Posts Tagged ‘EMOM’

Ashley Sagar – M/A/R/R/S tools

Posted: 18 May 2025 in Albums, Reviews
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3rd February 2025

Christopher Nosnibor

This one may have started at the beginning of the year, but is an open-ended project which has been added to over the subsequent months, meaning that there’s more to absorb now than there was previously, and some five months in, it seems like a reasonable point to take stock of the progress so far. Although released under his Sunday name and therefore perhaps not a release that leaps out, Ash Sagar has been operating as Meanwoood Audio for a while, as well as being involved in numerous Leeds / York based collaborative works, notably The Wharf Street Galaxy Band and Neuschlafen, and perhaps notably the one-off experimental improv collective Beep Beep Lettuce, who will one day be hailed as a 21st century Big in Japan or Immaculate Consumptive. Well, we can but hope.

M/A/R/R/S tools is one of those albums that could only ever exist in the digital age, consisting as it does of some fourteen experimental pieces with a running time of around a hundred and eighty-five minutes. Yes, that’s over three hours – even longer than recent sprawling Swans releases.

Sagar’s notes are succinct – or scant, depending on your perspective – summarising M/A/R/R/S tools as ‘Audio recording from tests of building tools in SuperCollider for Meanwood Audio Recording & Research Services {"M/A/R/R/S"}.

My instinct is – because my instinct is dictated by my brain, which is brimming with stupid nonsense and is excessively prone to misfired associations – is to ‘pump up the volume’. But this proves to be rather unwise, as the release contains an endless stream of unsettling discordant rumbling, hovering hums, and fizzing extranea which is just around the tinnitus range.

‘Audio_25_01_20_1’ makes me feel tense: it reminds me of a ‘breather’ in a Teams call – there’s always one freak who positions their unmuted mic right in front of their open, gasping mouth, and the sound is like a gale on a mountain top.

Dripping, dropping, dribbling electronic abstractions dominate, with microtonal bibblings running on and on, sounds like twanging elastic bands and scratches and scrapes, atonal strings and R2D2 malfunctioning. I recall running my nails along an egg-slicer as a child. It’s a memory I had largely forgotten until hearing this remined me. M/A/R/R/S tools offers up an oddball array of sounds, and it feels random in the extreme. Oftentimes, it’s barely there, or it’s nothing more than the rumble of passing traffic or a distant radio. Occasionally, there are stuttering drums. Other times, there is not much at all.

This is a work which has been a long time in development: there are two full live sets, recorded five years apart, with a set recorded in London sitting at the midpoint, and another live set, recorded in Leeds, drawing the curtain on this colossal release. The fifteen-minute London set is a challenging work, which confirms what anyone who has seen Ash live will already know, and that’s that he in unafraid to test an audience with monotonous, woozy oops which are as uneasy on the intestines as they are on the ears. This is reinforced by the thunder-filled, sample riven discomfort of the Leeds set – something that his set in Leeds just this last weekend extended still further. Distorted, heavily reverbed and practically impenetrable vocals spitting out randomly sequenced words cut through the speakers, and it’s almost too much, too disorientation. A derangement of the senses. Both John Cage and Brion Gysin would have been proud. It’s dark and murky, and droning notes quaver in the background.

M/A/R/R/S tools is not an easy listen, not only on account of its duration. Despite its superficial minimalism, there is a lot going on. And none of it is kind, comfortable, or particularly easy on the ear or mind.

AA

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Andy & Grace – Reunited

Posted: 29 September 2023 in Albums
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Sinners Music – 30th September 2023

Christopher Nosnibor

As the album’s title suggests, this is not Andy & Grace’s first work together, but does come after some time since their last collaboration. By ‘some time,’ I mean a long time. Like two decades long. As the bio which accompanies the album outlines, they first met in the late 1990s ‘as founding members of the ambient chillout band Chillage People’, under which moniker they played ‘long, improvised sets in sweaty chill-out rooms in gloomy Sheffield clubs’ and resulted in the album Solid Water, released in 2001.

There’s much of the intervening time unaccounted for, presumably because life. So many creatives in all media seem to suddenly disappear from view. Work, families, and ordinary everyday adult pursuits take over and there simply isn’t the time or the energy. Some accept this comfortably, even embrace it, others wrestle with the opposing forces of creative juices fermenting and slowly gnawing at their guts while enduring.

Whatever the reason for the gap in his musical CV, recent year have seen Andy becoming a part of the Electronic Music Open Mic (EMOM) movement, appearing at venues around the North of England playing with his modular synthesiser. This is where Sinner Records come in: Ian J Cole is also a face on the EMOM circuit, a musician in his own right, who recently established Sinners Records. And let’s not forget Grace – that’s Grace Griffin, who at the time of joining Chillage People, was already a highly sought-after live sound engineer, working with some of the biggest names in the music business.

‘You name them and it’s a fair bet that Grace will have worked with them,’ says the bio. On top of that, and being ‘an accomplished musician with a gift for crafting fascinating textures and grooves, she is also an adept photographer and video editor.’

She’s remained engaged in music. There may be a worry that after twenty years and their lives having taken such different trajectories, reconvening would bee awkward, but the clue is in the title, really: Reunited speaks of coming together, coming home and picking up where you left off. And listening to Reunited, for all its crazy crossover and stylistic divergences, it feels like an album that has been dying to get made, whether they knew if or not before they started work on it.

