This is the first in a series of releases from Fields We Found, the catalyst being a period of illness which prompted Alex Gold to focus in on the things that gave him joy, including the process of making music. The overall series is called resolve / relate.
The four tracks here are inspired by nostalgia for Gold’s halcyon nights spent clubbing at places like Fabric. Each has the relentless chugging rhythms of especially solid techno sets, offset by minimal interventions – a cluster of notes approximating a repeating melody, deep bass lines, oscillator sweeps, unfurling drones, tuned percussion – that add to a sense of forward momentum. The EP is rounded out with a remix of ‘rhythm structure 1.1’ by Brendan Moeller, who recently released an album on Gold’s Quiet Details imprint.
Each of these pieces are, however, draped with a sort of foggy impenetrability, like the club is choked with dry ice. The figures of fellow clobbers are reduced to mere shuffling outlines, while strobes and lights create jagged shapes as they try to cut through the haze. It approximates both the fallibility of memory, as filtered through our nostalgic recollections, and the vibrancy of a club situation where the only thing that matters is the trance-like state created by extreme repetition.
Gold’s practice is entirely live, improvising and recording direct to tape. This gives tracks like ‘rhythm structure 1.2’ a spontaneity, almost like he is helming a DJ set and constantly keeping an ear on each track’s energy. ‘rhythm structure 1.3’ is this writer’s personal favourite, opening with white noise-tinged sequences that whine discordantly, prefacing a delicate suite of notes that slowly emerge from the background and assert themselves as the unswerving focal point of the track. As they do so, a sense of extreme, swirling turbulence begins to become obvious down in the foundation layer – restless, unplaceable sounds; sibilant noise; tension; discordancy.
A powerful – yet restrained – signal of intent from Gold.
KEMPER NORTON – TALL TREES (AND OTHER TALES) (Zona Watusa)
I absolutely love Kemper Norton. His music, very often inspired by Cornish folklore, mythological figures or its forgotten Industrial Age contribution, has a highly distinctive and wonderfully idiosyncratic originality. For Tall Trees (and other tales), he focuses his attention on his own personal history and mythology, celebrating a bunch of nightclubs that have closed their dance floors for good. “None of these places still exist, and some of the people have gone too,” he writes. “But not all of them.” This is club music as filtered the disjointed fog of memory, of too many nights out that you thought you’d remember forever but now can’t. That poignancy and nostalgia is all over Tall Trees, but it’s elusive, hidden beneath grids of dirty beats and lysergic energy. The eponymous opener is punishing and insistent, but it’s also ever-so-slightly wonky, as if the neatness of Kemper Norton’s grid itself is protesting against the uniformity of recollection. The two parts of ‘Victor Dragos’ carry a vital latency, with suggestions of rapid-fire hardcore beats subsumed under washes of amorphous, psychedelic texture and restless acid house pulses. A truly original work from one of electronic music’s most enigmatic of mavericks. Released 28 November 2024.
Scotland-based electronic musician Veryan released her latest EP just before Christmas. Containing three tracks featuring prominent piano and breathy vocal textures, Paper Hearts has a sort of frozen quality to it, as if the pieces were created while looking across a frosty winterscape. The title track features an icicle-sharp countermelody and a sinewy arpeggio filled reminiscent of Higher Intelligence Agency’s Colourform album from thirty years ago (ah, the memories…). Veryan’s music has always carried a searching, inquisitive dimension, embodied here by the unfurling textures and refracted journey of ‘Gossamer’. The EP concludes with ‘Soft Lights Dance On Walls’, whose circular central piano motif leans into classical minimalism, while its shimmering electronic accompaniment is freighted with a powerfully contemplative energy. Released 23 December 2024.
