For The Ambient Lovers...review and mixtape archive 001

[Muttley]

The Caretaker (Leyland Kirby) - Extra Patience (After Sebald)



Free download companion to the "Patience (After Sebald)" OST that's available on CD and vinyl today.

http://thecaretaker.bandcamp.com/alb...e-after-sebald

He's been interviewed for The Guardian which is great to see!

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012...y-rings-saturn

On Kirby's soundtrack, loops of Sebald's beloved Schubert are battered and eroded: pianos lollop along, drenched in static, while detuned voices burble from the murk. Sebald's line "the ghosts of repetition that haunt me with ever greater frequency" could easily have been written about Kirby's music itself, so full is it of rolling, wraithlike samples seemingly dredged up from a half-remembered past.

[DIB]

Audio Gourmet presents Hidden Landscape 2

Marsen Jules / Talvihorros / Midori Hirano / The Frozen Vaults / Danny Norbury / Rudi Arapahoe / Federico Durand / Quinn Walker / Pawn / Lawrence English / Field Rotation / Pjusk / Offthesky / Konntinent / Strom Noir / Ian Hawgood

Due to be released on CD Digipak edition of 250 March

Curators by Bartosz Dziadosz (Pleq) and Harry Towell (Spheruleus)
Mastered by Rudi Arapahoe

http://soundcloud.com/bartoszdziadosz/various-hidden-landscape-2

[Annastay]

This is freaking lovely.
http://parks.bandcamp.com/album/depths

[DIB]

Another free Bengalfuel album given away today http://bengalfuel.bandcamp.com/album/amdurer

[Muttley]

Visit Dave's site to get links to what he mentions in this set and tracklist; the sequencing of the first four tracks is stellar.

Low Light - Fire And Ice - An Icelandic Mix

For such a small country, Iceland has produced a surprising number of excellent artists. From Bjork to Mum to Seabear to Olaf Arnalds to Sigur Ros, it's really extraordinary the amount of wonderful music that comes from that island.

This last mix of 2011 is an Icelandic journey. All the music is created by artists from Iceland. The brilliant idea for it came from loyal listener, Kevin. I wasn't sure how much music of Iceland I had in my collection but I was surprised to find quite a bit.

Icelandic music for me begins & ends with Sigur Ros & Bjork. They are both in the mix, with Jonsi, from Sigur Ros, making multiple appearances. In addition to the Sigur Ros tune, Jonsi contributes "Stokkseyri" from Riceboy Sleeps & "9" by Frakkur.

When Kevin suggested the mix & the title, he was thinking of Iceland as a land of extremes...glaciers & volcanoes, 24hr days & 24hr nights. This mix doesn't swing too wildly from one extreme to another. It's more ice than fire. A few of the tunes do build in typical post-rock fashion, but generally things are fairly subdued.

I used two Johann Johannsson tracks fairly close together, which I normally don't like to do but the IBM track just seemed to fit perfectly with the preceding cut. Plus I was just happy to be able to use that IBM track again because I LOVE it!

The pic in this post is from a terrific blog called "Stuck in Customs." Check out the blog or go to his Flickr stream to see some amazing photos. I'm a little tired of the HDR effect in photos but Tret Ratcliff does a really nice job with it & it definitely helps that he is shooting in unbelievable locations.

This was a fun mix to put together & I'd like to thank Kevin for suggesting it, I'm very happy with how it turned out.

T R A C K L I S T :

00:00 Amiina - Boga (from kurr 2007)
06:01 Johann Johannsson - The Flat (from And In The Endless Pause There Came The Sound Of Bees 2009)
08:15 Olafur Arnalds - Himininn er a hrynja, en stjornurnar fara per vel (from Variations Of Static 2007)
12:05 Johann Johannsson - Part 2 Ibm 1403 Printer (from Ibm1401-A Users Manual 2006)
15:50 Stafraenn Hakon - Veggur (from Gummi 2007)
18:55 Valgeir Sigurðsson - Equilibrium is Restored (from Ekvilibrium 2007)
30:54 Jonsi & Alex - Stokkseyri (from Riceboy Sleeps 2009)
37:49 Sigur Rós - Álafoss (from () 2002)
46:15 Hilmar Örn Hilmarsson - Sudurgata (from Children of Nature 1996)
49:08 Bjork - Cosmogony (from Biophillia 2011)
53:40 Frakkur - 9 (from songs for the little boy 2008]
1:01:23 end

Download

As a supplementary note, now I've recommended a fair few mixes in this archive: all these mixes are discerned first before picking them. They have to be special in their own unique way.

