Tag: Field recordings

Shots: Audio Obscura / Marco Avitabile / Holdec / Rupert Lally

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AUDIO OBSCURA – ÉLIANE RADIGUE TRIBUTE

Norfolk-based Neil Stringfellow (Audio Obscura) made this tribute to French electronic music pioneer available upon her sad passing earlier this year. At the time she left us, I had been making enquiries about interviewing her for Electronic Sound, but was well aware that her appetite to do such an interview as she approached her mid-nineties was remote. These two long-form pieces were only available briefly, and only accessible to Stringfellow’s Bandcamp subscribers. In the message that accompanied their release, he spoke about how inspirational Radigue was to him (after a work colleague handed him a CDr of her music in 2004), and how her passing prompted him to spontaneously create these pieces from the same source sounds. They lean into Radigue’s trademark soft drone style; deeply-layered, consciously-structured, never static, always moving, forever evolving (yet ever-so-gently). The first piece focuses its attention on the drones alone, while the second piece adds an emotive, exceptionally sparse piano motif that delivers a melodic offset to the undulating long tones that sit beneath it. A poignant and reverential tribute. Released February 26 2026.

MACRO AVITABILE – NOW TRANSITIONING

I was fortunate enough to hear this album a long time before it was released, and consequently I feel highly connected to the latest collection from Italian guitarist Marco Avitabile. Fully improvised, it finds Avitabile at his most introspective and thoughtful, his playing delivered under the weight of profound emotions. On the first piece, ‘Waiting For Something Good To Happen’, he introduces a melodic motif which appears, in often dislocated form, throughout the pieces here. In its opening appearance, it is presented as anticipatory and expectant but also realistic, as if suggesting that he knows the path ahead if far from certain. So it is that on ‘Broke Up And Cried’, the melody is subjected to angry distortion that renders it almost unrecognisable. The centrepiece of this collection is ‘Let The Children Play!’, which is languid and serene, evoking the carefree lives we enjoy as children, while a sudden pivot into graceful, elegiac textures is nothing short of devastating. Released March 20 2026

https://marcoavitabile.bandcamp.com/album/now-transitioning

 

HOLODEC – TRU FOLK

On first listen, the new album from LA-based Holodec (aka Jieh) is a collection of drifting, beat-less gravity-free ambient pieces, rich in textural tapestries and often fleetingly melodic. In his description of TRU FOLK, Jieh makes a seasoned case for how these pieces connect to folk music, but it is not obvious, at least initially, how that link manifests itself. Each of these pieces incorporates field recordings made in various locations across California and Taiwan. Most ambient music that embraces field recordings as situational devices goes for naturalistic sounds, and there is definitely some of that in evidence here, particularly on the meditative ‘quiet water, loud water’.

Jieh’s field recording focus is more squarely placed on overheard conversations, snatches of dialogue, the naïve joy of children playing, disagreements and idle chit-chat, all dropped in almost indiscriminately alongside his soft, enveloping compositions. When your attention rests on these human interactions, that’s when Jieh’s idiosyncratic view of this being a uniquely progressive and electronic form of folk music makes sense. Folk music has always been about the stories of people, and that’s ultimately what we realise we are hearing here. Released April 17 2026 by Phantom Limb.

https://holodec.bandcamp.com/album/tru-folk

RUPERT LALLY – WARM COMPUTERS

 I’ve known Swiss-based electronic composer Rupert Lally for a long time now. I’ve followed his music, I’ve interviewed him, I’ve collaborated with him and I’ve released two of his albums through Mortality Tables. I like to think I’ve got a pretty good handle on his music. Warm Computers, his latest release, proves that familiarity doesn’t always afford a complete understanding of where an artist might decide to take their music.

 This is Lally at his most objectively and surprisingly rhythmic, eschewing his recent forays into modular improvisation in favour of an electronic dance music which leans into a sort of late-80s / early-90s vibe. ‘You Gotta Be Respectful’ drills into a defiant electro style, filled with hard-hitting rhythms and a wild, attention-grabbing bass line. Elsewhere, Lally hitches resolute beats to emotive textures and the effortless melodic nous which his years spent researching overlooked film soundtracks has informed. ‘Corrupted’ has a dirty, post-hardcore edge, while ‘Selected Ambient Postcard’ nods toward the Aphex Twin album of a similar name. An exciting departure by Lally toward an under-explored zone in his music that I truly hope he continues to investigate. Released May 1 2026.

https://rupertlally.bandcamp.com/album/warm-computers

Temporary Bodies – Transformations In K

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Utopian Mechanics is a Preston-based imprint fronted by Mike Warburton, who operates under the Temporary Bodies alias. For Transformations In K, Warburton used field recordings made around his Lancashire base, adding these to improvised sound structures that waft gently between brooding dark ambience and modern classical. These pieces are minimal in their architecture, structured from a restrained set-up – two keyboards, a loop pedal, some effects.

