Thin Places by Blue Sky Research is another excellent release on the wonderful and illustrious Hippocamp netlabel. Even the cover is excellent, and it also fits the music well: its overall form is elegant, majestic and endless. I’ve been listening to Thin Places for days with a feeling of deep serenity - occasionally my interest piques and I note down a characteristic I enjoy, then it enters my subconscious again.
There’s tracks like Kingdom Blue Sky, AV Output Intro and Sundra that feel gracious and sad, but optimistic. Others are more upbeat, like Jasmine, Thin Places (Bad Format Remix) and Fletcher Moss have percussion and cut up recordings of people and places. Firth of Tay Extended feels like the soundtrack to a surrealist’s nature documentary, with backwards sounds and acoustic guitar sounds tumbling gracefully.
Blue Sky Research is also the guy who runs Hippocamp, and has many more releases available on their website. I seriously can’t recommend Thin Places enough, and it prompted me to read more about Hippocamp, as I’ve been happily downloading the label’s music for some time without really knowing anything about them. It turns out they’re based in Manchester (England), and have a monthly live event. A bit too far from London, but still, if I’m ever up North I’ll be sure to pay a visit.
Comments Off
Fah - Halftone Bin released on Ronin, is eight tracks of high-quality ambient compositions, well-suited to late night hacking sessions. ‘Two’, in particular, uses delays to create a hypnotic beat that pulses seductively (personally, this brings back teenage memories of when I got my first multi-effects pedal and found out I could use my guitar to make more than just grunge).
A few of the tracks on Halftone Bin are simple chord progressions or melodies, surrounded by strange sounds. ‘Three’ is an example of this, where a delicious synth sound plays over what sounds like wind recordings and crumpled paper. Other tracks, like Hutt, contain rhythms and occasionally demented melodies, giving a darker feeling than the melancholic ambience of Three.
The first track, Tape, sounds oddly out of place, with reverb-soaked drums that will probably remind many of Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works. Although, I find this point interesting - people releasing music on netlabels are able to release work that’s not necessarily going to be commercially successful, despite a lot of people actually wanting to hear things like this.
The last track, ‘Gradient’, is more subtle than the others, centering around a simple chord progression and fairly stereotypical ambient pad sounds. However, Gradient works well, and it’s a good way to lead you back into reality if you’ve meditated too deeply on the Halftone Bin.
Comments Off
Grandma - Tiny Fashion is another EP by the extraordinary Connor Kirby-Long (released on Camomille), who proves yet again to have a natural flare and sensitive ear for the unusual and beautiful.
Each track is short, and sweet. Mexico sounds a lot like recent American folk-inspired electronica, although the gentle distortion at the start reminds me of Boards of Canada (similar timbres can be heard bouncing along in Burgerburgerburger!). Connor’s vocals sound mature for his age - the lyrics are poetic and fit in well with the overall sound. When listening to Tiny Fashion consecutively, you may find Burgerburgerburger! and Mexico blending into each other, as if Connor has intentionally structured this EP to appear as a whole rather than a selection of tracks or ideas. Despite many elements of Connor’s sound having recongisable influences, he leaves his own fingerprint behind.
The cover has people chatting on IRC, which amused me, seeing as I’m a long-time IRC user. It’s a shame Connor isn’t aware of our beloved, humorous and slightly edgy ASCII art! Come and say hello, server: rubbish.ing.me.uk, channel: #merk.
Comments Off
Yannis Kyriakides is quite a prolific character in the realm of netlabels, and Highly Coloured Places, released on Entity, is a mind-blowing example of his work. This is an hour-long journey consisting of five tracks through a fantasy geography invented by Kyriakides, taking you through many shifting locales, occasionally surreal but mostly exotic.
The longest track, Sea Song, is 21 minutes, but is varied and far from repetitive. You can hear violins, sometimes giving rise to images of an Eastern landscape, but this isn’t dwelled on for long, as Kyriakides whisks us off to another place as soon as we can identify recognisable elements. Terra Incognita’s string sounds seem ironic to me, and are churned up violently by a sea of marching and sweeping noise.
The track names share names with places in reality, such as The Polar Grill (in Greenland), and Kyriakides uses field recordings on this release, so I assume they were taken from the places in the track names. Yet Kyriakides has somehow filled the world these recording reflect with his own imaginings and observations, pulling and twisting the phonographic recordings into his abstract domain.
If you enjoy listening to this, Kyriakides also runs a netlabel called Unsounds, featuring artists producing similar electro-acoustic music. By the way, isn’t the cover art beautiful?
Comments Off
When I started listening to Televishnu - Mantenna on Polygon, I thought I might be in for something similar to Team Doyobi’s Choose Your Own Adventure, since Pritty sounds a lot like that kind of mix of old c64/Spectrum/videogame sounds and more modern electronic music. Mantenna quickly diverges, however, and generally sticks to catchy analog-sounding riffs with occasionally unpredictable rhythm programming.
There are also slow, meandering tracks like Grasshoper and Aye-aye. Aye-aye even has 80’s style gated reverb on the drums, with sampled drums fluttering around in the background, making the track feel more dramatic. There’s other original and professional touches in Mantenna, and you can download the whole thing here.
