Another evening of vinyl, vino, beer, snacks and conversation with my friend Jon. Our playlist for the evening is below.
(c) 2023 Further.
JaM Session – March 25 2023
The JaM Sessions
The evening of Saturday February 25 saw the inaugural monthly JaM Session* : my good friend Jon and I meeting up to listen to records, drink wine and beer, eat snacks and talk about the super important stuff that two middle-aged blokes talk about (family, travel, work, music, coffee, IKEA).
Our exclusively vinyl playlist consisted of:
Billy Joel – An Innocent Man (CBS, 1983)
V/A – NME Readers’ Poll Winners ‘84 (NME, 1985) (Bronski Beat, Cocteau Twins, The Smiths, U2)
The Dave Brubeck Quartet – Anything Goes! The Dave Brubeck Quartet Plays Cole Porter (Columbia, 1967)
Simon & Garfunkel – Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits (CBS, 1972)
* JaM – Jon and Mat
(c) 2023 Further.
Veryan / Everyday Dust – Nocturnes
Music for the dead of night. Nocturnes brings together Veryan and Everyday Dust, two Scottish-based electronic musicians, both of whom offer up a twenty-minute piece that evokes the stillness of night and its quiet and often unseen dramas.
Both of these pieces are shrouded in mystery, full of secret pathways and shadowy interventions. On ‘Moonlight Lullabies’, Veryan creates a slowly-advancing piece that progressively evolves toward a dawn-like resolution. Subtle field recordings give this a naturalistic edge, but it’s Veryan’s electro-symphonic arrangement here that gives ‘Moonlight Lullabies’ its sense of calm, ethereal grace – stirring string layers, shimmering synth sounds that flit across your vision, a stunning arpeggio that captures the notion of a slumbering landscape coming back to life. Its denouement is a beautiful, and hopeful, chorus of morning birdsong.
Everyday Dust’s ‘As Bats Fly’ is, in contrast, almost impenetrably dark. For me, this piece evokes that strange and liminal place that only appears in the depths of night, where a sudden wakefulness into an alien silence yields a clamouring of a thousand anxieties, each one jumping up and down and shouting ‘Me, me, me!’ The sounds here have the density and bleakness of Rothko’s paintings for The Four Seasons in New York. Like the seemingly unwavering blocks of colour that Rothko used, closer examination of ‘As Bats Fly’ reveals myriad textures and nuance, layered with enveloping detail.
Nocturnes by Veryan / Everyday Dust was released 9 December 2022 by Dustopian Frequencies.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2023 Further.
Rupert Lally – Backwater / Hacker
Backwater is the second novel from Switzerland-based electronic musician Rupert Lally. Like his debut, Solid State Memories, Backwater is a suspenseful thriller. However, instead of pitching its wares in a dystopian and terrifying near-future like his first book, Backwater occupies the past, present and future. The story temporally criss-crosses all three to follow its lead characters as they try to prevent environmental disaster using the rare natural resources of the Bronze Age past, mysterious archways allowing instantaneous movement between eras.
This is principally a high-speed race against, and through, time, but also an exploration of other, deeper, themes: the bond between father and child, gender inequality, power struggles, corporate villainy, technology and climate change. It is hyper-aware of big issues facing society today but also authentically well-researched about Bronze Age history and culture. A trace of Solid State Memories arrives with a brief trip to the future, where we find Earth ravaged by global warming and profligate resource exploitation, a dirty husk of its former self filled with criminality and hunger.
Backwater is complicated, as most time-travelling tales can be. It both demands and requires complete focus, especially when Lally’s prose moves at an urgent pace through different time zones, left-turns and unexpected events. Like his previous novel, Backwater confirms Lally as an original story-teller drawn to mystery and drama-filled narratives. Dizzying and rewarding.
A sense of mystery also pervades Lally’s latest album, Hacker, released by Spun Out Of Control. Hacker operates in a interstitial time zone somewhere between 1980s movie soundtrack and 1990s Warp label electronica, using brief samples of WarGames, Hackers and other films to supply a plot line of dial-up era computer vigilantism.