Opener ‘The Thickness Of Cotton Thread’ features hissing natural sounds. It’s hard to tell whether the sound is a car driving through a puddle at the side of the road or of wind rustling the leaves high in the trees, but it frames a beatific, stately composition that flits between meditative New Age-y chimes to sweet blocks of long keyboard tones that sound like they would work well at the mournful conclusion of Less Than Zero.

Elsewhere, ‘The Countenance Of Saints’ begins with sounds slowly emerging from a fog, like organ music in a coastal church heard from a boat floating off the shore. As the track coalesces, Warburton infuses the overlapping tones with equal measures of hope and despair, depending on where your personal emotions are operating while you listen. High-pitched, euphoric notes are held in place by rough, discordant textures, whose tense and disruptive atmospherics slowly overwhelm the piece.

The birdsong that frames ‘Pigs In Tokelau’ is a sweet plot device that ushers in some of Warburton’s most positive and euphoric playing. The pieces contains a sort of romantic yearning, even if occasional patches of distortion inject a feeling of doubt. In my mind’s eye, I see a callow young groom waiting for his future wife at the altar, the sounds reflecting emotions oscillating between excitement and nerves.

Warburton’s improvisatory technique suggests an artist with a deep understanding of the mechanics of emotional sound design. Transformations In K is an understated, restrained album packed with complex, fluctuating sentiments, making for a powerful and absorbing listening experience.

https://utopianmechanics.bandcamp.com/album/transformations-in-k

Transformations In K was released March 7 2025 by Utopian Mechanics.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2025 Further.

Mortality Tables: boycalledcrow – Kullu

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an audio travelogue of sound artist Carl M Knott’s travels in India

released May 3 2024 in digital and limited cassette edition of 25 copies

mortalitytables.bandcamp.com

Watch the video for ‘Milk And Honey’ here:

“Eventually found a guesthouse. Not very nice: a park-bench bed with two blankets for a mattress, stone walls and a shared squat toilet, but it had an ashram ambience and great acoustics for the guitar. I could really feel those bass notes.

Spent the evening understanding the layout of the city, eating and playing the guitar. I met the devil in New Delhi railway station and sold my soul for his guitar tunings. Robert Johnson is taking over my fingers.” 

– Carl M Knott, January 26 2006 

Kullu is the new album from electronic musician and former folk artist boycalledcrow, the alias of Chester’s Carl M Knott.

The album is an audio travelogue of Knott’s travels through India in 2005 and 2006, just after he’d graduated. That journey was part of Knott’s concerted efforts to overcome the intense feelings of stress and anxiety that had gnawed away at him throughout his adolescence. Along the way, he documented his travels in a blog and accumulated countless memory cards of photos and videos. He stayed in basic accommodation and made numerous fast friends from around the world, one of whom, an artist called James, provides the album’s sleeve image.

Knott made copious field recordings during his travels, and this diary-like library of sounds forms the basis of the ten tracks on Kullu. We hear busy, vibrant towns from the back of an auto rickshaw, rapturous tabla rhythms, blurred chanting and tanpura drones, as well as Knott’s own playing, made using a guitar bought in Dehradun for £27.

Knott took these foundational sounds, then augmented and processed them in the style that he has developed on albums such as // M E L O D Y_M A N (Waxing Crescent, 2023) and Mystic Scally (Wormhole World, 2020). These pieces roam freely between the engaging and unpredictable; joyous yet reflective; uplifting yet inquisitive. They are pieces filled with constant motion; taken as a whole, these pieces allow the listener to follow Knott’s journey through the remote Kullu Valley and along the Beas river that bisects the Himalayas.

This is an album of intense discovery, of new sounds and new atmospheres, and a sense of healing and catharsis. Knott wrote in his blog about trying to avoid being drawn into the well-worm paths of mediation and yoga, unlike most of the travellers he met between New Delhi railway station and his time in the Kullu Valley.