Over the span of thirteen pieces, the pair explore a host of soundscapes and varying moods, all incredibly rich in atmosphere, shifting constantly. The first of these, ‘Deady Long Legs’ transitions from shifting sands of electronic noise to somewhat unsettling echo-drenched ambience, eerie chimes and shooting stars spinning off course against a warping backdrop of slow-melting vintage synth tones and shuffling groundworks, and there’s a lot going on here. It’s an album dominated by rippling waves and space-age spins, and there are some tracks which find the pair go full dance – or EBM or EDM or whatever it is in America. The beats aren’t often dominant, but they are frequently driving. At times, the tones are brittle, reducing from full range to clipped, tight compressions mingling with undulating synths forge cinematic techno.

There are moments of expansive tranquillity, such as ‘Sad Major’, and this is an album that places tone and texture to the fore in terms of the way the sounds are sculpted into songs. It’s immersive stuff, and on a number of occasions I find myself zone out, not through boredom but the music enveloping my mind and body. And perhaps some tiredness, too. But ‘Forty Winks’ a bleepy wakeup, and one suspects the title is a reference to Josh Wink.

Reunited is the sound of old friends coming together and finding they still have an intuitive connection. There are some neat grooves – like the buoyant almost funk-tinged workout of ‘Groovy Machine’ and the stuttering harder beats of the mellow ‘Mallets of Entanglement’, and there are elements of playfulness in evidence, as on the skittering ‘Wasted in Da House’ and the irreverently-titled ‘When A Seagull Ate My Icecream’ – which reminds me of the time a giant cockerel nicked my baguette, but that’s a story for another time.

Reunited is a cohesive work which strolls through numerous different terrains of electronica, and shifts from light to dark, but mostly ambulates the spaces in between in fine style.

AA

Andy _ Grace Cover

Mho – Blueprint

Posted: 30 April 2023 in Albums
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Sinners Music Records – 15th May 2023

On reviewing the debut EP by Fashion Tips recently, I commented that the northern noise ‘scene’ was, in effect, more of a community. I suppose this is something that is true of many more niche corners of the musical world, and it’s certainly true of the electronic scene, particularly that which has grown up around the EMOM (Electronic Music Open Mic) nights that take place around the country as a platform for all strains of all things electronic based (several of which I’ve reviewed, and a few of which I’ve performed at). These nights are a broad church, and have not only welcomed me, but opened the doors for myriad collaborations, as well as providing a safe space for testing stuff out as well as an opportunity for seasoned performers and novices alike to connect with an accommodating audience, and this release comes courtesy of Sinners Music Records, established by Ian J Cole, another face familiar to attendees of the York EMOM nights, who also streams the Audiophile radio podcast showcasing weird and wonderful exploratory electronica.

Mho – that’s ohm backwards, and pronounced ‘mo’ – is the musical vehicle of Dave Walker, who’s been a regular face at the EMOM scene, and has become established as being instantly recognisable for his stagewear, with neon-splatter t-shirt and hat. Obviously, these visual props don’t translate to the recordings, which must stand on their own merits – and they very much do.

Over the course of ten tracks, Walker showcases a broad span of styles and sounds, and the compositions are all accomplished and considered. As his bio states, he ‘began his foray into making electronic music at school when he built a Transcendent 2000 synthesiser and a ETI String Synth, as the Polymoog synth cost as much as a house back then’. He’s since switched to more contemporary kit, but his years of experience have led to a nuanced approach to musicmaking: there’s a lot of detail, but nothing’s overdone. Every drop, every time the beats bang back in, every layer, every stutter, every new sound and sample, is perfectly placed – but not in such a way that the precision leads to sterility. Walker’s tunes flow with a rare naturalness, and there are no jarring jolts or awkward lurches between segments.

Predominantly, these pieces are built around conventional piano sounds and broad strokes of synth which fill out broad spaces, and there’s a lot of analogue-style pulsations, too, cut from the cloth of Mike Oldfield and Tangerine Dream.

There’s something familiar that I just can’t quite place about the melody of ‘Nie Rozumiem’ (which will undoubtedly annoy me for days), and elsewhere, ‘Chorale’ brings ambience with low-key beats that washes along nicely, being largely undemanding but pleasant. ‘Eternal’ brings a hint of Eastern promise and a vaguely operatic vocal carried on a soft breeze of shuffling beats and rippling piano.

‘Contact’ and ‘Moon’ appear to be thematically linked, the former bursting with samples and laser-beam bleeps, and it does have quite an 80s feel to it. This, though, is true of much contemporary electronic music which isn’t overtly dance – or EDM and the encroaching Americanism would have it. The latter is a seven—minute sonic exploration that expands through time and space with crackling radio transmissions from the lunar landing of 69.

‘Take it Easy’ is pure 80s retro tootling melting into 90s euphoric trance, and while well-executed, it’s perhaps the least engaging or enticing tracks on the album, but it’s but a brief weakness in an otherwise solid album which concludes with the surprisingly light and accessible spin of ‘I Am With You’ which practically skips along.

With EMOM sets providing just ten to fifteen minutes for artists to showcase their style (these nights are absolutely bloody packed, to the point that despite being ‘open mic’, all slots are usually taken a full month in advance), it’s good to hear the full span of the elements which feature in an Mho set, and even better to hear that Mho has the material for not only a longer set, but a full album which is at once diverse and cohesive.

AA

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