I’ve regularly written about Quiet Details releases here, and, on the strength of their first release of 2025, it seems like it will be another year of high quality, gently reflective albums. Wil Bolton’s contribution to the series was inspired by journeys around South Korea, featuring accumulated field recordings, instruments found and played on his journey, and electronic arrangements of extreme subtlety. In many ways, what Bolton has delivered with South Of The Lake is the very essence of what Quiet Details founder Alex Gold was seeking to achieve with this series. Pieces like the standout ‘Sun Tree Trail’ are deeply contemplative, evoking the Buddhist notion of being the still point in the turning world, wherein the listener is surrounded by bird calls, running water and a textural accompaniment of singing bowls and synths that rest lightly and comfortingly upon you. Last year, I spent some time at Lake Shrine in Los Angeles, not far from Pacific Palisades. It was a transcendent experience, and one of the most significant places I’ve ever had the privilege to visit. My only disappointment was the sound of cars whizzing down the mountain toward the Pacific Coast Highway, something that took some intense meditation to ignore completely. If I ever get to go back, South Of The Lake is what I would choose to listen to while there. Bolton’s album is a truly beautiful listening experience. Released 8 January 2025.
RUNAR BLESVIK – ALL THE DIFFERENCE (Fluttery Records)
Runar Blesvik is a Norwegian pianist and composer whose work seeks to transcend the frontiers of modern classical music, a genre with some of the least defined of frontiers to begin with. Accompanied by strings from the Arcobaleno String Quartet, clarinettist Jussan Cluxnei and Blesvik’s own piano and electronic textures, All The Difference is a gently ruminative listening experience that subtly demonstrates the emotional power of his compositional sleight of hand. The album opens with the achingly minimalist ‘Finding’, wherein Blesvik’s piano is accompanied by sepia-tinted static, a powerfully restrained statement that might have been overburdened by layers of additional sounds or melodies in the hands of another composer. That’s not to say these pieces are all uniformly sparse – ‘One And The Other’ adds strings, rhythms and a beatific synth motif to create a soaring piece that rises quickly before falling back into comparative quietude. Across the remaining tracks, Blesvik pivots his classical vision toward jazzy levity, blissful Terry Riley circularity, gamelan chimes and ambient atmospherics, rendering All The Difference an impactful, exquisite listen, executed with extreme precision. Released 10 January 2025.
THE KLINGT.COLLECTIVE – VARIABLE DENSITIES (Interstellar)
Viennese experimental unit the klingt.collective consists of Martin Brandlmayr (drums), Angélica Castelló (recorders and tapes), dieb13 (turntables), Klaus Filip (ppooll), Susanna Gartmayer (bass clarinet), Noid (cello), Billy Roisz (electronics and bass), Martin Siewert (guitars and electronics) and Oliver Stotz (guitars and electronics). Variable Densities was recorded at the densités festival in north-eastern France back in October 2023 and highlights just how seasoned these improvising musicians are. No mistaking, this is a large group, and the capacity for everyone to be playing over everyone else to assert dominance is high. Fortunately, that isn’t the case. There are moments of multitimbral, densely-layered intensity where necessary, but for the most part Variable Densities finds small sub-units working an idea to its conclusion before another sub-unit starts a new idea. This creates unexpected, unpredictable juxtapositions as different ideas coalesce, with electronics, tapes and turntables nestling up against strings, percussion, guitar and other traditional instruments. There’s a constant fluidity within these exchanges which means nothing hangs around for long or outstays its welcome. A diverse and compelling listening experience full of vitality, energy and impressive meshing together of disparate influences. Released 11 January 2025.
One Universal Breath is (indirectly) a product of grief. In the wake of her father’s passing, Scottish electronic artist Veryan caught sight of a solitary practitioner of Tai Chi across from where she was sat in a Parisian park. That inspired her to take up the ancient Chinese martial art as a way of reaching an acceptance of death, and its inextricable link to life. That, in turn, inspired the twelve tracks that comprise Veryan’s contribution to the brilliant Quiet Details imprint, marking yet another high watermark in Veryan’s discography and QD’s faultless catalogue.