Instead, the pieces on Kullu find someone acutely listening to the turning of the world around him. It represented an awakening of Knott’s approach to documenting the sounds he is drawn to, fused with a distinctive, emotive and original compositional style. 

1. Charas
2. Pretty In The Sun
3. Joy
4. Vipassana
5. Tuktuk
6. Milk And Honey
7. Golden City
8. Kanashi
9. Sadhu
10. Kali

Music and production by Carl M Knott.  
Mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw.  
All field recordings and photographs by Carl M Knott, India, 2006. 
Design by Neil Coe. 
Video editing by Neu Gestalt.

Digital edition and limited cassette edition of 25 copies released May 3 2024 through mortalitytables.bandcamp.com


All proceeds from sales of Kullu will go to CHUMS. CHUMS provides mental health and emotional wellbeing support for children, young people and their families.  

chums.uk.com

A Mortality Tables Product
MTP29

ABOUT BOYCALLEDCROW

boycalledcrow is the alias of Chester-based sound artist Carl M Knott (Wonderful Beasts, Spacelab). Knott, a former folk musician, uses his myriad acoustic influences to create unique, strange and beautiful compositions. 

boycalledcrow.bandcamp.com

(c) 2024 Mortality Tables

Shots: Simon James / Found Object / Jess Brett / Gvantsa Narim / The Night Monitor / Sermons By The Devil

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SIMON JAMES – CATHEDRAL CAVE

The latest release from Brighton sound artist Simon James was recorded at Cathedral Quarry in the Lake District. Its first four pieces are essentially unadorned field recordings made in a cave, full of chilly atmospherics and incessantly dripping water, evoking a sense of vast space but also a macroscopic focus on miniature events. The final piece, ‘Exquisite Friction (Binaural)’, was made with a double mid-side microphone and transforms the cave ambience to trace outlines and alien textures, blending metallic tones and watery subterranean depth. Released 20 March 2024. 

Simon James recently worked with local residents to create Neolithic Cannibals, a multidisciplinary arts initiative taking place at Brighton’s Lighthouse Project Space between 4 and 19 May – visit www.lighthouse.org.uk for more details. 

FOUND OBJECT – EVERY SILVER LINING

Found Object is the alias of Pete Allen, a former drummer who makes rhythmic instrumental electronic music that nods squarely in the direction of a certain legendary Düsseldorf quartet while also isolating the emotive melodic qualities of early 1980s synth pop. Not for Allen banks of vintage gear – all of the tracks here made using the iPhone Beatwave app. Tracks like the astute and moving ‘Silver Lining’ carry a rhythmic firmness and emotional turbulence of Depeche Mode’s ‘Nothing To Fear’, while ‘Mephisto’ (this writer’s personal favourite) stacks cyclical layers of icicle-sharp hooks on top of an unswerving beat that offers a sense of perpetual movement through the murky, neon-lit quarters of a thriving metropolis in the early hours. 

Allen is also a frequent collaborator with powerful Kidderminster vocalist and electronic musician Jess Brett. Their ode to Berlin’s stately Unter den Linden thoroughfare is a triumphant pop moment for both artists. 

Every Silver Lining was released 6 March 2024. Unter den Linden with Jess Brett was released 25 March 2024. 

GVANTSA NARIM – CRUEL NATURE (Cruel Nature) 

The latest album from Georgian sound artist Gvantsa Narimanidze derives its name from the label releasing it. Split into two long tracks, each lasting around twenty-five minutes, the album finds Narimanidze in deeply reflective mode. ‘Cruel’ offers a sort of sonic dualism, with drifting, ethereal, ascending tones occupying the upper registers and an unsettling, undulating drone and outline of a bass-heavy pulse operating as a foundation layer. ‘Nature’ adopts a similar pose, only its high end shapes are less uniformly soothing and its underpinning dronescape is more intensely restless. Released 29 March 2024. 