Lally’s recent albums have been among the best, and perhaps most accomplished, in his career. Hacker sits comfortably in his latest streak of excellent releases, even if it is the complete antithesis of Wanderweg, the pastoral and bucolic exploration of natural landscape and pathways of his adopted Swiss home that preceded it. Here, the focus is squarely on icicle-sharp melodic tendrils threading their way down phone cables, encouraged and framed by rhythms as focused as an algorithm figuring out the password for a locked military server. Where standout tracks like ‘Hot Swap’ and ‘2600Hz’ are freighted with a vital, relentless energy, ‘Access Denied’ is thwarted but tender, and easily one of the most poignant pieces Lally has ever composed.
Backwater by Rupert Lally is available now at Amazon. Hacker by Rupert Lally was released December 23 2022 by Spun Out Of Control
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
Mister Poppy – Jelly
“Jelly is like time. Jelly fits any mould. It resists the sentimentality of form. Jelly is a state of putrefaction before dust…” – Andrew Poppy
Jelly is the follow-up to Andrew Poppy’s Hoarse Songs from 2021, and finds the composer, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist exploring harsh electronic tonalities that emerge from the shadows of our collective imaginations.
Consisting of five long pieces, Jelly is accompanied by a libretto that shows Poppy the lyricist to be one part Beat stream of consciousness poet, one part experimental philosopher and one part languid observer. Mostly delivered as spoken word verse, Poppy’s words come across as a sort of voyeuristic sequence of clipped words, half-formed sentiments and hyper-visual word patterns. Dramatic, dirty and laced with a Lynchian notion of the fixated gaze, Poppy’s words alight upon grim notions with microscopic detail. Opening track ‘Tattoo / Copy Something That You Love’ might be about the processes involved with getting a tattoo, but it’s delivered with a nightmarish visceral streak that’s as unflinching as the Velvets’ ‘Heroin’ – a different needle, but the same sting.
According to Poppy, these pieces were at least partly inspired by Robert Rauschenberg. That would certainly explain the abrupt edges, collaged approach and his insouciant approach to subtle appropriation. Each piece here hovers round the twelve-minute mark without ever feeling like they have no sense of direction. Each builds slowly and often imperceptibly from base elements – a sonorous bass pulse, a fleeting, fluttering tone – toward some dramatic conclusion, without losing sight of an essential minimalistic ethos that allows empty spaces to be just as prominently featured as Poppy’s finely-crafted loops and dense blocks of electronic sound.
This is an often uncomfortable listen (which I intend as a compliment). There are many times on pieces like the haunting, hyper-sensual ‘Mister Post-Man / No More Fumbling’ where I’m reminded of Coil, especially when a flurry of strings drift into view on top of Poppy’s wiry, undulating electronic sequences. That’s not to suggest that these pieces deal with some sort of dark, brooding, shadowy occultist magick. It’s more the case that they contain a sense of tantalising, enveloping danger, acting like a portal to somewhere other than here, where every moral sensibility is inverted.
If that all seems to jar with a title that feels playful and ridiculous, therein lies Poppy’s compositional sleight of hand – an ability to take something quotidian, atomise it, play with the mess it produces and reassemble it with only the briefest sense of where it came from. A beautifully challenging and intensely-detailed album.
Jelly by Mister Poppy was released October 1 2022 by fieldRadio. Thanks to Philip.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
John Derek Bishop / Inge Weatherhead Breistein – Ro
Ro pairs electronic experimenter John Derek Bishop (Tortusa) with tenor saxophonist Inge Weatherhead Breistein. The album captures the duo performing in five churches along the western coast of their Norwegian homeland, with Bishop manipulating Breistein’s sax in real time using live sampling techniques.
The first thing that grabs you on the opening track, ‘Spurv’, is the rich tendrils of reverb that surround Breistein’s horn. This give his playing a stately and atmospheric quality, even when he launches into a run of more forceful notes instead of the more delicate passages elsewhere. Those sections are at once soothing but also inquisitive, as if he was seeking answers from the furthest corners of the room, his circular breathing technique seeming to gently lift you up out of your most contemplative thoughts.