Given its genesis, One Universal Breath is naturally a deeply spiritual, contemplative collection. However, Veryan’s conceit is to avoid resorting to wispy ambience and New Age-isms, characteristics that might be expected for music intended to align the body and mind. These pieces are characterised by subtle rhythmic interjections that provide focus as well as momentum. Somewhat surprisingly, given how balanced these pieces are between forward propulsion and lightness, they originally grew out of beat-free, more ambient soundscapes; separate them from their rhythms and these pieces are vaguely Bladerunner-y and sci-fi soundtrack-friendly. The same pieces, inextricably linked; yin and yang; life and death.
Opener ‘Lift Hands’ sets the tone for the album, with a deep, bassy root beat that acts as a guide rope throughout the whole track. To that solid beat are added electro-symphonic swirls and a spiralling, ringing melody that spins and flutters like an inquisitive dragonfly. The effect is quietly euphoric and gently uplifting. ‘Diagonal Flying’ does something similar, only here there is the addition of a white noise sound that evokes the idea of air currents or waves crashing onto some faraway beach. A similar feeling emerges on ‘Grasp The Sparrow’s Tail’, which is delivered through a sense of latency, of something about to emerge from the calm. Here, Veryan presents a bass pattern that has a determinedly motorik dimension that reminds me of Nitzer Ebb’s ‘Join In The Chant’. That rhythmic shape is poised beneath resonant strings, while light percussion sounds begin to cluster and build with intentionality as the piece progresses.
‘Step Forward To The Seven Stars’ offers a suite of wavering tones which are imperfect yet strangely engaging. Those gently wonky sounds are joined by a slow motion break, while flute-like notes sketch the outline of hope and salvation. It represents one of the album’s sparsest and enveloping moments, but its linearity is complemented by unusual interventions that happen along the way. These create a sense of uncertainty, as if there is more than one path available. One of the best tracks here is ‘Needles At The Bottom Of The Sea’, which contains a delicate central melody that is freighted with the haunting quality that makes so much of Veryan’s music so engaging; simple, understated, yet devastating. It is one of the busiest tracks, the melody offset by a sequence which undulates and fluctuates like it’s trying to escape from something. ‘Needles At The Bottom Of The Sea’ is immediately powerful and resonant, caught in the interstitial space between hope and despair.
That’s not to suggest that this whole album leans into a sense of calm. Two tracks – ‘Part Wild Horses Mane’ and ‘Fair Lady Works The Shuttles’ – contain mysterious elliptical tones and a sort of creeping noir tension. That sense of foreboding, so different from tracks elsewhere, reminds me of Thomas Newman’s soundtrack to Less Than Zero, or what Nine Inch Nails might have sounded like if they’d recorded The Downward Spiral at a spiritual retreat instead of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s house in Benedict Canyon.
The album’s title track is the piece that unifies the whole album and its myriad dualities. On this piece, Veryan deploys crisp and unswerving beats with delicate melodic interfaces. There is a sense of motion yet stillness; of positivity yet reflectiveness; meditative yet danceable; soft yet firm. We find enveloping strings that wrap themselves comforting around you, and a pulsing bass line that rises and falls like the breath of the title. It embodies the premise of this entire album, being at once towering, yet welcoming, marking the conclusion of an utterly mesmerising achievement.
One Universal Breath by Veryan is released 21 August 2024 by Quiet Details.
Damon Vallero describes his new Audio Maze album as “a meeting place and a platform for departure”. Its dub-inflected soundscapes carry a sense of fluid motion, of coming and going. Even at its most languid – as on the widescreen ‘Grand Land’ – there is a feeling of restlessness, even though its constituent parts (a slow-motion rhythm, a metronomic bass pulse, a softly ebbing and flowing melody) suggest a resolute stillness. It transpires that it’s an unplaceable, half-heard sound off in the distance that conjures this feeling of nothing being settled, of everything moving. One of the album’s many highlights is ‘Circle Of Sand’, containing myriad distinct intersections – a submerged bassline that is felt more than heard; a voice whose words cannot be deciphered; a rhythm that feels like the juddering sound of a train passing through a station; a jazzy piano riff that seems to splinter and fall apart gracefully as the rest of the track follows a very different path. This is an album filled with complex detail just beneath its surface textures. Absorbing and richly nuanced. Released 30 May 2024.