THE NIGHT MONITOR – HORROR OF THE HEXHAM HEADS (Fonolith / Library Of The Occult) 

Neil Scrivin has truly cornered the market in freaky electronic music inspired by unexplained phenomena and paranormal activity. His first collaboration with Library Of The Occult is inspired by two carved stone faces that appeared, inexplicably, in a Northumberland family garden in 1971, foreshadowing a bunch of strange activities that I’m far too disturbed by to search for on the internet. Scrivin has assuredly outdone himself this time, stripping his compositions back to almost skeletal forms. ‘The Witch’, one of my favourite pieces, pairs rich and resonant synth sweeps with scratchy, nails-on-glass screeching that had me glancing at the window to make sure nothing was trying to break in (and, for context, I was in a plane flying at 35,000 feet in the air at the time). The shortest interlude here, ‘How Does Your Garden Glow’, is one of the collection’s finest moments. It might last barely a minute but its edgy, metronomic pacing and unwinding, slowly-writhing melody is – no pun intended – wonderfully haunting. Released 5 April 2024. 

SERMONS BY THE DEVIL – BAPTISM OF DESIRE

The latest album from New Jersey’s Sermons By The Devil arrives with a manifesto of sorts: “If free will is the last battleground of youth, then dancing is the most rebellious thing that can be done as humans.” These pieces are indeed danceable, though I found myself moving almost involuntarily to each one, leaving me wondering what free will I had in the face of these persuasive moments. Each of these tracks rely on subtle shifts and intense repetition. You will find tasting notes of Micro-phonies-era Cabaret Voltaire soundtracking a pagan muzak rave. The two opening tracks are among the best. ‘Black Magik’ carries itself on a low-slung, nagging bass-heavy rhythm with a sort of heavy, ritualistic intent. Swirling spirals of brooding synths act as an offset but this is a grubby, minimalistic and insistent track. Meanwhile, ‘Fetishes And Sacrifice’ mines a chunky electro beat overlaid with ground-out bass synths and intensely-worked, restless sweeps. At almost nine minutes it is an intense and often disorienting highlight, relentless and urgent In spite of its slow tempo. A wonderfully dark collection from the self-styled ‘official house band of the apocalypse.’ Released 11 April 2024. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2024 Further. 

Mortality Tables – Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds

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Mortality Tables – Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds (Performance #2)

Earlier today, The Moderns played ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds (Performance #2)’ by my Mortality Tables project as part of their latest episode. 

themoderns.blog/2024/03/31/the-moderns-ep-308/

To celebrate that, here are some 50% discount codes which can be used at the checkout at mortalitytables.bandcamp.com:

Performance #1 – ivesone
Performance #2 – ivestwo

I feel like this piece requires some explanation. 

On face value, ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’ is just an eight-and-a-half minute field recording from Central Park in New York, beautifully mastered by Alex from the quiet details label. There’s more to it than meets the ear, and its development has occupied me almost ceaselessly since 2021. 

The location of the recording isn’t random. It is derived from your age and your life expectancy in 1874. I made a special map of Central Park divided up into areas corresponding to those life expectancies, and the ‘performer’ makes the recording in that area. 

Why 1874? That was the year that the American radical composer Charles Ives was born. One of his compositions was ‘Central Park In The Dark’ (1906), with which Ives intended to evoke the sounds of the park that he heard while sat on a bench not far from his apartment on Central Park West. Incidentally, Ives is the guy with the beard in the illustration by Savage Pencil that gave Mortality Tables its entire visual identity. 

Savage Pencil – Mortality Tables illustration (detail)

Why life expectancies? That’s because being a composer wasn’t Ives’s main occupation. For the majority of his working life, Ives worked in life insurance, way Downtown on Nassau Street, near Wall Street.

Why eight-and-a-half minutes? Because that’s how long the first recorded version of ‘Central Park In The Dark’ (made in 1951) lasted. 

Mortality Tables – Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds (Performance #1)

The intention is to publish the instructions for making a performance / recording of ‘Central Park: A Picture-In-Sounds’, along with more details about Ives and his work in both music and insurance, in October of this year.

A couple of other explanations, maybe. A list of life expectancies is called a mortality table. You may now see where the name Mortality Tables comes from. And my main occupation involves working with insurance companies. That’s why Ives is important to me, as an inspiration, and as a role model.

– Mat

(c) 2024 Mortality Tables / Further.