Bishop’s processing similarly alternates between extremes. At its most subtle, his looping technique creates a chorus of Breisteins, a many-layered orchestra of saxophones, giving a sense of depth and perspective to his playing. Sometimes his contributions exist solely in the background as a microcosm of tiny sounds freighted with almost percussive textures, or as fleeting constructs of dissonant drones; elsewhere, as on the seven-minute title track, his involvement becomes increasingly prominent, especially in the second half, where he contrives to convert Breistein’s playing into a swooning, cinematic piece full of drama and tension. For the most part, at least in the first few pieces, Bishop occupies a terrain of considerable restraint and a generally respectful approach to his manipulations.
Perhaps the most surprising moments come with ‘Lag’ and ‘Stim’, where Bishop feels emboldened to add in a consistent rhythm alongside his partner’s sax. After a number of quiet, softly undulating pieces, those pieces have a crushing, disruptive edge, their rattling textures seeming to shake the pews and foundations out of their holy slumber. ‘Trekk’ begins with a passage of what could be echoing birdsong and clattering percussion, but might well be re-pitched and reassembled sections of Breistein building his horn and warming up. Whatever the source, as the piece progresses it evokes the feel of a slow riverboat cruise through some exotic jungle rather than trawling the cooler waters of Norway’s coastline, acting as a perfect example of this duo at their most inspiring.
Ro by John Derek Bishop and Inge Weatherhead Breistein was released by Punkt Editions / Jazzland on October 21 2022. Thanks to Jim.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
Vanessa Wagner – Royal Albert Hall, London 24.10.2022
At the end of her performance in a small room near the roof of the Royal Albert Hall, Vanessa Wagner leaned back, shook her hands vigorously, and issued a smile and a sigh of relief.
What came before was nothing short of mesmerising. As Wagner tackled complex, undulating, restless pieces by Philip Glass and Harold Budd, her fingers appeared to dance on the keys, sometimes lightly, often with resolute firmness. Between pieces her hands would float gently above the keys, as if contemplating what should come next. They would then fall lightly to the keys and begin their signature dance once more.
It is easy to regard minimalism – the genre of classical music into which Wagner has been perhaps inconveniently placed – as sparse and empty, of the spaces between notes as much as the notes themselves. Watching Wagner play literally thousands and thousands of notes challenges this. There are spaces. There is sparseness. But there is also density and intensity here, vital, energetic passages which are dizzying to watch. Her fingers move as if possessed, delivering lightning fast arpeggios and improbable clusters of notes.
Wagner’s most recent album, Study Of The Invisible, from which tonight’s pieces were taken, used electronic compositions as its starting point, out of which Wagner produced amazingly intricate piano versions. Watching her perform a piece like Suzanne Ciani’s ‘Rain’, wherein she seemed to turn her piano into a stream of liquid, coruscating notes and textures, will stay with this writer forever. A truly transcendent and vital musician, and a truly memorable concert.
Thanks to Dean.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
Various Artists – Fictions
The latest release from Crammed Discs’ reinvigorated Made To Measure series is described as a compendium of ‘wordless fiction’. Curated by Crammed Discs co-founder Marc Hollander (Aksak Maboul), the album compiles eight tailor-made pieces that navigate a path between ambient, soundscapes, adventurous electronics and modern classical stylings.
While the pieces here are new, there is a sense of reverence through the inclusion of a track by Benjamin Lew and Tuxedomoon’s Steven Brown. The pair originally worked together during Made To Measure’s initial years, releasing Douzième Journée: Le Verbe, La Parure, L’Amour in 1982 and its follow-up A Propos D’Un Paysage in 1985, creating mesmerising and innovative clashes between tapes of African music and electronics. After hooking up again at a Made To Measure event in 2019, they found themselves rekindling a creative partnership, and their track – ‘A.D. Sur La Carte’ – is a haunting stew of inquisitive synths and mournful trumpet that together feel amorphous and ephemeral.
