Tag: Touch

Shots: Washington Formica / Jem Finer & John Matthias / Cloud Canyons / Forster

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WASHINGTON FORMICA – BUREAU 31

Washington Formica is the alias of French collagist Musta Fior. Bureau 31 arrived a week after ‘Essentials Oils’, which formed part of The Impermanence Project through my own Mortality Tables imprint. The two releases are markedly different. Whereas ‘Essentials Oils’ was built around dense clusters of drones, Bureau 31 focuses its attention on rhythms. The parallel between them comes in the most subtle of variations, with the carefully constructed beats continually shifting despite seeming fixed. In this way, it evokes Autechre’s ‘Repetitive Beats’, though the pace is much more languid. I listened to the chill ‘Porte C’ while driving to breakfast in Los Angeles along a palm tree-lined boulevard under a vivid blue Californian morning sky. It felt like the perfect accompaniment to a paradisiacal moment, the sinewy acid phrasing creating a sense of latent optimism. Elsewhere, the ten-minute title track begins slowly, before building up layer after layer of drums, over which sounds that swing with an implied jazziness are added. A brilliant addition to the Washington Formica catalogue. Released August 14 2026 by Wormhole World.

https://wormholeworld.bandcamp.com/album/bureau-31

JEM FINER / JOHN MATTHIAS – ALMOST STARLIGHT

Almost Starlight pairs two musicians who might be better described as conceptualists. Jem Finer might be known as a guitarist and founding member of The Pogues, but his solo multidisciplinary activities have included thought-provoking pieces like Longplayer, an installation in a Docklands lighthouse using singing bowl samples that will run until 2999. John Matthias is nominally a violinist and arranger who has worked with Radiohead and others, but his backstory involves studying theoretical physics, which informs his approach to composition. Almost Starlight finds Finer playing hardy gurdy as a complement to Matthias’s swooping violin observations, recorded at Ashton Church of St. John the Baptist in Devon in July 2025. They are joined on key pieces by Jay Auborn (cello / percussion), the result being an atmospheric collection where classical forms are re-framed with electronic music sensibilities. ‘Queen Of Winds’ stands out as a highlight, wherein strange percussion sounds provide a metronomic pulse that is offset by howling winds of discordancy. Meanwhile, ‘As Low As Possible’ centres its attention on drones continually being pitched downwards, giving rise to a somewhat disconcerting feeling of time and existence coming to a dead stop. Released September 4 2026 by Touch.

https://touch333.bandcamp.com/album/almost-starlight

CLOUD CANYONS – BODY WISDOM

“I have to go away and leave again,” is a central lyric on ‘Double Vision’, the sparse and fragile opening track on Cloud Canyons’ new album, Body Wisdom. Those lyrics precipitate a record that travels far from this initial moment of subtlety. Then again, the Italian quartet of Stella Baraldi, Michelle Christofori, Laura Storchi and Nicola Caleffi are rarely known for standing still. I initially came upon their music with last year’s Ecstasy / Discipline, which contained two tracks as different as they were alike. Body Wisdom takes that duality even further, presented as a collection of nine long pieces that journey toward vital electronic body music, a final state that is barely hinted at when the album starts. Along the way they offer sinewy synth sequences that evoke Giorgio Moroder, the wild blunt force of Factory Floor and trippy, psychedelic imagery. ‘Dream Hunter’ is my personal favourite here, its repeated synth sequence giving me joyful memories of the first time I listened to Suicide. An exciting stage in Cloud Canyons’ ongoing metamorphosis. Released September 4 2026.

https://cloudcanyonsband.bandcamp.com/album/body-wisdom

FORSTER – LIVE AT OHM

A wise person said to me recently that “noise is in the ear of the beholder”. I had those words rattling around in my head when I started playing Live At Ohm by Forster (Mitchell Keaney and Davide Luciani); by the end of this recording of their show in Berlin in January 2026, my ears were ringing. In a good way, I should stress. In the same way that my ears were ringing for days after attending the final Throbbing Gristle concert in 2010. I knew what to expect. I visited the head of The Tapeworm at his London HQ a few months back and he gushed, “You must listen to this!” and played me the third track from this collection – loud, at foundation-troubling volume – where the bass intensity was physically impactful. Keaney and Luciani handle dangerous levels of distortion, probably without feeling the need for hazmat suits, and inputs are subjected to such savage processing that any hope of tracing their original provenance is pointless. In the case of that third track, a form of industrial techno emerges, but it is utterly, joyously, fractured. There are moments where what sounds like an ethereal voice floats gently above the din, but it is sucked down into the maelstrom of angry bass and clipped rhythms leaving barely a trace of itself. A joy to behold. Released October 2 2026 by The Tapeworm / The Wormhole.

https://the-tapeworm.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-ohm

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2026 Further.