Shots: Paul Reset / Everyday Dust / BMH / Pearl Home Records / Moolakii Club Audio Interface / Letters From Mouse

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PAUL RESET / EVERYDAY DUST – ARCHIVE 23 (Dustopian Frequencies)

A new split cassette release from Dustopian Frequencies pairs two artists comfortable operating deep under cover, with a track apiece influenced by the numerologically significance of the number 23. The release notes claim that both tracks were created using processes that were in some way developed with that number as a catalyst, but both are staying tight-lipped about precisely how. If you know, you know, I guess. Paul Reset’s ‘DotXm’ is a trip through his sound archive, presented as a collage of beats (electro, dub, fractured breakbeats) and interventionist overlays that veer from stalking, horror soundtrack synths and industrial bleakness that taps into a vivid and harrowing vision of dystopia. In contrast, Everyday Dust’s ‘Red Scavenger’ is dark and ominous, relying on processed sounds and haunting melodies inserted into a blanket of murky, impenetrable texture that nods squarely in the direction of Coil. There’s a flute melody at the start of this piece that is so utterly displaced that I can’t tell if it’s a particularly expansive Herbie Mann-style riff or some sort of ritualistic Pagan Muzak. The fear of the number 23 is, apparently, eikositriophobia, something you might well begin to experience if you listen to Everyday Dust’s piece in the dark and haunting chill of the early hours. Released December 28 2023.

BMH – EYE-EYE_[II]_IMMORTAL INFLUENCE (Colander)

The latest album from BMH, a duo of Dark Train’s Kate Bosworth and Matt Jetten, is quite honestly bonkers. In a good, nay great, way. Here you’ll find found sound, abstract percussion, rural accents, beautiful and abrasive noise, metallic kitchen sink percussion sounds, Coil-esque psychological terror, a sort of detuned 1990s Warp-style deep pulsing electronica and an ongoing commentary (with lots of laughter) that runs throughout the album that feels like an insight into Bosworth and Jetten’s creative practice. Honestly, this is an absolute joy to listen to and the perfect antidote to the unfortunate sequence of GWR train delays and cancellations that accompanied my first play of the album. My personal favourite track is ‘Radio Times’, which evolves from deep-slung dubby electronica to a sort of Heath Robinson playfulness that sounds like Brian Cant making sounds with the wind-up metal toys from the end of Bric-A-Brac. Released January 15 2024.

PEARL HOME RECORDS – CORNISH WIND (Pearl Home Records)

Several decades ago, this type of vinyl record wouldn’t have seemed out of place. While hanging out in my friend Steve’s record shop (Junkwax) in Penzance at the weekend, I alighted upon Sounds Of West Cornwall, a 1970 LP from the defunct Cornwall-based Sentinel label, which included various field recordings made in the westernmost part of the county, as well as arrangements of traditional songs. This lathe cut 7-inch looks like it could very well be one of those old Sentinel LPs, and includes recordings of wind made at five locations – Tregonhawke Beach, Tate St. Ives, St. Ildierna’s Church in Lansallos, Talland and St. Michael’s Mount off the coast of Marazion. As most field recordists will tell you, recording breezes and gusts of wind is fraught with problems, but Cornish Wind contains wonderfully tranquil, yet dramatic, sonic postcards of fairly typical Cornish weather. Easy, breezy. Released 18 January 2024.

VARIOUS ARTISTS – TFL VOL 1 (Moolakii Club Audio Interface)

I remember talking to Neil Stringfellow (Audio Obscura) as he was about to head to London to record sounds on the Elizabeth Line for this compilation, curated by Chris Bullock (Bone Music). When Stringfellow returned, he commented on how incredibly quiet and airy the line and its stations were. That quality feeds into his piece for TfL Vol 1, which is full of peaceful silences and unhurried rhythmic moments. The Elizabeth Line is, however, an enigma. Most of the Undergound is old, cramped and noisy, and that can be heard best on pieces like Moray Newlands’ edgy ‘176 Seconds’ and Looptronica’s cloying ‘Bakerloo Line’, where the clamorous abundance of captured passenger voices over a thudding techno pulse approximates a fairly typical trip during rush hour. Elsewhere, Stoltz’s ‘Central Undersound’ has a sort of industrial, symphonic quality, not unlike Laibach busking in a carriage of a Central Line train after a late night recording session at Guerilla for Nova Akropola. Released January 24 2024.

LETTERS FROM MOUSE – CLOTA (SubExotic)

Clota is a welcome return for Edinburgh’s Steven Anderson (Letters From Mouse). Very much a continuation of his focus on Scottish topographies and mysteries that began with An Garradh and the Robert Burns-focused Tarbolton Bachelors Club, Anderson’s focus here is the mythical Celtic goddess Clota. Believed to be the goddess of the River Clyde, that gives the seven enveloping modular synth pieces on Clota a beautiful flowing fluidity. In pieces like opening track ‘Frogspawn’, Anderson taps into a sense of wispy ephemerality, as if highlighting the way that the goddess Clota has become largely forgotten as time has passed. The key track here is ‘Bowling Greens And Tennis Courts’, featuring birdsong, footsteps and other field recordings alongside fragile reverb-drenched melodies. Released 26 January 2024.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2024 Further.