[Muttley]

Separate from my columns is a review I just wrote for eMusic.com. I'm having to condense it to 1000 characters there, but it works best like this:

bvdub - The First Day (Home Normal)



To Brock Van Wey's avid fans, "The First Day" imposes unlikely regression after you press play. There, like a memento to old times are his positively slushy melodies, violins stretched, as if they have rode weight through many lifetimes he couldn't experience. But what's clear, from opener "Never In The Prison Of Their Stars", is an obvious incline into Brock's Deep House DJing influence. This isn't your "norm" Home Normal. But beats or not, Brock crafts majestically, opening up a multi-tiered, spliced sequencing effect that posits the mellifluous drone washes he's always honed. Longest cut "The First Day" recalls Brock's collab with Ambient and Electronica artist ASC. Long swirling intro leads into Downtempo kismet, a "What if Orbital slowed down their 'Halycon On And On' with modern production values?" rhetoric. Not intense bvdub, but not lacking balls for all its genre crossing. "While They Dreamed We Were There" debuts piano as rhythmic motif, counterpoint to wispy synths and, unorthodoxly, male vocal - Brock is usually about the feminine adorning his work. Genders are 'speaking' to each other here, adding further dimensions in imagery. "While They...", also pinnacling for wider tonal range, approaches Klimek's "Dedications" LP for emotion. "My Skies Cry Your Name" shreds size by half and hits relocation point in Home Normal's trad nomenclature, melding Brian Eno finesse with delicate pianism. "The First Day", totalling, is actually more progressive than you could imagine, and a highly recommended entry into Brock Van Wey's dense, always deep sound sphere.

http://www.emusic.com/listen/#/album...day/13145746/:

[Muttley]

Kirill Nikolai & Colin Trieber - Three Studies Of October / The Cemetry For Mt. Vernon In Spring

October…almost the coldest month of autumn in Britain…winter’s near, televisual execs free the advert slurry for Christmas shoppers, and there’s an aura of the year climaxing before closure. Feelings of dread, dullness and expectation all coincide in a pre-empted stocking, where the sun’s orange has slipped from view, and the moon casts shadows of doubt over the moods of many. Another way of looking at it is you bond with loved ones further, MOT that love, and power through trauma. Kirill Nikolai and Colin Treiber’s “Three Studies Of October” evokes these psychic images, and from three sweetly formed tracks for acoustic and electric guitar, the duo return us to the original impetus of October’s context: sitting by a log fire, turning the wood, or just chilling on the sofa with the curtains drawn. These homely, cyclical instrumental deposits are never a chore to attend to, and retain just the right amount of rhythmic intervention as they do spatial detachment. They’re very reminiscent of virtuoso James Blackshaw texturally, perhaps not diametrically – all sitting around the six minute mark as opposed to Blackshaw’s vigorous session stylism. The doubling interplay of guitars pokes a deeper cove too; a multi-maximal instrumental soundscape where pretence is never offputting. Essence of destination resume predominates “Three”, the last on the 3′ CD-R – tempo and intensity rise to a peak of stewed tea effusiveness, playing styles wirring like a boiled kettle, which then wears out its electric cord in the aftermath of much appeal.

“The Cemetry For Mt. Vernon In Spring”, Nikolai and Treiber’s next recording in Spring 2011, is also issued as 3′ CD-R, and Reverb Worship pairing the two is fitting: both musicians extend their expertise; Nikolai to 6/12 string acoustic guitars and field recordings; Trieber a new, biological osmosis, where every release of his guitar’s reverb brings in a cumulative, beneficial turgidness to the sound spectrum. This works one of two ways. First, it buffers your attentiveness in certain places. Second, it reduces overall attentiveness in nature of in/out, combined with diagnostic of reverb; the soft belly in the music; the obscure instability in the production; an emptiness syndrome waiting for a full meal, digested through deviation in length. So the pieces here are shorter, being split into five unnamed parts over 13 minutes, whereby tension and unobtrusiveness of the rain and creaking (barn-door-esque) field rec of “Part II” go hand in hand with the brighter revelation “III”, stepping chords smudging themselves into an unpained, antidepressive detachment device. It’s spiffy syrup melodically, stylistically in line with the Folk guitar experiments Rameses III reached for on their “No Water, No Moon”. “Pt. IV” reverts as supplementary field recording, which perhaps ends too abrubtly for it to be of worth besides EP pattern recognition. But when “PT. V” arrives that endorsement of character is appreciated, since this finishing piece remodels its scope to walk the red carpet: twirls of the strings, looks in several tonal directions, but a straightahead goal: to please and purfiy the disc.