Another Made To Measure alumnus is Pascal Gabriel, here appearing in his Stubbleman alias. Gabriel released his critically-acclaimed Mountains And Plains audio travelogue for the label in 2019 and has collaborated with Crammed Discs and Aksak Maboul in the past. His piece finds him working with Norweigian trumpet player Nils Petter Molvær. ‘Ne Pas Se Pencher Au Dehors’ has definite soundtrack credentials, the melodic synth refrain and more direct trumpet playing that comes in after two minutes sounding (to me) like the perfect accompaniment to Michael J. Fox’s final scene in Bright Lights, Big City as he watches the sun rise over Manhattan’s East River and contemplates starting his life afresh.
Elsewhere, Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith delivers a cascade of burbling synths on ‘Waterways’, managing to enrich analogue sounds with an aquatic sense of motion, over which floats a pretty xylophone motif. LA’s Mary Lattimore is an artist that has truly redefined approaches to playing the venerable harp, and her ‘Bird’ offers up a sweet, heart-wrenching duet with electronics that is simultaneously hopeful yet thwarted, as if gazing wistfully on the fleeting nature of existence.
Not that these are all delicate, gentle sonic experiments. French composer and sound artist Félicia Atkinson’s ‘The Sun, Perhaps Three Of Them’ bristles with wild energy, a central white noise drone and what could be a voice is nothing short of chilling, while Christina Vantzou’s tone poem ‘Museum Critic’ use of out-of-place found sound to catch you off guard and knock you out of the meditative state provided by other tracks here.
Taken as a whole, Fictions represents an absorbing, inspiring collection onto which you can write your own personal narrative.
Fictions was released October 14 2022 by Crammed Discs / Made To Measure
Thanks to Jim at Ampersand and PG.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
Seaming To / Leverton Fox – IKLECTIC, London 11.06.2022
Seaming To is a London-born vocalist, sound artist and multi-instrumentalist whose most recent release, ‘Natural Process’, was released earlier this year by Lo Recordings. Her set saw her switch vocal stylings between sibilant sounds, anguished outbursts and warm jazz-like torch singing, while her musical accompaniment veered from gently pulsing synths to mounrful clarinet.
Leverton Fox – a trio of Isambard Khroustaliov, Tim Giles and Alex Bonney – release their new album In The Flicker later this week. Fully improvised, much of the recording was undertaken outside in the Sussex countryside, imbuing its pieces with a delicate, naturalistic sound. The trio approximated that external influence by deploying field recordings alongside a rich, undulating web of electronics, augmentted by Bonney’s pocket trumpet and Giles’ percussion.
IKLECTIC faces an uncertain future following a potentially catastrophic planning application that would see the venue, its neighbouring city farm and park replaced by yet more needless construction. It doesn’t have to be this way. Sign the change.org petition to give IKLECTIC the best chance of continuing its vital, exciting programming.
Thanks to Andrew Plummer and Oli Richards.
(c) 2022 Further.
Espen J. Jörgensen / Rupert Lally – Stillium Partita (archive review)
Ten years ago, Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally released Stillium Partita, heralding the start of a vital distance collaboration which produced a rich seam of albums and projects together while never once managing to go over old ground or repeat themselves.
According to Lally, I was one of the first to pick up on the album, reviewing the release for my Documentary Evidence blog. To commemorate its anniversary, the duo recorded a video about the release, its creation and how they feel about it now. The video also features my thoughts on the album, a decade on. An edited version of my original review appears below the video.
Espen J. Jörgensen, a Norwegian documentary film-maker, fan of circuit-bent instruments and one-time collaborator with Simon Fisher Turner on the Soundescapes album that Mute released in 2011, has launched his own label – No Studio – and crafted an album with Swiss-based ex pat Rupert Lally entitled Stillium Partita. Consisting of seventeen electronic tracks that manage to blend together chilled-out Global Communication-style synthetic ambience with some more harsh, gritty sound sources, Stillium Partita arrived quietly and with little notice via Bandcamp in July 2012.