Shots: Script Kid / Witch On Horseback / Andrew Weathers / Xingu Hill

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SCRIPT KID – SKSI

SKSI is a five-track EP from anonymous Philadelphia producer Script Kid, which follows his dizzyingly accomplished debut album, Music For A Deprecated Dataset (2021). Intended as a metaphorical sonic bridge between his debut and a future new album, SKSI is a hot mess of crunchy beats, wispy synths and fragmented samples. ‘Nunya’ flinches and twitches with a nervous euphoria, a swirl of soft ambient textures fluttering around a suppressed rhythm. ‘The Groove’ hitches similarly ephemeral synth samples to a resolute breakbeat, giving me warm and fuzzy Mo’ Wax memories, while the curt ‘$Beatz’ highlights Script Kid’s minimalist flair with 90 seconds of scratched-up chat about ‘money-beats’ that had me tapping my toes on the train home in the rush hour.

SKSI by Script Kid was released July 28 2023 by Music Is The Devil.

WITCH ON HORSEBACK – Jumand

This is purportedly an unearthed suite of four recordings from The Witch On Horseback Institute For Cognitive Salubrity, founded by the narrator of these pieces, Dr. Noving Jumand, in New York State in the 1970s. The story goes that the new age performance space and education centre was founded by some ex-Moog employees, which would explain the deep drones, pulses and half-melodies that frame Jumand’s delivery. It’s all completely made up, of course. There was no Institute, there was no Jumand, and these pieces of strange and abstracted fiction – each delivered by the Jumand character in a flat voice reminiscent of guided meditations – are each one part-Welcome To Night Vale and one part David Lynch. The thirty-minute ‘Unusual Restaurant’ is wry and harrowing, putting you in a dreamlike story that concludes with you tucking into a dish of wafer-thin objects made from the body of a creepy childhood neighbour. You may think twice before listening to that next supposedly relaxing podcast on the Calm app after hearing this.

Jumand by Witch On Horseback was released August 25 2023 by Difficult Art And Music.

ANDREW WEATHERS – A Cardinal With A Sign Of Blood

A Cardinal With A Sign Of Blood is Texan sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Andrew Weathers’ eulogy to his late father and aunt. Their passing prompted this collection of discovered quarter-inch tapes that his father had made, field recordings, guitars, horns and electronics. Ghostly and haunting, the opening piece ‘28 Feb 1975’ features Weathers delivering a sparse, hesitant guitar melody loaded with plaintive contemplation over a murky bed of impenetrable voices and delicate keyboard tones. The 10-minute centrepiece, ‘The Cardinal, The Bike, The Stars’ features taped reportage about and from childhood and thoughts of aliens, Weathers manipulating an unintended cough in one of the recordings into a vague and unpredictable rhythm that ushers in an increasingly complex series of minimalistic layers. Reverential and absorbing, Weathers’ grief has produced a sonic adventure of great and mesmerising power.

A Cardinal With A Sign Of Blood by Andrew Weathers was released September 1 2023 by Full Spectrum Records.

XINGU HILL – Grigri Pavilion

The latest album from John Sellekaers’ Xingu Hill project contains eight tracks of enquiring electronics, and key moments like ‘Hi-Fi Simulant’ and ‘Moving Mirrors’ fizz with a palpable energy. Fragile, hooky synth melodies rest on top of complex beats that nod to minimal techno, electro and splintered drum ‘n’ bass. And yet, despite the components all feeling like they might have a place in a 1990s warehouse rave somewhere outside Amsterdam, something about Sellekaers’ presentation of these pieces feels vaguely… detached. The euphoria that should exist here is suppressed, in its place a sort of ephemeral, almost New Age-y introspection. That sleight of hand – used liberally on each of these pieces – creates beautiful shades of texture and nuance. An enriching auditory experience from start to finish.

Grigri Pavilion by Xingu Hill was released September 15 2023 by Subexotic Records.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Strategic Tape Reserve: Whetmann Chelmets / Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival

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Two recent releases from the Strategic Tape Reserve label both continue the label’s fascinating voyage into the heart of adventurous electronic sounds.

