion, esotericism and Georgian polyphonic music’, and that ‘her latest work was written in late 2022 / early 2023 and tells the dark and cold story of winter’.

It seems very much that winter now is not like the winters of twenty or thirty years ago: instead of two feet of snow, we get seven feet of flash flooding here in the UK. And now, despite it being the middle of May, it’s impossible to predict from one hour to the next, let alone from one day to the next if it will feel more like October or February. But despite this, winter not only has timeless connotations, but also, whether it’s sub-zero or only just a bit chilly, the cold winds and long dark nights do have a profound effect on human activity and our lives as individuals. It’s not only psychological; it’s biological and metabolic, and some of this is genetically coded into us from our prehistoric existence all the way through to as recently as just before electric lighting and mains power. There’s a case that says this is where we went wrong, as a species, and for the planet, in evolving beyond lives in tune with nature.

We each have our own unique relationship with winter, and our own associations and reminiscence. While I’m prone to Seasonal Affective Disorder, presenting as low mood and low energy, my wife would invariably suffer a low ebb in health from late October through the February, often suffering back-to-back colds that would drag on for weeks, the lack of daylight dragging down her levels of vitamin D and her immune system struggling to fend off the endless barrage of bugs and viruses that thrive in the cold months, especially when being breathed around in close-packed environments like offices. I fully acknowledge, then, and actually embrace, the fact that I am coming to this album fully loaded with my own baggage which will colour my experience and interpretation. This is a healthy, a function of music, something which can exist as a vessel for us to pour our thoughts, feelings, memories, and traumas into.

The compositions ‘Apotheosis’ and ‘Animæ’ bookend the album, and as the former lifts the curtain, it’s a slow, simple piano that evokes a slowing, a darkening which paves the way for mournful strings and distant echoes of bass and percussion on ‘Sicut Mortuss’ (which I believe translates as ‘like death’ or similar) conveys that paralysing sensation which descends with the darkness; while on the woozy, disorientating ‘Amnesia’, snippets of speech drift in and out, but instead of giving a sense of human connection, as they echo into the droning hum, there is only distance and detachment. Stretching out past the tend-and-a-half-minute mark, it’s hypnotic and unsettling, a little like the point at which you realise you’ve gone a little too far into your own head and need to drag yourself back to life, if only because it’s scary in there and you’ve got to work and at least appear normal.

There are moments of grand, sweeping ambience, soft and gentle, which convey the comforting experience of watching large flakes fall, heavy and silent, settling thick and deep in a silent white blanket; there are also moments of gritty disturbance, swirling glacial winds and shards of ice. ‘Born in the Mist’ is dark and brooding, shapeless, formless, ominous, impenetrable, the howling scrapes that ebb and flow are unsettling and uncomfortable, and it’s evocative; personally, I’m reminded of slogging across mountain tops in the Lake Diastrict in dense cloud and storm-force wind, and no doubt anyone else would being different mental visuals along.

This is where instrumental, abstract music really does come into its own: listener response simply cannot be prescribed, and has to come from within, and for this reason, we will all hear and experience something different. Following on, ‘Stopwatch’ sounds like the clouds lifting and waking up from a daze to remember that you do know how to live, that sense that perhaps hibernation is over and there’s a world outside, and this applies not only to the winter which is determined by the meteorological and astronomical seasonal changes, but the winter of the soul which can chill even deeper.

It’s soft and soporific: ‘Train’ glances and glides with crisp, crystalline tones into the – sadly missed, proverbial – sunset. The fifteen-minute ‘Codex’ is a big, brooding, bruising storm building in the form of a rumbling drone that’s dark as oppressive. Crackles, bleeps and bubbles rise cautiously on the edges of this mass of dense, dark atmosphere. Over time, it throbs lower and slower, and rippling details emerge and float along on the surface – but that darkness, that threat, is always present. At some point, you find yourself lost in the drift, and a slow thumping beat emerges behind a locked loop of synthesised notes… and then it shifts again, reminding us that nothing is ever static, however much it may seem that nothing changes, however much we may yearn to remain in a moment forever.

There are some truly beautiful passages; but they’re tempered by sadness and tension, which conveys the sense of coldness, darkness, isolation, longing that the long dark nights bring – a yearning for warmth, for comfort, for hot, hearty food, the primitive craving to sit beside a roaring fire.