Like Soundescapes, which arose from a chance encounter, what would become Stillium Partita started with a simple question. “Rupert asked Simon and I if he could do a remix of the track ‘Soundescaped’,” explains Jörgensen by email. “I didn’t know Rupert then, but he had done a remix of something which was included in Simon’s score for The Great White Silence. I thought the ‘Soundescaped’ remix was okay, but I thought Rupert’s personal stuff was way better, and I thought, though I was burnt out and all, that his stuff could be interesting with my stuff.”
At this point, Jörgensen wasn’t sure whether to make any more music. “I was tired and I wanted to quit,” he continues. “But I thought, ‘What the heck. Let’s ask him if he wants to do something,’ and Rupert said yes. It was as simple as that.” As with Soundescapes, tracks for Stillium Partita would start with Jörgensen compiling sounds which would then be sent to Lally to add his own ideas.
Tracks like opener ‘Åpen Sår’, ‘Cobalt Night’ or the majestic ‘Gefangen’ have a sort of glitchy, electronic soundtrack quality to them, full of complex layers, burbling synth patterns, delicate melodies and a rich array of almost industrial noise effects; ‘Skallax’ goes further into the noise oeuvre with a central ‘riff’ that could have come from either a transmitting modem or a ZX Spectrum computer game tape loading up. Despite such ear-challenging interludes, Jörgensen confirms that, unlike on Soundscapes where his sounds were processed to the point of unrecognisability by Simon Fisher Turner, the intention on his collaboration with Lally was to allow for more straightforward electronic sources to be incorporated.
“It doesn’t feel like a bad follow up to Soundescapes, as it’s a very different thing,” explains Jörgensen on the different approach taken through working with Lally. “When I record stuff, I’m kind of finished with it. I send it out, and insist that my collaborator only use the best bits, or the bits they connect with. From there I think it’s best that they do whatever they want to do in that moment; it’s best that they give a 100% on their front, and if it means that they only use a fragment from my recordings, then fine, that’s the best decision. So Rupert’s used my stuff as either background ‘noise’, things which he looped, or things that played the main theme. And I’m glad he did, I’m glad he put so much of himself into this. Simon added a few recordings to Soundescapes, but it was 98% my recordings. I’m sure if Rupert just edited my stuff it would sound different, but I´m glad he added synths, beats and guitars himself. He took my recordings to a different level.”
If Stillium Partita has a major reference point, it would be the electronic soundtracks that emerged most prominently in the Eighties, the interest in which has been rekindled and updated through the likes of Cliff Martinez and his pulsing score for Drive. Icy synth melodies converge with slowly-evolving rhythms and layers of more challenging, Rephlex-esque beats, sounds and textures. Whilst not conceived as a soundtrack at all, while listening to pieces like the expansive and ethereal ‘What’s The Film In Your Head?’ or the menacing, deep ‘Structure & Analysis’, you do find yourself wondering how these sounds might interact with scenes in some imaginary movie.
Jörgensen is emphatic that there wasn’t a plan at all for how these tracks ended up. “I approached Rupert because his take on music is very different from Simon’s. Lally’s stuff was more synth-driven. I’m not going to say that Rupert belongs to a category, but he’s this guy who knows a lot about programs and so on, plus is good at playing and arranging. He uses a lot of soft synths and I wanted to have a contrast to my stuff, which can be very harsh or organic, sound-wise. Rupert felt that the music was genre-less, though I think the album hat tips to certain sounds and ideas. That´s Lally´s fault since he actually knows how to play. But I like it. It has a great contrast sound-wise.”
As was the case when recording Soundescapes with Simon Fisher Turner, Jörgensen and Lally have never actually met. “Ironically, Simon and I finally met at the Great White Silence live performance here in Norway, which was after Soundescapes was made,” says Jörgensen. “We said that we could only work together because there was a distance, and now that we’ve met there can’t be another collaboration. Luckily, I haven’t met Rupert which means that there might be another release or two to come.”
Stillium Partita by Espen J. Jörgensen and Rupert Lally was released 15 July 2012.
Words: Mat Smith
(c) 2022 Further.
An earlier version of this reviewed appeared on Documentary Evidence in 2012
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