Shots: Bowing / Claire M Singer / Astrïd / Tape Loop Orchestra / Amon Ra Collective

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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

(c) 2024 Further.

Shots: Any Second Now / Bana Haffar / Goldston – Jones – Kelley – Larkin / Awakened Souls / Yui Onodera

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ANY SECOND NOW – Any Second Now

This album of synth pop genius was released in December but only hit my inbox recently. A London duo of vocalist Steve Olander and synth whizz Alex Hall, Any Second Now take their name from one of the most subtle Vince Clarke-penned moments on Depeche Mode’s 1981 debut, and Any Second Now is resolutely faithful to electronic pop’s best vintages. Containing songs written over the last four decades but which were never recorded, these thirteen songs are filled to bursting point with crystalline, haunting one-note synth melodies and skeletal drum machine rhythms. With the opening and closing instrumental tracks (‘Peking Sunrise’ and ‘Peking Sunset’), Any Second Now isolate the early 1980s’ fascination with travel and far-off, exotic places, while the semi-detached, almost spoken emotional vocal of key tracks ‘Plastic World’ and ‘No Face’ serve as useful reminders of how easily early synth pop evolved out of punk. These songs are all poised perfectly between darkness and lightness, with ‘Who Killed Kennedy?’ tackling one of the most-asked questions of all time with a cheerful, if unresolvable, levity, while the title track is easily one of the most infectiously joyous pop tracks you’ll ever hear. Simply brilliant.

Any Second Now by Any Second Now was released December 17 2022.

https://anysecnow.bandcamp.com/album/any-second-nowanysecnow.bandcamp.com/album/any-second-now

BANA HAFFAR – intimaa’ (Touch)

intimaa’, the latest album from Montreal-based sound artist and modular electronics pioneer Bana Haffar, can be thought of as a sensitive and delicate collision of styles. On the one hand, key pieces like ‘Elemental’ and ‘Lifter’ highlight the vibrant and often unpredictable pathways that can be established by patching a bunch of magical sound-making boxes together; on the other, they are infused with structures, shapes, rhythms, atmospheres, field recordings and melodic detail that nod to traditional Middle Eastern music. As a listener, you can listen intently for these moments, or just appreciate intimaa’ as a richly textured ambient masterpiece.

intimaa’ by Bana Haffar was released May 19 2023 by Touch.

https://banahaffarreleases.bandcamp.com/album/intimaabanahaffarreleases.bandcamp.com/album/intimaa

GOLDSTON / JONES / KELLEY / LARKIN – Miasms (Full Spectrum Records)

Miasms brings together Lori Goldston (cello), Greg Kelley (trumpet), Al Jones (electronics) and Austin Larkin (violin) for four improvised pieces, recorded in 2019. The occasion was an exhibition focused on the remains of a piano which had been dropped from a helicopter onto musician Larry Van Over’s farm in Duvall, Washington in 1968, an extreme artistic gesture that carried more than a whiff of Fluxus about it. The four musicians here are, in part, responding to the visual stimulus of the piano’s shattered remnants, but the main jumping-off point came through Jones attaching various electronic devices to the piano itself. Each piece contains an intense and intricate soundworld that fluctuates between the quiet and the dissonant. On ‘Two’, thick drones emerge from a turbulent, volatile squall of strings, while the comparatively calm ‘Three’ concerns itself with smaller gestures before a disruptive trumpet blast from Kelley forces the adaptable players into a more strident formation.