Procrastination is the root of all shrivel. I found with these two short collections an absence of festering inspiration, which revitalised my own mind, moreover loosening up functions that were impenetrably shut down. Nikolai and Trieber pose a certain tapestry of thought that’s inclusive learning-about-self, to reach new self, and self-worth. This artistic signposting by them won’t change the face of acoustic guitar records forever, but it does add to a stream of goodness that is regrettably in decline. And heck, if I had the moolah, I’d buy these just for the beautiful cloth casings! – Recommended.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/02...non-in-spring/

[Muttley]

Last Harbour - Escape Was All I Ever Meant (Little Red Rabbit)

There’s a succinct difference between lying and being economical with the truth. The latter, what most people use as a privacy shield, happens prior to any theoretical advent of lying. To lie pushes this advent into a realistic full block of privacy, and as for what the recipient thinks, it doesn’t really matter. Because for the liar, what they believe is more important is themselves.

The idealising of what is economical and that which is false is also a pitfall of the remix project. The listener asked to remix a work has to decide whether certain sounds fit their narrative, or whether they contradict their meaning, just like a lie itself. The producer’s mindset then ponders a wheat/chaff base approach to sampling from original material, and uses economy with a plan to eradicate falseness. Where that split is lacking, it can be deduced there’s an indecisivess between being economical and lying – a lying to oneself with thinking an idea would work at all.

It’s testament to “Escape Was All I Ever Meant” and its pleasing economy and falseness – or linguistically, what’s regularly posited at Alt. music – the foregone conclusion principle of pretension – of Last Harbour’s “Your Heart, It Carries The Sound”, that this remix project bags up the essentials and lies to oneself in terms of thematic consistency; much as indie music does with sweet nothings in the ear of recipient. Yet, like the propensity of a lie, when I think of a harbour, I don’t think of it as an arrival service. It’s always about departure, of a key to future freedom. When you have a band called Last Harbour, those ideas don’t quite correspond. Their name has a certain action-refrain, an inflexuous foreboding of disaster waiting to happen. And fittingly, Last Harbour’s compositions, rooted in the quiet/loud calamity of post-rock-meets baroque dramatics, also banshee-band a gothic portent to their music.

This portent, like a lie, dissolves with a platitude to compromise. Gone on all remixes is the indie song structure that makes Last Harbour’s “Alternative” bracketing seem conventional. This bonus CD, in an edition of 100 at act-fast basis, to me is more attitudnally refreshing than “Your Heart, It Carries The Sound”. That might be because Little Red Rabbit have invited eight uniquely talented remixers to join the hood, from The Wire-acclaimed Sone Institute and his electronic spasm-centricity, to the highlight version of “If You Mean To Be Lost” by A.R.C Soundtracks. Paul Gregory commences with the mantric theme: “You never ever lied / You never truly tried to tell the truth”, penning svelte drumwork and Marsen Jules-like melodic toppings. 23 Hanging’s take on “The Heath” has backing instrumentation knotted to past and lets David Armes’ voice melt into the wax.

Fieldhead, one musician familiar to Fluid Radio regulars, being part of the Japan Benefit “Kanshin” compilation, recontextualises lyrical presence to a filtered whistling, splitting “Open Up And Rust” headroom with a fragile Electronica beat that doesn’t outstay its welcome. “If you mean to be lost, are you ever truly lost?” poses another consequentiality of economy and lying: it’s a perceptual non sequitir to suggest a mindset, but is that mindset really a vehicle for changeover? A.R.C Soundtracks cuddle the violin like a slide guitar works in shoegaze, and the drums indeed impose likeness to the underexposed Slowdive cut “Country Rain”. Blk W Bear, first of the Front & Follow 4 CD box set artists from 2010, shoehorns “The Stars Look Down” to a dubbed nighttime feel, dissimilar atmospherically with dub techno stalwarts Deep Chord. Sone Institute’s lacksaidaisical, repeatedly yawning synth and fragments of Armes’ vocal leads us into another proposition of economy and lie: time and place play an important role in the arbitrary realities of truth and justice.

That’s no less true when you account for the environments Armes and his band recorded “Your Heart, It Carries The Sound” in; a Northumbrian cottage sidechained to St. Margaret’s Church in Manchester, where they bounced off the architecture inspirationally. As a contextual result the heavily deconstructionistic “Replacements” by Slowsecrets couldn’t be a more apt conclusion; at 20 minutes, outstripping the length of all others by over three times; swashbuckling transparent drone porosity – what contemporary electronic innovator Steve Roach issued with his “Quiet Music” in 1988. The soundscape alternates gravitas of wash like listerine to your brain, and finalises an outro on the economy/lie juxtaposition – some are in it for chance, while others stick at it for the long haul. As a soundtrack to that internalised self-monologue, Last Harbour’s “Escape Was All I Ever Meant” doesn’t put a foot wrong, and intrigues questioning humanitarianly. Now that’s one harbour I actually want to arrive at one day.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/02...-i-ever-meant/

[Muttley]

Refractor - Locus Suspectus (Under The Spire)

“Each person is an island unto himself, in a very real sense; and he can only build bridges to other islands if he is first of all willing to be himself and permitted to be himself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that he has a real and vital part of him, then I am assisting him to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this.” ~Carl Rogers, On Becoming A Person, p. 21

Carl Rogers conceptualised cross-application between psychotherapy and social work in the 1950s, while the “locus of control of reinforcement”, a concept developed by Julian Rotter in that same decade, was constructed to subdivide internal and external personality types as being driven by decisions either in their control or not. So while Rotter would hold the belief that behaviour was guided by “reinforcements” (rewards and punishments), evidence of Rogers’ many theories suggests oracular reclusion from righteousness – as natural to the social worker archetype today as then.