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Various Artists – Spectrum

Posted: 17 April 2023 in Albums
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Cruel Nature Records – 20th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

Regular readers – or even more casual ones – will likely have noticed that Cruel Nature releases have received a fair bit of coverage here. The Newcastle-based cassette label, and brainchild of Steve Strode, are now celebrating a decade of their existence, releasing non-conformist, way-outside-the-mainstream music, and they’re celebrating with a compilation of 23 (of course, it has to be 23) exclusive tracks recorded specifically for this release, on a label who can now boast the tagline of ‘Channelling sonic diversity since 2013’.

Spectrum very much succeeds in showcasing that sonic diversity, presenting a collection that spans ambience to brutal metal. In times past, no-one who would listen to one would listen to the other, but my own musical journey over the last decade and a half means that whereas once I’d have sneered at one and hesitated over the other, I’m now on board with both. And why not? Cruel Nature Records has spent a decade now giving a home to music that doesn’t really fit, and doesn’t conform to a specific genre.

Of the 23 contributors, a fair few of them have previously featured on these pages, so new material from them is most welcome. VHS¥DEATH are among them, and ‘Sacrifice’ is a relentless industrial hardfloor disco banger, which couldn’t be more different from the mellow jazz ambience of Aidan Baker’s contribution, ‘Grounded Hogs’. And in a nutshell, the contrast between the two tracks instantly encapsulates the ethos of Cruel Nature. Anything goes as long as it’s different and interesting.

It’s great to hear snarking antagonists like Pound Land in the same space as Nathalie Stern’s haunting atmospheres and the spare folk of Clara Engel. Pound Land deliver a gloomy grinder in the form of ‘Flies’; despite its minimal arrangement, it’s dense and oppressively weighty, not to mention really quite disturbing in its paranoid OCD lyrical repetitions.

‘K Of Arc’ by TV Phase’ is a punishing, percussion-led trudge through darkness, while Charlie Butler’s ‘Eagle’s Splendour’ which immediately follows couldn’t be more different, it’s rolling piano and soft, rippling chimes providing six and a half minutes of mellow enchantment.

Petrine Cross bring a rabid howl of utterly crushing, dungeon-dark black metal that’s as heavy and harrowing as anything they’ve done, making for a most welcome inclusion here. Offering some much-needed levity, Empty House’s ‘Blue Sky Dreamers’ is a wistful slice of breezy indie with a hint of New Order, not least of all on account of the run-filled bassline, while Katie Gerardine O’Neill swings something of a stylistic curveball with some quirky deconstructed jazz.

Also worthy of mention (although in fairness, there isn’t a contribution on here that isn’t, had I the time for a track-by-track rundown) are Aural Aggravation faves Whirling Hall of Knives and Omnibadger, with the former whipping up a mangles mess of glitching distortion and the latter – these buggers get everywhere, having featured on the Rental Yields compilation I covered only last week – mixing up a collage of hums, thunderous drones, and a cut-up melange of feedback and miscellaneous noises to discombobulating effect. Then again, the final two tracks, courtesy of Lush Worker and Lovely Wife respectively bring some mangled reverb-heavy drone-orientated avant-noise and eight and three-quarter minutes of demented, downtuned, downtempo sludgy space rock. Both are truly wonderful, and this is a superlative compilation that perfectly encapsulates the eclecticism of Cruel Nature. It’s also the perfect illustration of why we need these small labels who aren’t driven by commercialism or profits or shareholder value. For disseminating all of this weird and wonderful music – music which often challenges the very idea of music – the world is a much better place.

Fans of the label with absolutely love this, and for those unfamiliar with the label, there couldn’t be a better introduction. Here’s to the next ten years of Cruel Nature.

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Elif Yalvaç – My Heart of Noise

Posted: 9 April 2023 in Albums
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Möller Records – 23rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

It’s clear that while the pandemic is officially over, collectively, we’re still very much coming to terms with it, and its aftermath. Lockdown, in particular, has had a deep psychological impact, on so many. Everyone’s experience was, and is, different, of course. I have friends who almost deny to themselves that it happened, that it was a dream or something, and for some of us, in some respects, it’s as though it never ended. This is how people deal with shock and trauma.