Miasms by Goldston / Jones / Kelley / Larkin was released August 4 2023 by Full Spectrum Records.

https://fullspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/miasmsfullspectrumrecords.bandcamp.com/album/miasms

AWAKENED SOULS – unlikely places (Past Inside The Present)

awakened souls are a duo of Cynthia Bernard (voice, guitar) and James Bernard (bass, synths, guitar). Inspired by the idea that we can all find creative impulses in the least likely of places if only we took the time to stay present, this collection of ten pieces is perhaps one of the most delicate, contemplative albums I’ve heard. Reassuring and comforting, pieces like ‘waiting’ are nevertheless poised and purposeful, not exercises in empty ambient drifting. An oscillating synth tone on ‘fall asleep, dream’ floats determinedly over soft, undulating sounds and Cynthia’s ethereal vocals, collectively guiding your awareness and providing clarity to the disorganised clutter of your mind. Beyond beatific, and a joy to be in the company of.

unlikely places by awakened souls was released August 16 2023 by Past Inside The Present.

pitp.bandcamp.com/album/unlikely-placeshttps://pitp.bandcamp.com/album/unlikely-places

YUI ONODERA – Mizuniwa (Decaying Spheres)

For Mizuniwa, sound artist Yui Onodera recorded sounds while visiting the Tochigi Prefecture, a landlocked area lying 80km to the north of his Tokyo home. A beautiful, tranquil location encompassing mountains, national parks, water falls and, on the basis of this album, ample sources of inspiration for Onodera. The six pieces here have a life-affirming warmth, full of rich, constantly-moving yet subtle synth layers and naturalistic water sounds. For me, key pieces like ‘Mizuniwa 2’ and ‘Mizuniwa 6’ are sonic embodiments of the concept of shakkei, whereby a background landscape is incorporated into the design of a garden. In this way, Onodera’s pieces encompass distant horizons and close-up details, making for a truly transcendent listening experience.

Mizuniwa by Yui Onodera was released August 4 2023 by Decaying Spheres.

yuionodera.bandcamp.com/album/mizuniwa

Words: Mat Smith

Thanks to Graeme.

(c) 2023 Further.

drøne – The Long Song

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drøne is a duo of Mark Van Hoen and Touch’s Mike Harding, accompanied by ‘invited guests’. Presented as a single piece divided into discrete sonic movements, The Long Song captures the pair exploring a soundworld characterised by tiny, almost imperceptible changes in currents.

On ‘Escapement’, snatches of overheard conversation and baritone prayer calls join hissing noises that sound like gas escaping from a damaged canister, what could be a faltering shortwave data broadcast and tiny clusters of electronic melody. The interplay between these disparate elements is sudden and fleeting. Nothing stays in place for long. Everything – literally everything you hear – is ephemeral and inconsequential.

The approach taken on ‘Escapement’ runs through the entire duration of The Long Song. On ‘Altamura’, sounds arrange themselves into an inchoate, distant rhythm, but just as you start to lock into its abstract groove, it drops away and is replaced by a grainy – possibly VHS – recording of a weather broadcast from a location that isn’t specific. The effect is like listening at twin speeds: a sense of things unfolding both slowly and also rapidly. This isn’t some intense trading of ideas designed to appeal to the hyperactivity of the modern age, as the pace is rarely ever frantic; yet somehow ideas are allowed to evolve here at a surprising velocity, just one that is delivered with the extremest subtlety.

‘Inanna’ is one of the most gripping and arresting pieces on the album. Here, a collection of haunting, overlapping choral vocals (from Bana Haffar, Jana Winderen, Anna von Hausswolff and others) floats delicately and elegiacally into view. The presentation is at once uplifting, joyous and vital, yet they float above a foundation layer of gravelly, impenetrable sub-bass and clusters of wild static. As soon as your attention locks onto that, any sense of joy immediately evaporates, leaving you suddenly doubtful and uncertain. Something similar happens on ‘He Frightened The Bird Away’ which follows, only here it is a vaguely sinister, alien tapping sound and restless non-rhythm that punctures its way through clouds of becalming, descending harmonies.

There are countless moments like this across ‘The Long Song’, moments that trip you up and force you to reconsider what it is that you thought you might have heard, that decontextualise and recontextualise themselves endlessly. It shows two artists in complete control of their sound palettes, fully aware of the powerfully disorienting impact their assemblages can have on a listener.