Whettman Chelmets’ Koppen finds the US sound artist foraging for sounds at The Gathering Place, a park in Tulsa, Oklahoma. It can be thought of sonic reconnaissance trip before Chelmetts upped sticks and moved to the area. These found sounds and field recordings were then augmented with elements such as snatches of radio broadcasts, the wind chimes outside his house and electronic melodies. Its title – Koppen – refers to a system of dividing the world into different climate zones, and the names of these pieces here refer to a specific zone in the Koppen classification system.

One could easily suggest that Chelmets’ deployment of serenity and turbulence in each track is a reflection of the volatility present across the world. These pieces are all restless, never still, always moving. Even in moments of tranquility, something edgy is just around the metaphorical corner. ‘ET’ and ‘Dfd’, for example, present vibrant soundworlds of many layers – metallic, ringing, bell-like tones, slowed-down rain sounds, whistling half-melodies, and something earthy and naturalistic, maybe the sound of walking through a damp wood in Fall. They are simultaneously enveloping but also threatening and brooding, poised with a sort of calm and resolute danger.

Something similar happens on ‘Cfa’. Here we are presented with a cluster of pretty, almost classical melodies. At some indefinable point these sounds become buried and lost as a harsh, sawing, back-and-forth sound and crushing white noise blanket drapes itself over the track. On ‘Dfc’ and ‘BWh’ the inverse happens, with a cloying, impenetrable web of sound dropping out into randomised bursts of dislocated radio recordings – ghostly voices and snatches of broadcast music. They are respite, perhaps, from what comes before, but somehow more ghostly and unsettling because of the starkness of contrast.

Koppen is presented as a single long piece, its constant shifts creating a dizzying, relentless unpredictability: in the quieter moments you are filled with anticipation of noise overtaking any sense of calm, and in the noisier moments you are waiting for the sudden drop into beatific, pastoral sweetness. None of this is remotely accidental, of course, and Chelmets proves himself to be an absolute master of sculpted, dramatic, enlivening sound art.

Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz and Depresstival brings to an end their fabled Leisure Pop Trilogy. The third instalment of their series for Strategic Tape Reserve, following Plaza Centraal (2001) and Elmyr (2020), this is an utterly madcap leftfield pop sprawl.

The tone for this is largely set by opening track ‘Foyer’, an effervescent, skittish, lo-fi banger with wiry guitars, a decidedly awkward funkiness, birdsong, recorders, bleeping Casio synths, oompah bass, dull documentary samples and a vocal about paradise that sounds suspiciously like the late Mark E. Smith. All in one song!

Ergo Phizmiz has made a career of operating fluidly around copyright, and that’s no different here. Meanwhile, multimedia artist Depresstival set an ambition – this is deadly serious, so please approach it that way – to “become the ultimate post-structuralist Geri Haliwell tribute act.” This heartfelt reverence to the onetime Ginger Spice would certainly the interjection of a sample of the Spice Girls’ ‘Wannabe’ on the standout ‘Heartslashwallet’, a track that sounds like a Numanoid replicant thoroughly pissed off at having to constantly pay for romance. Meanwhile, ‘Stalker’, which includes lyrics about voyeuristically watching someone taking out their bins, has more than a stench of The Residents about it, and ‘Four Things I Would Have Done If It Wasn’t For Fucking Brexit’ is a protest song dressed as an erudite expression of love for motorik German music.

Quite honestly, nothing I write here could do justice to how completely bonkers this collection is. What I will say is that the final track, ‘John Lewis Christmas Advert’ envisions an alternative reality where a female torch singer covers the Sex Pistols over a tear-jerking stop-motion short film to support a department store’s flagging seasonal sales. Seriously ridiculous and ridiculously serious by turns, and a high watermark in the Ergo Phizmiz prankster portfolio.

Koppen by Whetmann Chelmets was released July 7 2023. Owl And Monkey Haven by Ergo Phizmiz ft. Depresstival was released September 8 2023. Both releases are on the Strategic Tape Reserve label.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

Bethan Kellough – The Underlying / venoztks – light breaker

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews3 Comments

California Dreaming: The Underlying, by sound artist Bethan Kellough and light breaker, by the anonymous venoztks, offer two very different sonic impressions of California. 