Xuma is a duo of Harriett and Chris Robins Kennish. Based near Brighton, they make music built from the foundational structures of dance music, with slowly-evolving minimal sequences and crisp, danceable beats offset by Harriett’s often blissed-out vocals. ‘I Know Her’ drifts gently into a dreamy garage-y framework of driving beats and jazzy sounds, over which Harriett deploys layers of euphoric, arms-in-the-air vocals. ‘Joyful’ is one of the album’s many highlights, with vocals converted into loops of shimmering, beatific texture over sounds and rhythms that sound like they are soundtracking a Goan (or maybe Hove?) sunrise. ‘Invisible’ strikes a minimalist techno pose, its feathery electronics fluttering ceaselessly over a stalking pitch-bent bassline, while closing track ‘Relent’ adopts a laidback, half-speed Café Del Mar vibe. Jasmine is a hidden gem of an album, and one that resolutely follows its own stylistic path. I had the pleasure of hanging out with Harriett and Chris on Brighton beach recently, and two nicer people making brilliantly diverse electronic music you will not meet. Released 20 June 2024.
Antenne is Brighton-based James Dean’s homage to a mysterious pirate radio station, which broadcast continuously from a point in the 1990s before coming to a sudden halt in 1996. This is his evocation of the energy of the station, deploying his trademark sinewy synth melodies, club-oriented beats and a sense of latency. On ‘I Feel Eye See’, he uses a muted hardcore break but instead of hitching it to 1992-vintage head-cleaning hoover noises, he layers the beats with pretty, overlapping spirals and a fuzzy blanket of warm, emotive textures. ‘Oriam Speedway’ ventures into a suggestion of kosmische electronic rock, fused again to suppressed rave beats. My personal favourite track is ‘Controller 29’, whose structures steadily coalesce out of a delicate web of interwoven synth lines that ripple with intense motion. Those patterns quickly fade out of view, only to firm up around a motorik beat and a fluttering melody that nods to Kraftwerk’s ‘Neonlicht’. Another fine release in the Bunkr catalogue. Released 28 June 2024.
Another exceptional release from the Quiet Details label, easily one of the most interesting imprints issuing music today. To catch people up on the concept, the idea is that each handpicked artist is asked to produce a body of music that responds to the name of the label. Every release in the series has been a joy to listen to, and the latest – from Tresor stalwart Emile Facey – is no exception. Like some of the other releases surveyed in this post, Facey’s ‘The Unfading Spark’ relies principally on the suggestion of movement and energy. In standout pieces like opener ‘Broken Through’ or ‘Signal Beckons’ or ‘Wisps Of Vapour’, there is this feeling of high-octane techno structures itching to punch their way through the gauzy, enveloping textures that dominate the tracks. These potentially competing forces create a compelling tension – soothing on the one hand, fidgety and restless on the other – that somehow knits together seamlessly, making for an enriching and engaging listen. Released 10 July 2024.
There is not a lot that Rupert Lally can’t turn his hand successfully to. While he might be best known as a prolific (and stylistically dexterous) composer of electronic music, Lally is also an accomplished author and, via his blog, an avid documenter of underrated films and their soundtracks. Profiler, like 2022’s Hacker, brings together these interests into a neat and tidy package. Not just a hypothetical soundtrack, Profiler comes with a detailed plotline and is presented as a lost 1980s crime flick, with Lally’s music leaning authoritatively into the synth sounds of that decade. That means rich, infectious melodies, big beats and a sense of bold, shiny vibrancy.
In spite of Lally’s intuition for period authenticity, there’s plenty of room here for his distinctive noir-ish sensibilities. ‘The Unsub’ is a brooding, unsettling and mysterious short cue, its key focal point being a series of uncoiling tendrils of synth sequences that lead to a cloying, claustrophobic atmosphere full of tension and danger. ‘Possible Suspect’ is the track that feels most like it was unearthed from a bankrupt studio’s archives, with a dense drum machine beat filled with a kitchen sink’s worth of percussion presets and fills and a sharp, sinewy synth melody resting atop a sequence that feels like it was created from a short vocal sound imported into a sampling keyboard. Avid readers of Further. will know how much of a fan of Lally’s music I am, and this imaginative collection is undoubtedly up there with his best. Released 19 August 2024.