The Long Song by drøne was released 5 May 2023.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2023 Further.

The Eternal Chord – Bis dat

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Bis dat (Give more) is the latest release from the long-running Spire project, which celebrates the venerable organ and the long shadow cast over the development of contemporary music, from its Roman origins to its divisive association with the architecture of Christian churches. This collection is the second to feature various artists creating new pieces using The Eternal Chord ensemble’s Semper Liber (Always Free) album from 2018 as their source material, and finds artists as diverse as Faith Coloccia, BJ Nilsen and Zachary Paul offering tracks that further invert any commonly held misconceptions about the organ.

The Eternal Chord is curated by Touch’s Mike Harding and consists of Marcus Davidson, Hildur Gudnadottir, Charles Matthews, Clare M. Singer, Maia Urstad, Anna Von Hausswolff and others. Live performance is a critical aspect of The Eternal Chord, and Semper Liber was compiled and edited from various Spire events that have taken place around the world since 2009. Generally being custom-built for the specific location into which they were going to be installed, the players are just one aspect of Semper Liber – the other is the distinct sonic personality of the organ which is being played, whether that be the 1877 ‘Father’ Henry Willis organ at London’s Union Chapel or the comparatively modern 1967 Karl Ludwig Schuke instrument at Berlin’s Passionskirche.

Very often, it’s not really possible to identify anything resembling an organ on these pieces. Even allowing for aggressive processing and atypical performance, the instrument has a distinctive character which manages to cut through any alteration process. Brief moments of that character emerge in Faith Coloccia’s ‘Voice IV Sarcode’ or in the frozen stillness in the background of strom|morts’ ‘Absolute Magnitude Hermetism’, but for the most part what the organ provides to these pieces is a suggestion of its tonal familiarity.

One of the organ’s technical innovations was the ability to create infinitely held tones, and these pieces are filled with such drones – static, immovable blocks of texture that are anything but still. In the hands of Rhodri Davies’ ‘HAARP’, he deploys his e-bow to his harp to create layers of squalling, overlapping drones over the course of his 31-minute contribution. His piece is, at first, aggressive and uncomfortable, but listen to the delicate microtonal shifts sitting just on the edges, and what emerges is strangely hypnotic and uplifting. Something similar happens on Zachary Paul’s visceral ‘Sunken Cathedral’, where his scratchy violin rests on top of a a shimmering, impenetrable blur of rapid oscillations and drones so ephemeral that they could be sonic approximations of heat haze.

The Eternal Chord is a collaborative project in its own right, and Bis dat is broad minded enough to accommodate collaborations within that collaboration. Alcibiades is a pairing of the elusive radio static-manipulating venoztks and Jay Glass Dubs. Their ominous ‘Omicronology’ exists as a combination of skipping, hopping waves of intrafrequency growling and unfathomable vocal bursts, over which an inquisitive gamelan-style melody is interwoven. We hear echoes of the piece’s background radiation in a concluding piece from The Eternal Chord – ‘Omnia transeunt’ – which is many steps removed from anything resembling an organ, a ringing synth pulse and whistling sound approximating an unpredictable melody.

We all have a perception of what organ music sounds like. With Bis dat, and indeed all the various Spire activities, we are encouraged – forcibly, noisily and occasionally uncomfortably – to rethink that perception.

Bis dat was released May 6 2022 by Spire / Touch.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2022 Further.

Bethan Kellough – The Underlying / venoztks – light breaker

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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. 

Vacation Playlist: Edinburgh, August 2021

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On Sunday August 22 2021 I flew for the first time since before the pandemic. A short flight to Edinburgh was something that I’d have done, before, fairly often, usually accompanied by things to review. It occurred to me a few days before that I’d need to plan what to listen to in the air, an active decision over what to listen offline after spending most of the pandemic period constantly online, with access to anything. It felt a lot like travelling as a teenager, where I’d pack my Walkman and choose a bunch of tapes to haul around with me.

