Claire M Singer – Further.

BOWING – NORTH STANDING (Downstream Records)

A collection of 13 ambient moments, Bowing’s North Standing eschews the casually drifting pads and gauzy textures of most music in the genre. Often constructed with expressive cycles of pretty melodies in the foreground, pieces like ‘Sway Of The Rushes’ and ‘Tomorrow Will Bring’ are languid, enveloping and moving. A jazzy momentum and looseness infiltrates the latter, giving the piece a questing, enquiring mystique. Released 17 July 2023.

CLAIRE M SINGER – SAOR (Touch)

Influenced by trekking through the Cairngorm region of northern Scotland and an 1872 pipe organ installed in a church in Forgue, Aberdeenshire, Saor finds Claire M Singer reflecting on the topography of her homeland, as well as ruminating on existence itself. Many of Singer’s ancestors are buried at the church in Forgue, and the vast Cairngorms expanse would be largely unaltered from when they were alive. That gives these pieces the notion of things staying the same, but at the same time always changing. This is expressed in beautiful, thought-provoking pieces like ‘Cairn Toul’, through long, unmoving held notes on the organ over which more fluid moments are laid. The album’s 25-minute title track is nothing short of mesmerising, its organ drones rising gracefully like one of the mountains and plateauing with hopeful, joyous interventions. Singer is currently raising funds to help the restoration of the Henry Willis organ in the Union Chapel In Islington, which is featured on Saor – to donate, go here. Thanks to Mike and Zoe. Released November 3 2023.

ASTRÏD – ALWAYS DIGGING THE SAME HOLE (False Walls)

French quartet Astrïd is comprised of Vanina Andréani (violin, piano), Yvan Ros (drums, percussion, harmonium, metallophone), Cyril Secq (guitars, piano, synth, harmonium, percussion, metallophone) and Guillaume Wickel (clarinet, percussion). Their new album for the False Walls imprint is stunningly beautiful, a perfect accompaniment for frozen days. Opening piece ‘Talking People’ is plaintive and contemplative, opening with Wickel’s expressive yet subtle clarinet and a particularly introspective piano motif from Andréani. As the piece builds, with unobtrusive percussion, violin and tender guitar, ‘Talking People’ takes on a gently towering dimension, full of uncertain emotion. Subtly majestic, the five pieces on Always Digging The Same Hole act as an emotional salve, like wrapping yourself in the comfort of your favourite blanket. Mesmerising and beguiling. Released November 10 2023.

TAPE LOOP ORCHESTRA – ONDE SINUSOÏDALE ET BANDE MAGNÉTIQUE (Quiet Details)

Tape Loop Orchestra is an alias of Andrew Hargreaves (lately of The Mistys). For his contribution to the always beatific Quiet Details label, his sound palette was restrained to an oscillator, a tape machine and minimal effects. That set-up gives the three long pieces here a stillness and fragility. Central overlapping tones build and coalesce slowly, fringed by subtle additions and gentle interventions, creating an effect not dissimilar to Claire M Singer’s organ preparations on Saor (above). The entire Quiet Details series has a delicate sparseness, but Hargreaves’ Onde Sinusoïdale Et Bande Magnétique is probably the most ephemeral release yet. Released November 15 2023.

AMON RA COLLECTIVE – AT THE CENTRE OF EVERYTHING (Lamplight Social Records)

Amon Ra Collective are an ensemble comprising over 20 members, all of whom are jazz students at Leeds Conservatoire. Their debut album is ostensibly a astro-spiritual collection, but is not restrained by any particular genre boundary. The centre of the album is occupied by a wonderfully sprawl of experimentation, culminating in the aptly-named ‘Explorations’, where bleeping synths, treacly bass, atonal reverberating horns and intense percussion suggest a restless, inquisitive spirit. Concluding track ‘Astro Funk’ starts out in a joyous, danceable frame of mind before oscillating rapidly into territory somewhere between 1970s German rock and sound art. Released November 24 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

Touch: Isolation. Photograph by Jon Wozencroft.