Slow Clinic is a project of mastering engineer James Edward Armstrong. On the three pieces presented here, it’s self-evident that Armstrong has an exceptional ear for detail and nuance. ‘Accept’, ‘Hold’ and ‘Wander’ are all constructed from field recordings made in Farnham, Surrey using an old dictaphone, upon which Armstrong layers gentle, undulating guitar drones. These drones were built from a chain of effects pedals but were otherwise fully unprocessed after they’d been recorded. At times resonant, at others contemplative, there is an appreciable openness to these pieces, and, perhaps, a vulnerability: they are imperfect, in the sense that the base layer dictaphone recordings are bathed in a hissy white noise where you can almost hear the tape mechanism. Moments of clarity find their way through, but that lo-fi bed of static is a constant. And, in that sense, this is Armstrong at his most accepting. For someone so well-versed in addressing deficiencies and errors in other artists’ material, with this EP he doesn’t seek to address those that present themselves in his own work. One can only imagine that process was strangely freeing and cathartic for an artist usually drawn to the most macroscopic of details. Released 27 March 2024.
MORAY NEWLANDS – BUZZ BUZZ (Wormhole World)
The latest album from Dundee’s Moray Newlands acts as a tribute to The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks’ debut novel. Forty years on from the publication of The Wasp Factory, it remains a book that is fraught with controversy and whose unswerving violence and vivid, twisted narrative launched Banks as his generation’s Anthony Burgess. When I first read the book, sometime in the early 1990s, the violence wasn’t what gripped me; instead it was a sort of compassion for Frank, the 16-year-old protagonist. Not, I stress, because I felt some sort of nihilistic familiarity with his character, but because of how deeply troubled and disturbed he was. I don’t think I had read a book, up to that point, where I felt as much sorrow for the main character as I did disgust. It proved to be good practice for when I read American Psycho.
Newlands’ album is, then, appropriately balanced – empathetic in places but just as unflinchingly brutal as Banks’ narrative. The two opening pieces, ‘The Sacrifice Poles’ and ‘Snake Park’ are mournful, symphonic and curiously moving. So moving in fact that you don’t notice the creeping undertow of sibilant buzzing sounds and dark shadows, all of which are fully realised on ‘The Bunker’, where the sound of birds and softly squalling sounds act as metaphors for Frank’s torturous ways. Buzz Buzz is like the Bibliotapes cassette that somehow never got released, moving episodically through the book’s pivotal scenes and figures. Here we meet Saul, a dog that is purported to have inflicted a grievous injury on young Frank (‘Old Saul’s Skull’). We encounter his brother, Eric, forever changed by his grim experiences as a medical volunteer, one of the book’s most harrowing moments (‘What Happened To Eric’). In a moment of grim, fairground whimsy, we alight upon Frank’s cousin, ‘Esmerelda’, killed after he attached her to a large kite which takes her far out to sea. The motive? Because he’d killed too many boys and needed to create a semblance of evenhandedness.
Elsewhere, we hear the sonic embodiment of Frank’s wasp-destroying mechanism on the title track, a stew of clocks, wound-up cogs, struck matches, dubby pulses and angry – nay fearful – buzzing. Even now, when confronted with the idea of Frank’s Heath Robinson torture device, I find myself instead thinking about an episode of Bagpuss where his mice companions use a similarly ramshackle machine to make digestive biscuits. I think it is a device my teenage brain used to prevent me from being too impacted by Frank’s callous traits. Finally, we arrive at the album’s closing moment, ‘What Happened To Me’, the sonic portrayal of a pivotal confrontation between Frank and his father, wherein we learn a lot about Frank – or maybe, just maybe, nothing at all. Newlands depicts this in a searching, inquisitive, but ultimately unresolved electro-symphonic tearjerker, a droning, undulating voice sound reminding us of Frank’s hymenopteran prey.
