RIP. A weekly roundup of releases on Bandcamp and Soundcloud selected and delivered by Aidan
Mid-September and all that. It’s actually my 10th wedding anniversary today. Wuurt.
TOTSTELLEN - WORKING WRECK / WRECKING WORK (repurpossessed)
“working wreck / wrecking work is based on concrete field recordings of a journey through germany, the netherlands, france and ireland; climaxing in a massive car crash, followed by a night in the overcrowded ER (track 05) of cork hospital”
WELL now. Lots of incredible noise sounds here, transmutated and destroyed and corroded and refashioned, from mundane and traumatic life experience to high art. Any money made from this release will go towards the crew of the Iuventa, a rescue ship/crew that saved the lives of refugees in the Mediterranean when no one else would before the ship was siezed by Italian authorities and the crew charged with facilitating immigration, effectively branding them smugglers. See more here.
Lola de Puy-Montbrun - Poema Documenta
Deep and strange ambient sounds, not sure who the artist is but sure look. Slowly unfurling, revealing new moments and ideas, like the sound of an afternoon spent quietly listening to the world.
This release is bright and bouncy and colourful, sounds darting back and forth while blobs of synth spread across the spectrum like a game of paddle war. ‘one2MANY’ is a wonderfully lush and expansive but honestly the whole thing is a dream.
Carl Ritger - Frozen Lake Assemblage
Full Spectrum just released two “limited edition lathe cuts”, one from mor eaze (where she splits “the difference between Fennesz and Robert Ashley”) and one from Carl Ritger, also of Great Circles. This one is languid and murky, its text referring to the soup of life and the heat death of the universe. Somewhere between the minutiae of everyday life and the epic grandeur of unintelligible time and space there stands this 13-minute release, trying to make sense of it all while we go about our business of existence.
Patricia Wolf's Ambient Flo Mix For Worldwide FM London
Friend of the Cloud Patricia Wolf conjures up a sublime 60 minutes of ambient sounds for Brian d’Souza’s Ambient Flo project. Expect beauty and wonder from the likes of Hoavi, X.Y.R., HTRK (whose new album is a treat), Ffion, KMRU and more.
Utterly relentless sounds from slikback, like I honestly don’t think I could listen to this all in one go. A whopping 16 tracks created in collaboration with a host of artists feted and unheralded, from Objekt and Brodinski and KMRU (again) to GRAŃ and DJ No Regular Meat. Grimy noise (in the biblical sense) and trippy dance and more, it’s cacophonic at times, enlivening throughout and generally fukcking mad.
Blue Lick - Hold On, Hold Fast
This album is a bit strange too, but in an entirely different manner. It’s full of beautifully bizarre sound design, accompanied by poetic spoken word that I simply cannot fathom. I would love to write more but it’s on a higher plane than I can appreciate and I simply want to bring it to your attention.
Tump described this as a place for all his “demos, orphans, compilation tracks and generally weird pieces to go”. I enjoyed listening to the scratchy bits of noise that were collected here and think you should check it out. If you do, download weekly as he may remove tracks from time to time.
Dinelka Liyanage - ONE SPACE (EKA THANAK)
Sri Lankan artist Dinelka Liyanage shared this three-track set without any commentary, so it’s left to us to create or divine whatever meaning there may be. Longform(ish?) ambient drones and moods, with drifting backdrops and discordant tones that could be deliberately badly played stringed instruments or could be some sort of terrifying sonic abstraction.
The JWA - Moon Eclipse Overshoot
If you like basically anything by The Orb you’ll love this. Originally recorded a full 30 years ago, this is a fascinating mixtape/live performance by The JWA, released by frbh. It features brilliantly composed sonic oddities, samples of brilliantly recognisable classic songs, the sound of animals (not quite roosters), warbling, wobbline tape sounds, sports commentary, detuned and slowed-down acid rave music, news reports, Kraftwerk, laugh tracks, sounds from space, giant choirs, look if you’re not sold already it’s not for you. It’s blimmin great though.
Norman W. Long - BLACK BROWN GRAY GREEN
Hausu Mountain delivering YET AGAIN. Though I should say that Norman W. Long recently released some stuff on his own and it was awesome, so really this is a marvellous joining together of greatness rather than one elevating the other. ANYWAY. This is a fascinating release, inspired by and building on sound walks and breathing exercises, a method of reconnecting with our bodies and with each other. Long comes from South Deering, on the south side of Chicago, a majority black and brown community that like many has been disconnected from its “environment, economy, sense of self and place”. The music and sounds here combine field recordings of the natural environment with a fascinating digital world, the two combining in such a way that while the larger facets of each may be recognisable, the more nuanced details are lost at the intersection of both. ‘Essential/Sacrificial(Worksong)’ refers to how many in the black community are forced to expose themselves to the virus due to the nature of their jobs, largely in the overall service industry. Not everyone can work from home, and it’s important to remember the people who are facilitating the protection that many of us have enjoyed from our own homes.
I was going to make a dad joke about the signals being right to me, but I’ll leave it. I missed this on release somehow, but I’ve been playing it a bunch this week. Really nice, trippy sounds and melodies, weird and glurping synth notes and tones.
An incredible, thunderous juke(?) track from Kush Jones that is an ode to Bobby Caldwell, in that it samples two of his tracks that made for absolute classic rap joints. The music is from ‘My Flame’, sampled by BIG for Sky’s The Limit, and the vocal, from ‘Darling Open Your Eyes’, you may recognise from Common’s ‘The Light’.
Gorgeous, ethereal, otherworldly.
Finally this week! A double-whammy from myself. Lobster Theremin invited me to contribute to their podcast series, and I gave them an hour of feel-good house music. We have music from the late-80s to today, from the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, from the early to the late-10s, with artists like Glenn Underground, Larry Heard, James Holden, Olive T, Satoshi Tomiie and Todd Edwards and many more. Friends and legends, both, neither. I fairly agonised over it but it’s all in the name of fun.
I also recorded a radio show the night before this aired, on an entirely different tip. Given I knew this bangerific mix would be airing some 12 hours later, and following on from all the ~discourse~ last week, I decided to make it an ambient special. It covers a huge rage of ambient sounds, featuring artists like pub, claire rousay, the above-mentioned Patricia Wolf, Siavash Amini, Sufjan Stevens, Roland Kayn, PINKCOURTESYPHONE, Teresa Winter, Julianna Barwick… Two hours is both a long and an incredibly short amount of time. Shout out to Sisu, the last dragon.
PS. RIP DJ Mehdi