I decided to trawl through recent Bandcamp additions – purchases I’d made or promos I’d been sent – and that formed the basis of my in-flight entertainment. While in Edinburgh I visited Nigerian sound artist Emeka Ogboh’s Song Of The Union at the Robert Burns Memorial near Calton Hill. 

Take-off: CARL STONE – NAMIDABASHI

Carl Stone’s contribution to Touch’s brilliant Displacing subscription series translates roughly as Bridge Of Tears and was recorded for Radio Free Nakano in his Tokyo base. The 15-minute piece is one of fragile momentum, seeming to rush forth and build into a sort of suppressed motorik groove while retaining an effortless, dreamy levity. Released May 28 2021 by Touch.

https://touchdisplacing.bandcamp.com/track/namidabashi

In-flight: LISTENING LANDSCAPES – LL#1 (MUSIC FROM RIVER DERWENT) / RIVER DERWENT SOUNDSCAPES 

Two 2021 releases from Dan Davies, both recorded using the sounds of the river Derwent in Derbyshire. Both illustrate Davies’ approach to taking field recordings and responding to them with additional composition for a diverse array of instruments, or leaving them poignantly unadorned. As such, these releases straddle the tranquility of listening to water and wind sounds (River Derwent Soundscapes) with delicately composed accompaniments (on LL#1) that are both mournful, vibrant and often noisy. Released March 28 2021 / May 6 2021.

https://listeninglandscapes.bandcamp.com/album/ll-1-music-from-river-derwent

https://listeninglandscapes.bandcamp.com/album/river-derwent-soundscapes

In-flight / landing: CARNEDD AUR – BEETLES 

Simon Proffitt’s work under the Carnedd Aur alias differs from his usual solo output as Cahn Ingold Prelog and The Master Musicians Of Dyffryn Moor by opting for more of an intentionally accessible output. Originally intended to be a body of work that his parents might recognise as something vaguely adjacent to electronic pop, the project instead became an engaging leftfield project whose titles were all inspired by different sub-species of beetles, with a sound that’s pure insectoid minimal acid-inflected techno. Released August 6 2021 by superpolar Taïps.

https://superpolar.bandcamp.com/album/beetles

On location: EMEKA OGBOH – SONG OF THE UNION

Nigerian artist Emeka Ogboh’s contribution to Edinburgh’s Art Festival is a thought-provoking seven-channel sound art work installed in the Robert Burns Monument near Calton Hill. For the piece, Ogboh recorded versions of Burns’ poignant ‘Auld Lang Syne’ sung by twenty-seven Europeans living in Scotland, one from each of the member states of the European Union that the UK left in January 2021. His work has a subtle power as you sit in the Burns Monument and listen to the interwoven voices singing atop one another; being of Scottish descent, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ has always had subtle, stirring poignancy for me; heard in the context of a political work swirling and echoing around the circular space, its maudlin outlook is deeply unsettling. The day after I visited, I found myself walking past the building again. I could hear the plaintive voices wafting sadly into the aether, like ephemeral vapours of what once was. Song Of The Union runs to August 29 2021.

https://www.trg.ed.ac.uk/exhibition/emeka-ogboh-song-union

Take-off / in-flight: JAMES MAINWARING – MYCORRHIZA 

Saxophonist James Mainwaring occupies a sort of indeterminate zone between improvisation and composition. His latest album for Discus is titled after the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi and its 13 pieces carry a similar sense of integration between the instrumentation. The signature piece is ‘Komorebi’, which features Mainwaring’s sax alongside mournful strings and field recordings of birds made near the house where he grew up, an extra level of significance when you learn that the house is scheduled to be demolished as part of the HS2 construction project. On ‘Statues’, which begins as an understated ballad and ends as a free and urgent piece, Mainwaring’s playing nods reverentially in the direction of Paul Desmond; ‘Globe’, on the other hand, makes an unexpected left-turn into synthesiser minimalism and insistent post-rock, angular musings. Released Juy 13 2021 by Discus Music.