This album is not for the faint-hearted. There are moments here that are exceptionally terrifying, much like The Wasp Factory itself. My overriding impression, however, like my first reading of the book, is one of compassion toward poor Frank, in no small part thanks to Newlands’ clever sound design and masterful use of emotional texture. A powerful work of arresting, complex detail. Digital edition released 24 May 2024.CD edition released 28 June 2024.
WHETTMAN CHELMETS – A NEW PLACE (Quiet Details)
A New Place began life as a song by Whettman Chelmets’ young daughter. You can hear that song in the first two minutes of ‘Prelude To A New Place’, the first of the three tracks which constitute this release. That voice, imperfect, untrained and innocent, lends these pieces a sense of nostalgic optimism, which I can only liken to the feelings that wash over me whenever I look at old photographs of my children. There is a thick blanket of gauzy texture draped over these three pieces through which fragmentary details and ideas appear – a guitar, resonant brass, strings, a half-melody, children’s voices, discordant buzzing, the click of a computer mouse. At different points, these interventions can appear almost impenetrable, often threateningly dissonant, but those moments, like all the segments here, evolve away rapidly. In the final judgment, A New Place is a wonderfully evocative album full of ceaseless motion, and one of the most beatific albums I’ve had the pleasure of listening to. A resounding, emotional achievement for Chelmets, and another fine release from the consistently-brilliant Quiet Details imprint. Released 29 May 2024.
ASHER LEVITAS – Above The Pale Green (Waxing Crescent)
This four-track EP from Asher Levitas is bordered by two tracks that occupy similar stylistic ground. Opener ‘Fence – Stream – River’ begins with the the sound of gently flowing water and a metal fence being stroked by a stick, out of which rises a soft and delicate tapestry of ambient pads that sit on the frontiers between wistful, nostalgic and hopeful. A brief swirl of gurgling analogue synth evokes the notion of a meandering stream. A similar combination of field recordings and elegiac textures occurs on the closing track, which gives this EP its name. Except that where the first piece offers sense of optimism, ‘Above The Pale Green’ feels restless and uncertain.
If you only listened to those two tracks, you’d wind up with a completely unrepresentative impression of this EP. ‘Nowhere To Be’ is a woozy, slowly-evolving minimal synth pop cut overlaid with a haunting, wordless vocal and simple, pinprick melodies. It’s a lot like finding an early 1980s electronic demo tape in the loft of the house you’ve moved into, suitably draped in years of nostalgic fuzziness. If that wasn’t surprising enough, ‘You Don’t Have To’ is a further departure in the form of a plaintive, open and tender piano ballad. The keyboard sounds wonky and slightly imperfect and is augmented by subtle interventions off in the background. A grubby, dissonant melody, soaring textures and fragile rhythm in the middle eight usher in a more nuanced and layered conclusion. Having the bravery to fit three highly distinct and, on paper, incompatible styles together is a rare moment of daring, but Levitas executes it impeccably. Released 14 June 2024.
LOULA YORKE – Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head (Quiet Details)
The second Quiet Details review in this round-up comes from Oram Award winner Loula Yorke, and arrives hot on the heels of her recent masterpiece Volta. Heard in the context of that album, which relied less on the rave-inspired modular improvisations of her earlier work in favour of conscious composition, Speak, Thou Vast And Venerable Head feels unhurried and unburdened by expectation. It’s as if Volta reset those expectations and allows a sense of levity and freedom to enter Yorke’s electronic structures. The central piece here is the 13-minute ‘Monolithic Undertow’, which shares its title with Harry Sword’s landmark book about drones. Again, Yorke upsets expectation with this piece. Rather than being a dense block of intensely wavering drones, ‘Monolithic Undertow’ extends out on a intricate web of dubby, restless bass arpeggios, over which Yorke layers gently modulating clouds of intangible electronic texture. These are pieces filled with vast, open landscapes of sound and a sense of constant, fluid motion. Released 19 June 2024.
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.
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.
Further. 
You must be logged in to post a comment.