As things like self-isolation and social distancing became phrases and concepts the majority of the world has quickly become accustomed to, it’s been the art of the hasty pivot that has characterised lockdown: businesses that relied on face-to-face interactions suddenly thrust themselves into the hitherto unknown territory of digital engagement, restaurants suddenly offered take-out where they previously relied on seated diners, wholesale retailers suddenly became direct-to-customer operations; we have moved from the need to see, touch and meet people to drinking espresso and gin over video conference, walking in the middle of the road to bypass another pedestrian walking toward you, and following authoritarian one-way systems around supermarkets. None of this we could have conceived of a few months ago, yet we are now all – mostly – suddenly expert.

The way we consume and enjoy music was almost immediately disrupted by the measures governments put in place. Gigs and festivals were cancelled; release dates got put back; pressing plants shut down; critical calendar entries like Record Store Day were postponed; venues were almost immediately shuttered. These are existential events for artists, bands, labels, designers and the countless individuals and businesses that support the music industry.

In response, all manner of COVID-19 projects quickly sprang up: compilation releases to support frontline essential workers; isolation playlists were hastily assembled, often comprising lots of soothing ambient music; live-streamed solo bedroom gigs delivered your favourite artist into your front room; noodling Soundcloud tracks appeared with high velocity, the product of idle fingers, a need for expression, boredom and the advantage of a broadband connection.

One very special and highly distinctive project to emerge from this is Touch: Isolation, announced last week by Touch. “The pack of COVID-19 cards came down quite quickly, and we wanted to respond to some immediate problems many of our artists were experiencing,” says Jon Wozencroft, who founded the label 38 years ago, later bringing in Mike Harding to work with him.

Available through Bandcamp for a minimum £20 subscription, all of which is divided up among its contributors, Touch: Isolation consists of at least twenty tracks from Touch artists, each one mastered by Denis Blackham – that, in itself, an example of the label’s dependable obsession with quality presentation despite the speed with which the project was conceived and realised. At the time of writing, releases have already come through from Jana Winderen, Chris Watson, Bana Haffar, Mark Van Hoen and Richard Chartier with tracks incoming from Howlround, Claire M Singer, Fennesz, Oren Ambarchi, Philip Jeck, Carl Michael von Hausswolff and others who have issued released material through Touch.

chriswatson_gobabeb — Touch: Isolation – Chris Watson ‘Gobabeb’. Photograph by Jon Wozencroft.

“By the nature of what we do, it’s quite hand-to-mouth,” Wozencroft continues. “For Mike and I, the project is also a declaration of intent in a personal sense because we’ve both been experiencing some highs and lows in recent months.” Those lows are self-evident and are common to most of us, yet uniquely personalised to our own lives; the Touch highs include recent releases like Eleh’s brilliant Living Space, nurturing new artists on the label and Hildur Gudnadottir‘s success at the Oscars. Wozencroft justifiably calls it the “culmination of years of collaboration and shared ambition”. The idea of Touch going on hiatus just because normal life has been paused would thus have been a terrible, terrible notion.

“Between Mike and I it was kind of a Eureka decision to step ahead and do this,” he continues. “In effect, we pressed the switch in the third week of March and in no time we had a strong response from almost everyone we asked.”

A critical signifier of Touch has always been Wozencroft’s photographic accompaniment to the imprint’s releases, which presented a challenge for Touch: Isolation. “I had to think hard about how the Isolation series could be given a visual counterpoint, given the lockdown restriction,” he says. The result is a series of photographs of trees, leaves, pools, each one of something strangely quotidian yet now, thanks to the lockdown, mostly off limits; each one was taken on March 25 on Hampstead Heath’s West Heath and Golder’s Hill areas, just as the lockdown began.

“I’d been going to Hampstead Heath since being a teenager growing up in North London,” Wozencroft continues. “It was always a special trip, and so it was a challenge to make this familiar space reflect a certain unreality; the suspended state of beauty in the full gleam of the recent sunshine. But also its rarity and rawness as an urban environment in the current conditions. I was also remembering the damage of the Great Storm of 1987 – seeing the evidence of regeneration and a landscape transformed, and that sense of faith in the future.

“For me,” he concludes, “it’s about hope and detail, the hidden and its brilliance.”

Support Touch: Isolation at touchisolation.bandcamp.com

Thanks to Jon, Mike and Philip.

Interview: Mat Smith