https://discusmusic.bandcamp.com/album/mycorrhiza-111cd-2021

In-flight / landing: ANNA MEREDITH – BUMPS PER MINUTE: 18 STUDIES FOR DODGEMS 

Bumps Per Minute was Somerset House resident composer Anna Meredith’s contribution to the London venue’s entertaining DODGE experience, which closed on August 22 2021. Though most people just went for the nostalgia of riding an old fairground ride after a few cocktails, every hour, Meredith and sound artist Nick Ryan would subvert the traditional dodgem ride so that every bump or collision would trigger a different one of her specially-written compositions. The companion album includes those 18 compositions played all the way through; it might lack the chaotic randomness of the ride experience, but it nevertheless carries a decent approximation of what it was like to laugh uproariously, half-cut on over-priced cocktails, as you careered around the track accompanied by a skipping soundtrack that felt like a malfunctioning player piano tackling Don Dorsey’s Main Street Electrical Parade music through an 8-bit computer. Released July 15 2021.

https://annahmeredith.bandcamp.com/album/bumps-per-minute-18-studies-for-dodgems

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Further. 

Faith Coloccia & Philip Jeck – Stardust

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Sometimes in life you find yourself constructing walls around yourself, often subconsciously. Those structures form through the need for emotional self-preservation, retreat, a desire for safety or just through a need to fend off something that you feel bearing down on you. Some of those walls are temporary and as fragile as an ego; others are like a bunker, as permanent as a concrete cap on an atomic bomb-ravaged atoll.

As 2020 dragged itself without fanfare into 2021, I found myself building a few of those walls. I built those walls using sound – drones, soundscapes, textural ambience, deep listening – played loudly through earphones that allowed me to shut out the rest of the world. These listening sessions were like sonic screens, enclosed spaces that allowed me to breathe freely when life and relationships seemed to want to starve me of oxygen. They were both fleeting (the length of an album, the duration of a single piece, cut-off halfway through to attend to chores, teenagers, kittens) and enduring, often staying with me long after whatever I was listening to had finished; though these pieces typically lacked discernible rhythms, they allowed my mind and imagination to dance wildly in a cathartic nightclub, while also blocking out the incessant, relentless, repetitive sound of gloomy, compression-heavy YouTube hip-hop videos played at excruciating volume from our lounge.

Such was the case with Stardust, the sonic screen that seems to have provided the hardest exterior of all the things that I’ve listened to of late. Consisting of eleven pieces derived from dubplates of sounds recorded made by Faith Coloccia on Washington state’s Vashon Island between 2015 and 2018, these sounds were then processed and augmented by avant garde turntablist Philip Jeck in Liverpool last year as lockdown rolled its way toward the bleakest of winters. It falls somewhere between a collaboration characterised by an absence of direct collaboration, and a sound art call-and-response.

Not that Stardust is some sort of pastoral, easy-listening ambient fluff. Its architecture is characterised by a fretful, fidgety, wandering core, flitting between passages of wordless vocal murmuring and churning, antsy noise loops. And yet, for all its challenging adornments, as a whole this album is curiously soothing. Sounds and loops begin to slip out of reach, typically just as you’ve become comforted by their presence, and there is this continual sense of elusiveness, of sounds too fleeting to endure. It would be easy to be stressed by a piece like ‘Creosote’, which embodies all of these facets – and which moves seamlessly between the pretty and the pretty ugly – but instead it becomes weirdly peaceful; so much so that you drop this as a dirty sound bomb over a warzone and weapons would be laid down and ceasefires signalled.

Pieces like the title track have a gently swirling, endarkened motion, like listening to the sound of debris funnelled rapidly skywards after an explosion, yet a certain muted, choral stateliness seems to reveal itself as the piece progresses. ‘Archaea’ has some of the same qualities, its reverb-drenched fabric sounding like the dense throb of rush-hour traffic in a tunnel and a Latin hymn heard from outside a cathedral. ‘Mycorrhizae’ is the most wonderfully noisy and challenging piece of the collection, its distorted sonic core prowling into view like an incessant machine and staying richly grubby and enveloping throughout.