My Heart of Noise is not a pandemic album, a lockdown album, a post-trauma album, but as Elif explains, the album “began with a collection of studio and concert recordings from my travels north before the pandemic. It became like a puzzle: I could hear something special, but also that the pieces didn’t fit together well or feel complete. The breakthrough came in realising that this project was meant to be more about creation than preservation, and that it didn’t need to be a literal document any more. It could still be faithful, but instead to the spirit that inspired this music and my travels in the first place, instead of a particular recording. I created new musical starting points, and invited artists I met on my travels plus others, asking them to choose one to begin to work with together. Some artists incorporated our previous recordings, others set off in a new direction, while I shaped the pieces and found a way to connect them together.”

Recent history, then, is marked not as BC and AD, but BP and AP – before pandemic and after pandemic, and My Heart Of Noise reflects Yalvaç’s attempts to ‘make sense of a noisy world’. And the world is indeed, noisy, and difficult to articulate. There is simply too much noise too much happening all at once. It’s a perpetual sensory overload.

For this, her debut album, Elif Yalvaç involved a number of the people she encountered along the way of her journey, and the title also references this, the way she became the hub in a collective process.

The collaborative aspect means that each track does have a slightly different feel, despite all being centred around eerie ambient soundscapes.

‘Orchestra of Light’, the album’s first track, is a layered composition of dronies and hums and whispers which drift and swirl around some of the mind’s darker recesses. The textures and tones rub against one another and the edges aren’t all smooth, with buzzes and barbed, drilling sounds grating against the grain, meaning there’s a certain friction, a tension, creating a sense of discomfort.

‘Gate Check’, which follows, is softer, but the notes bend and twist and the supple, mellow tones are spun with a sense of the awkward and the uncanny, but nothing so warped as ‘Mielmaisema’, with its collage of human vocalisations and clunking clumps of thuds and thumps Amid whirls and crackles and hums, from which grinding groans of decaying Krautrock creak. It may be less than five minutes in duration but it packs a lot of shiversome strangeness into its short space, in which even chirruping birdsong feels somehow unsettling.

My Heart of Noise is not an overtly collage-based album, but it does assemble many sources and sounds, and often overlaps and overlays them to disquieting effect, and I’m at times reminded of vintage sci-fi and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

‘Cloud Score’ sits somewhere between post-rock and classic drifting ambience, while seven-minute closer ‘Taiga II’ very much feels like the lifting of the clouds and the breaking into light, but at the same time feels like a storm building on the horizon, and ‘Dronasaurus’ indicates that it’s not 100% serious 100% of the time.

My Heart of Noise is a restless work, one which ventures and explores, and never for a moment settles into comfort or conformity. It is not an easy album: whenever things feel like they’re settling into something nice, a cloud of disruption and difficulty will drift over and raise a shiver. You can never really settle or feel at ease with My Heart of Noise – but as a representation off life in the world as is, this is a fair summary. Keep your eyes and ears open: there is always something around the corner.

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Various Artists – Rental Yields Volume Four

Posted: 7 April 2023 in Albums
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Front & Follow – 14th April 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

These are shit times to be alive in Shit Britain, UK Grim: having taken back our borders, this green and pleasant isle is floating in a sea of shit – literal shit – that we’ve pumped out onto our beaches for our domestic holidaymakers to swim in, and we have 16-hour quest to leave the country to go on holiday for those who want to escape for a bit – damn those French bastards for checking the passports off non-EU visitors. But hey, at least we got rid of all of those foreigners working on coffee shops and bars for minimum wage and those doctors from overseas, right?

And yet, while the cost of living is spiralling, major corporations – and not just energy providers – continue to push up prices, not to cover the cost of paying their workers, but to preserve profit margins. It’s not that they can’t afford to increase wages, they simply won’t because capitalism is built on maximising profit. Fuck the staff, look after the shareholders. And of course, rent continues to rocket: landlords, too, need to protect their rental yields

An investigation undertaken in behalf of The Guardian late in 2022 found that ‘asking rents on new listings are up by almost a third since 2019, and some people are facing increases of up to 60%. Prices in 48 council areas are now classed by the Office for National Statistics as unaffordable when compared with average wages’.

The trouble is, capitalism is based on exploitation, and invariably, the wealthy become wealthy and grow their wealth through the exploitation of the less wealthy.

There is an irony here: in nature, the most successful parasites achieve a symbiotic relationship with their host. Under capitalism, the parasites seem determined to kill the host (the poor) on the premise that there will always be more. But then, the same is true of the human relationship with the planet: only, the resources are finite and there isn’t another planet, so we’re fucked.