Comments Off
I noticed Jonathan Hughes has made another Fluidities bonus track available for download here. This piece was created with Naryan Padmanabha, and is called Namfuaal. Naryan plays hammered dulcimer and electronic tamboura on this track, and the results have been processed in various ways to produce a deeply immersive ambient piece. I really love the dulcimer, and it’s used much more subtly here than most electroacoustic music I’ve heard.
Comments Off
Rui Gato - Chaosmos, released on Test Tube, is a collection of three tracks originally intended for an art venue last year. Each track adds to the complexity of the previous, making the first feel somehow pure. It’s as if the cosmos Gato is describing is awakening gently out of innocence, rather than a climatic big bang.
M1 has hidden depths that reveal themselves at louder volumes; there’s subtitles in the reverberations in the background, so that the distracting drone belies the complexity of the piece. Gradually, Gato introduces changes to the drone which appear to indicate a climax but then are rudely interrupted by the transition to M2 Extended. M2, with its ice-like sounds and bubbling parodies of strings that change chords in quite a lively manner, is very different from M1. For some reason, the complimentary sounds in M2 sound as if the laws of physics are being defied.
M3 Final crunches its way through several iterations, adding new elements, until it evens out into a house/dub-like progression. Gato uses effects here, mangling and filtering the sounds artfully, until there’s space to develop the harmonies more fully towards the end.
Despite each track being quite different, the description on Test Tube urges us to contemplate the entire EP as a whole. I found this release by accident on archive.org, but I’m enjoying it immensely and it’s urged me to listen to Rui Gato’s CD, Elastic Void.
Update: I originally thought that abrupt ending was on purpose, but apparently not! M1 was slightly broken, and there’s a complete version up now. I liked the mistake though, which reminds me of the aesthetics of accidents section in Iman Moradi’s glitch aesthetics paper.
Comments Off
I found Todd Christopher - Blue and Shell on the Ambient mailing list:
free album download (mp3s)
created summer/fall 2004 with fender jazz bass, pedals (bass crybaby, boss ds-1, guyatone md3, boss rc-20, boss rv-3), and ableton live 4.0 on a mac running osX.
The first track, Melting Snow, mixes percussive sounds from his bass and ambient soundscapes to produce something that sounds like the more subtle end of the post-rock spectrum, but also experimental electronica. Melodically, the track reaches a climax, and then explores more liquid-sounding textural territory towards the end.
The second track, Grandy, is a lot simpler, and reminds me of EBow sounds. Other tracks feature this kind of subtle and melancholic material, with huge reverberating distortion reminding me of My Bloody Valentine. Prettyfinal has a familiar-sounding melody played on Todd’s bass, and cold-sounding synthesised washes in the background.
Blue and Shell is an odd blend of strictly ambient music and post-rock, and Todd’s reliance on the bass as a source of timbre is impressive and welcomely expressive. Make sure you check out his website for videos and photos, and try listening to Melting Snow if you’re finding it hard to appreciate a dreary winter’s day.
Comments Off
Drone - Désarticulation is out on Hippocamp, featuring a collection of their work from the last 3 years and beautiful vocals by Ninel Cam, a Turkish singer. The first track, Obsession, is absolutely beautiful. The combination of Ninel’s voice and the strings creates a feeling of dry heat, like the feeling you get late in a summer day when the sun isn’t quite ready to go down and the wind is gently sweeping the heat off the land.
Other tracks, such as Inertie, American Girls and Pixels feel whimsical and occasionally amusing, but are infused with darker elements. In Latence, Elle s’appelle comment?, Twin Sisters and Les Villes trajectoires, Drone use gentle noise and field recordings to great effect. Common sounds from different places are combined, making you feel as if you’re in between places, contrasting next to Obsession and Le souffle, which somehow sound in between times.
The strongest track on the album is Obsession, yet there’s quite diverse material on Désarticulation, which takes a lot of listening to begin to appreciate.
Comments Off
Glitch Aesthetics by Iman Moradi is the first formal study of glitch art that I’ve read. Moradi discusses glitch aesthetics, motivations and themes, as well as the relationship between glitch art and other movements and artists, such as Seurat, Mondrian and cubism.
“Leonardo Da Vinci insisted that ‘that painter who has no doubts will achieve little’, and he advised artists to seek out inspirations for their paintings in the stains on walls”
There’s also a formal discussion of the art of accidents, computational aesthetics and the fetishism of glitch art. In summarising the techniques used, the following techniques are explored:
- Replication/repetition
- Linearity
- Fragmentation
- Complexity
Those of you who are interested in this kind of art will appreciate the overview of prominent artists in the field. including Beflix who is helping Moradi create a book on the subject. This paper and the forthcoming book could be an excellent resource for artists and students who wish to explore this field academically, and Moradi states in the conclusion that there needs to be more formal discussion of glitch art.
I created the image above by damaging jpeg files containing an image of the Amiga’s boot screen, after reading some of the techniques used by artists in this paper.
Comments Off