There are also moments of delicate levity – ‘Acquire The Air’ inches forward on held tones and brooding, looped spirals which give a sense of contemplation, while ‘Usnea’ has a ringing processed piano refrain that sounds like joyously peeling bells. Perhaps the most surprising moment here is also where Jeck’s presence is least felt – on ‘Speaking Stone’, which is essentially a vehicle for Coloccia’s beguiling, haunting vocal, here pitched somewhere between folk whimsy and dark nursery rhyme (Coloccia recorded while her newborn son was sleeping, so a nursery rhyme isn’t far off the mark). Jeck’s contribution is treacly rich reverb, giving Coloccia’s voice a displaced, otherworldly outlook. The same vocal appears again on the album’s concluding track, ‘Sun’, augmented by febrile sounds heard from an obliterated, broken point off in the distance, or from within the walls that surround me every time I play this captivating album.


Stardust by Faith Coloccia & Philip Jeck was released May 21 2021 by Touch. With thanks to the Minister of Names.

Words: Mat Smith

(c) 2021 Further.

Shots: Audiomaze, The Green Kingdom, Sweeney, Geneva Skeen, Sad Man, Saturnin Sektor, William S. Burroughs & Brion Gysin

On By 429harrowroadIn Album reviewsLeave a comment

AUDIOMAZE – ERRATIC GESTURES & STATIC INSTABILITY (Downstream Records) 

A new album from Downstream Records founder and fan of aliases Damon Vallero, who we last covered when he released last year’s Damaged Textures album under the name Local Sound Developer. Erratic Gestures & Static Instability finds Vallero deploying the quirky Cocoquantus and Plumbutter units from Baltimore synth house Ciat-Lonbarde, whose unique sound-creating interfaces give the album a playful suite of timbres but also more than an affectionate nod in the direction of some of the earliest electronic music experiments. The buzzing topline of ‘Wasp Having A Spa Day’ and its seesawing, wobbly foundation layer wins the prize for the most evocative track of the collection, while ‘Levitation’ has a soothing, contemplative quality ideally suited to a brief moment of calm in the maelstrom of our diurnal existences. Wonderful sounds from St. Albans and another release from Vallero worth spending some quality time with. Released February 5 2021. 

https://downstreamrecords.bandcamp.com/album/erratic-gestures-static-instability

THE GREEN KINGDOM – SOLARIA / SWEENEY – MISERY PEAKS (Sound In Silence) 

Two new releases from the Athens-based Sound In Silence imprint. The first, from Michigan-based Michael Cottone’s long-running The Green Kingdom project, is a collection of warm, almost folksy ambient soundscapes for electronics and guitar that – to this listener anyway – evokes the subtle optimism that comes with the shift from winter to spring. The details here are what’s important: the eight-minute ‘Arc’ offers a melody that nods in the direction of The Isley Brothers’ version of ‘Summer Breeze’ and ‘Sol 1’ sounds like what happened when Depeche Mode opened the gate to A Broken Frame’s secret garden. The second, Misery Peaks by Australian Jason Sweeney, finds the singer and sound artist offering a ruminative suite of songs over an intricate backdrop of turbulent gestures, modern classical tonalities, harsh industrial noise and sparse, fractured rhythms. ‘Sun’ is the album’s towering highlight, a plaintive love song placed in the context of a constantly-shifting tapestry of sonic events underpinned by a shrouded, submerged pulse. Both released March 27 2021. 

https://soundinsilencerecords.bandcamp.com/

GENEVA SKEEN – THE CLAP OF THE FADING-OUT SOUND OF YOUR SHOES (Touch) 

Geneva Skeen’s contribution to Touch’s Displacing subscription series finds her using the recorded sounds of Los Angeles from earlier this year and augmenting those with electronic manipulations to form a single piece of episodic, adventurous sound art. Like Chris Watson’s Displacing contribution (Station Chapelle), Skeen’s sounds have a strange, slightly unplaceable otherness. We are told that these sounds originate from LA, but how can we really be sure? What are the critical signifiers of their provenance? What is so distinctive about the hum of a helicopter, a person humming quietly to themselves, what could be the sound of cars driving over joints in a concrete bridge or the rain that makes these sounds sound like LA? This is perhaps the beauty of any field recording taken out of context – they are sounds that need explaining, that need justifying, as if we could not expect to comprehend them otherwise. Put that irreverent psychobabble to one side and what you have is an exciting, vibrant suite of noisy-beautiful sounds that carry a brooding purpose and a dark energy… which I guess is a fairly accurate depiction of LA, actually, now I come to think of it. The Clap Of The Fading-Out Sound Of Your Shoes is another brilliantly evocative chapter in the Displacing story. Released April 2 2021. 