The accompanying text pulls no punches in explaining the context:

“As we travel further into the year of our overlord 2023, the cold snap that had enveloped the country no longer seems to mock us as we struggle to complete the simplest of daily tasks. With public services at a standstill as the people actually doing the jobs fight tooth and nail for honest payment and work prospects, the rest of us eke out a little more of the heat reserve to keep us going as the ice finally begins to thaw. But the Rental Yields do not stop. The opportunity to make hay while the sun refuses to shine carries on as if no one was suffering. The money continues to be made and the towers in space continue to be built. Dark shadows now dominate the skyline of a city that has been forgotten to the wishes and demands of the few. Some will say this is the progress promised by those in charge of levelling up. But many others will suffer as the bankrolls of the rental yielders grow ever fatter. Still, the spring brings promises of its own.”

What makes life in this endless torrent of shit in which we’re all sinking is that there are some people who aren’t cunts, and who go out of their way to make the quality of life better for others, as well as themselves. The guys who run Front & Follow are among them, as are the many, many artists who have contributed to the Rental Yields compilation series, of which this is the fourth, showcasing tracks by myriad underground acts, remixed by myriads more in an exercise in infinite cross-pollination.

Featuring 26 new tracks and 52 artists, all money raised from this release will go to SPIN (Supporting People in Need), whose purpose is to feed, shelter, clothe and generally support the homeless and people in need of Greater Manchester.

As with the previous instalments, Volume 4, is very much geared towards ambient and more sedate electronica. With so many tracks and such an epic duration, and given the nature of the material, Volume 4 is a wonderfully immersive experience.

The overall quality is, again, excellent – meaning it’s consistently great across the duration and there’s nothing that makes you feel inclined to hit skip. There are, as always some names that leap out for a range of reasons: Kemper Norton. Yol, Omnibadger, The Incidental Crack, Field Lines Cartographer, Sone Institute – but the main point of this is not the names, but the merits of collaboration and collectivism.

Some tracks do stand out, notably ‘Acid Bath’ by BMH vs Lenina for it’s pumping beat, and CuSi Sound vs Robbie Elizee’s ‘I’m Not A Tourist, I Live Here’ for its overt wibbly synth weirdness, for starters. ‘The Enamel Hamper’ by Cahn Ingold Prelog vs The Ephemeral Man is a nine-and-a-half-minute dark psychological drift, while Omnibadger vs Grey Frequency’s ‘Speeding Ground (Part iii)’ is a glitchy, collaged morass of disorientation, with layers of noise, tribal drumming, and disembodied vocals, and ‘Home on the Whalley Range’ by Opium Harlots vs Yellow6 combines dark ambient, murky noise, and a hint of The Cure’s ‘Pornography’ to forge something intensely claustrophobic.

Solo1 vs yol’s ‘Black Spoons And Crosses’ is a collision of ambience and noise that will twist your brain, and the sonorous drones of Laica vs Learn to Swim’s ‘High Yields, Low Prospects’ is a doomy post-punk affair with an agitated drum machine hammering away amidst a sea of murk, and both the title and sound encapsulate the sentiment and the message of the album as a whole.

It is, once again, a triumph, not only artistically, but socially: the Rental Yields series is the epitome of community. And while our government speaks of community while acting in every way to destroy it, promoting division by every means, and social media has become a warzone whereby the goal is achieved, musicians are showing the way. This, this is how we will survive the shit and create a better future.

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Philip Samartzis – Atmospheres and Disturbances

Posted: 2 April 2023 in Albums
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Room40 – 14th March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

You might describe this as a ‘technical’ album. I certainly would. Because much as it’s constructed using field records, the methodology behind it is, quite simply, not that straightforward straightforward. It’s not a guy with a mic wandering around capturing sounds from spaces, that’s for certain.

The accompanying notes explain that ‘Atmospheres and Disturbances registers the changes in high altitude ecologies caused by increasing global temperatures. The composition is based on field work undertaken at the High-Altitude Research Station at Jungfraujoch, Switzerland where for four weeks I deployed various recording devices around the station, and in the surrounding alpine environment to register natural, anthropogenic and geophysical forces. The project provides new encounters of an endangered alpine environment to enhance the way we perceive and engage with notions of place, community, and environmental dissonance.’