For Kellough’s contribution to Touch’s Displacing subscription service, that impression was informed by field recordings made at the edge of Salton Sea, not far from the Joshua Tree National Park and the Mexico border. We hear birds, insects and a gently unfolding natural ambience, but we also hear an undercurrent of something darker – the drones and white noise from a nearby geothermal power station. The power source, heralded as one of several sustainable alternatives to traditional oil and gas, is nevertheless obtrusive and impactful on the environment that surrounds the power plant. 

Kellough’s sleight of hand is to take those two sets of sounds – the delicate vibrancy of nature and the omnipresent hum of the power station as she approaches it – and augment them with a sensitive arrangement of sounds that somehow resonate much closer to the choruses of birds and insects than the mechanical interjections of the power stations. 

light breaker is the latest missive from venoztks, an artist who doesn’t so much operate at the margins but within the interstitial frequencies of shortwave radio. The fifty-minute piece that light breaker consists of (‘Indent’) is structured from captured radio recordings – voices overheard as fragmentary mid-conversation non sequiturs, howling white noise, brittle static and resonant bass sounds that ebb and flow as menacing slow-motion pulses. The effect is like listening to an intense analogue synthesiser improvisation, but everything you hear came from the radio and the manipulation of its dials. 

As well as being an intriguing, absorbing listen from the outer edges of found sound, the album also acts as a highly effective sonic screen. I found myself listening to this while undertaking an array of tedious domestic chores, where the barrage of abrasive, sculpted sounds and found drones also provided a useful means of drowning out the tedious mumbly hip-hop music that my wife was playing far too loudly elsewhere in the house. 

The Underlying by Bethan Kellough was released August 27 2021 by Touch. light breaker by venoztks was released August 26 2021. 

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Further. 

Yifeat Ziv – Amazonian Traces Of Self

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviews, InstallationsLeave a comment

Yifeat Ziv is a Jersulem-born, London-based sound artist who won one of the six coveted prizes at this year’s Oram Awards. With a practice focussed primarily on the use of voice, Ziv’s works include 2019’s Rish Rush, based on the prevalence of onomatopoeic gestures in all languages, performances at Café Oto, a collaboration with David Toop on his recent Apparition Paintings album, and sound installations at numerous galleries in Israel and the UK. 

Amazonian Traces Of Self, Ziv’s latest work, arose from a ten-day AER Labverde residency in the Brazilian rainforest last year. For the piece, Ziv undertook a series of excursions into the rainforest, making field recordings of the natural ambience and capturing her own vocal improvisations, both of which are combined together into this thoughtful composition, here presented as a seventeen-minute live piece recored at Iklectik in January of this year, but which also has a parallel existence as a sound installation (The Echo Of Our Breath). The CD release is accompanied by an essay, designed to be read after listening to the piece.

If you are remotely environmentally-minded, any mention of the rainforest should, by rights, bring to mind the progressive deforestation and devastation that the natural landscape has endured as a consequence of humankind’s progress; whether for repurposing as land for rearing cattle or for growing the so-called ‘sustainable’ soya beans that propel the world’s biofuel hopes, the rainforest has decreased in size at a phenomenal rate – over 50% over the last 60 years. 

By focussing its initial attentions on the natural sounds of the environment, the piece prompts complex emotions. There is a sense of tranquillity and serenity, but it also feels strangely unsettling, like a creeping sense of impermanence that coincides with Ziv’s reverberating vocal interjections – breath, a sort of staccato passage, tremulous, quivering passages and almost bird-like calls. These sounds feel alien, like they have no place in this location, something that Ziv describes as “vocal pollution”, an allegory for the way we have encroached upon, and starved, the Earth’s lungs. A middle section of wailing voices sounds like a desperate, mournful elegy to what is lost, what cannot be replaced and that which we have caused. 

Yet as the piece progresses, Ziv’s layered vocal sounds take on a different hue. They feel curiously natural and optimistic, sitting in balanced evenness with the natural sounds that she is vocalising over. We start to feel a symbiosis between her sounds and those around her, almost as if she is gently reminding us of our dependency on this place, of how we can live in harmony with these spaces. A sense of optimism begins to emerge, a feeling that all is not lost, that our devastation of a place upon which we all depend for our live-giving oxygen is not yet entirely irreversible. 

Amazonian Traces Of Self by Yifeat Ziv is released November 17 2020 by Flaming Pines – flamingpines.bandcamp.com

Words: Mat Smith