https://touchdisplacing.bandcamp.com/community

SAD MAN – THE MAN FROM S.A.D 

A new album arriving through your letterbox from peripatetic Bourneville sonic magician Andrew ‘Sad Man’ Spackman is always a treat. Sidestepping the surprising directional shifts of his last three projects – the oblique radio play Stories From An Island with Francis Lowe for Cue Dot, the claustrophobic Music Of Dreams And Panic for Wormhole World and his soundtrack for silent movie Menilmontant – The Man From S.A.D finds Spackman riffing off the electronic wonkiness that characterised 2020’s genius Daddy Biscuits. More melodic than some of his other releases, for the most part The Man From S.A.D has a cheerful swagger and spring in its step, exemplified by the churning electric forward motion of the standout ‘Finny Feet’ and ‘The Green Opal’. We also find Spackman experimenting with vocal textures and samples across this album, always in typically skewed and playful way (see his brilliantly obtuse soul-inflected block party jam ‘The Shark’). What’s refreshingly omnipresent, though, is his dexterous, restless ability to endlessly hop from one idea to the next without catching breath, an effect that’s a lot like watching Charlie Chaplin in the mesmerising, chaotic but meticulously arranged conveyor belt scene from Modern Times. Released April 23 2021. 

https://sadmanband.bandcamp.com/album/the-man-from-s-a-d

SATURNIN SEKTOR – NIGHT ENCOUNTERS (Cruel Nature Records) 

Kinda hard to write about this new Cruel Nature album by Genovese electronic music duo Saturnin Sektor without using the expression ‘imaginary soundtrack’ or the superlative ‘John Carpenter-esque’ – mostly because Night Encounters is an imaginary soundtrack and its familiar tonality was inspired by the long shadow that Carpenter’s approach to scoring cast over a pivotal segment of the 1980s movie landscape. So you know the drill: stalking basslines, expressive melodies, resolute drum patterns and a heightened sense of psychological drama, which these ten tracks all have in an abundance. MS and TC (the anonymous minds behind the project) break with the format slightly on ‘Among The Ruins’, which manages to adopt a proggy stance courtesy of some soaring ‘Whiter Shade Of Pale’ organ chords; at just shy of five minutes, the preceding action in our imaginary movie suggests a heck of a lot of stuff got ruined. Released April 30 2021. 

https://cruelnaturerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/night-encounters

WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS & BRION GYSIN – WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS & BRION GYSIN 

This vinyl-only release from Cold Spring collects together rare recordings of Beat authors William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, drawing together pieces made while they were both staying in Paris in 1970, an October 1982 Burroughs performance from Liverpool’s Centre Hotel, and a series of poetry readings by Gysin from the mix-1960s. Listening to Burroughs’ familiar drawl from the Centre Hotel recordings, there’s a certain deft humour to his newsreader-like delivery which has the audience in uproarious laughter. Some of Burroughs’ racial language is enormously offensive when heard today, but it’s the home recording of his asserting a nihilistic surrender to junk on an extract from ‘The Beginning Is Also The End’ that’s arguably the collection’s most shocking moment. 

Gysin’s recordings focus on the development of the cut-up technique, including the instructive tape piece ‘Cut Ups Self-Explained’ which sounds like a lecture on the process until its practical demonstration reveals the splices, leading to words placed out of context, suddenly making no sense, making new shapes and inferences instead. Alongside pieces like ‘Pistol Poem’, wherein the dry sound of a gunshot is looped into a nascent rhythm, Gysin initially appears the more experimental of the two word-innovators, but largely only because the Burroughs performance making up most of this album is relatively linear. The inclusion of three versions of the Burroughs piece ‘Invisible Art’, supported by inchoate found sounds and words, does much to even up the balance. Released May 10 2021. 

https://coldspring.bandcamp.com/album/william-s-burroughs-brion-gysin-csr293lp

Words: Mat Smith 

(c) 2021 Further. 

Touch: Isolation

On By 429harrowroadIn Interviews, News2 Comments

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

(c) 2020 Further.