This, then, isn’t simple field recording, but environmental work, and the five pieces capture different aspects of environmental and ecological conditions. You may shrug and say ‘meh, weather’, but Atmospheres and Disturbances really captures just how affecting these are on our everyday existence.

It’s a perpetual joke that it’s the favourite topic of conversation for the British, but the fact is, meteorological conditions rule human lives; all agriculture is centred around the weather, our ability to travel is dictated by it. Tell me your mood isn’t affected by it.

Atmospheres and Disturbances is, then, very much a mood album, among other things.

For the most part, the fifteen minute ‘Wind’ which opens the album is subtle and simple, a recording of gusts as they rustle and buffet. It’s a relentless turbulence, a roar like a rough ocean, and it fills your ears and crowds your mind. While a windy day can be an annoyance or a source of irritation, there is always an element – no pun intended – of threat when it comes to winds, of damage even devastation. Around nine minutes in, things are building in volume and force, and it sounds like a barrelling blast hammering at a corrugated iron roof, rain, snapping twigs, and the tension is high as a storm rages. There’s something – not unreasonably – rooted deep in our psyche that finds storms a source of fear or excitement, or a combination of thew two, like a horror movie. Listening to this track, it’s all in there.

‘Stations’ begins with a gurgling trickle of water before a low00flying plane engine sound obliterates it, and cracks and thuds and slams coalesce to create a percussive force amidst fizzing electronic crackles and pops. Metallic crashes call to mind Einstürzende Neubauten, before more dense noise begins to blast and we’re dragged into a mechanical drone, the throbbing heart of the generators and mechanics of the station itself.

The remaining tracks are shorter – less than eight minutes apiece – but are darkly dense, blurring nature and machinery into a droning discomfiture. ‘Melt’ sounds very like the beginning of ‘Stations; but with additional disruptions and disturbances, thunderous roars and torrential rain. And, of course, one can’t help but feel that this is the literal soundtrack to global climate change, and with this comes a further reminder that we are, indeed, doomed.

I don’t say this for drama or hyperbole. It does seem to be pretty much established now: it’s simply a question of how quickly Venice will be sunk and the sea will swallow half of Britain.

It’s likely not Philip Samartzis’ intention that my mood should plummet as the album progresses. There is a sense that for all of its industrial bleakness and whirring machines and roaring engines and howling precipitation, Atmospheres and Disturbances is designed primarily as a documentary work, but, in context, it’s a documentary with a message.

As gusts roar through ‘valley’ in the wake of cracking thunder and drag chanking notes in its wake, the lingering experience is one of disquiet and discomfort.

AA

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KILN – Holo [2022 Remaster]

Posted: 7 March 2023 in Albums
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
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Keplar Keplar – 3rd March 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

However much you think you know about music, there is always more to learn. And so it transpired that Holo was first released in 1998 and is ‘one of those rare records that managed to carve out a niche of its own while also building bridges to variety of genres like Chicago-style post-rock, the ambient mysticism of projects like Rapoon or the music made at the intersection of shoegaze, and electronic music in the late 1990s.’

Where have I been? Living in a cultural vacuum? Hardly. And yet this is my first encounter with KILN. And I’ve not heard of Rapoon and have no knowledge of Chicago-style post-rock either. Chicago house, I’m aware of, but… well, I daresay I’m not alone, and so this reissue off Holo may well prove to provide an introduction, and an entry point to the trio’s supposedly niche-carving brand of ambience.

It’s an album that’s rich in detail and texture, from clanking, clattering tin can percussion and big sweeps of amorphous sonic clouds that wash and crash in waves.

It’s hard to decipher precisely what’s what – is that a didgeridoo or just a digital drone? It’s impossible to unravel the layers and determine the individual sources as glugs and gurgles slide in between soft dulcimer-like notes and easy beats that bubble between all kinds of textures and tones which drift and slide and groan and drone in and out of the ever-shifting fabric of this fascinating album. Guitars and extraneous sounds flit and flicker in and out while instant drums nag and boom. At times it’s new age, at times it’s more tribal, and Holo pushes ambience in numerous directions.

There are segments – interludes, breaks, fragments – where this is a catalogue of challenging source materials melted together. At others, it’s altogether less challenging and simply washes of you in a soft breeze.

For an album that’s so chilled, there is much happening on Holo¸ and as much as it is an album to chill to, first and foremost it’s an album to explore.

AA

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