When you have an album titled “Locus Suspectus”, the latter word Latin for “mistrust”, opinions about Joseph Martinez’ one-synth-only project remain contextualised by a psychological hit-and-run; he is said to “embrace the limitations of one-take recordings with no additional editing”. Theoretically that could be recipe for stasis, but then there’s sedation from singularity to consider. How can we connect Rogers’ ideation of non-supression with the “locus of control of reinforcement”, and its’ steadfast separation of internal and external personality types? After all, if “internals” are the bane of unstable realism, “externals” can be seen as relying too much on fate to direct their belief system. And when we apply that thought to musicians and their music, all matter of possibilities about past, present and future, construction and deconstruction, and ultimately, affection and indignation spawn to blur the focus of what’s good and bad, mixing it into a puddle of mud.

There’s a way to clean up perception. I can introduce a construct of mine called “refractive assuaging”. Essentially that’s what Refractor does on “Locus Suspectus”. Relief can arise through impulses being bent, like light through a prism. And resulting, what’s received is assuaging – to be broader than “relieving” meaning-wise – to the recipient. It’s a simple term that can be applied to other areas of media – pick up a linguistic pattern on a web forum, or notice digits and numbers in certain ordinations that mean something to you in an email, for instance, and these impulses can be refractively assauging, drawing you into different states of thought, comforting instead of disrupting you. And importantly it happens unorthodox, almost on a subconscious level. For Martinez’ synthesizer, played at moderate volume – a decrease in serotonin from loud volume as fits the theme – “refractive assuaging” happens very often.

But sentences about concepts can impress or tire. As we know, much depends on length of words, syllables and stresses. To contrast Martinez’ synthesizer, I write “write” twice, and already we’re too intense because of metre disruption. The same implications apply to working any instrument, but through a communal continuity in “Locus Suspectus”, and its 34 minutes of contemplative tones, the idea of excess bleeps or twiddles, causing oversaturation in content, disappears. Returning to the “locus of control of reinforcement” concept, a possible result causes attention counter-reversal, hence it’s vital to state there is transcendence between being an “internal” and “external” personaliy type as a listener. Much of this transcendence happens through comparable records of the last 30 years, from the keyboard wizardry of New Order’s “Your Silent Face”, to the synth experiments of Harmonia and Eno. Indeed, the arpeggiated filtration present on opener “Subliminal Dissonance” suggests a continuum with locus and refraction – one affects the other, round-about-the-houses-like, and “Polarizing Algorithms” is one metaphor for that. A point to be made is a point to also be obscured; by time, by music, by voice, and most of all, by transcendence.

Where this listener is perceptually an “external” – feeling like he is guided by fate, luck and strange coincedences – he so makes a connection with Rogers’ quote and its methods to obtain freedom of perception. As much as he does with the music here, which works identically. Just take “Gimmick Policing”; mumbling and grumbling melody playing counterpoint to a congested rhythm. This musical portraiture of static offers up another angle on “refractive assuaging” – to sedate one’s mood is a device for reducing a wet weekend to tumble-dried humidity. “Aping Trends” supplants a certain Port-Royal- sounding harmony, while “Mess Age” takes the hyper-kinetic intonations of Kraftwerk, giving more transcendentally introspective meaning to both the album’s intention – a mistrust of its own personality – and a comment on the junk-strewn suburbia where these synthesizers now regularly reside.

But real highlight “Virtual Distractions” forms refractive assuaging most thanks to its likeness with AFX’s early Ambient experiments. Reaching new islands comes from internalising a view of other music, then using external theorising to form a fresh illusion of change, and change can be as good as a rest, which creates assuage from refraction on this LP. Under The Spire deserve a lot of credit for utilising a similar pathway with their catalogue, from Spheruleus’ “Frozen Quarters” in 2010 to Coldstream’s “Alarums” later that year. The competence, opportunity and self-efficiacy of “internal” nose-to-grindstone determination, releasing unconventional Ambient sonics since 2009 alongside Folk, Noise and post-rock, works with the palette of “external” easy-going-ness, and that relief, or assuage, might be no greater for a good while from any other synthesizer-only record.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...cus-suspectus/

[Muttley]

Fescal - Alchemical Wanderings (Time Released Sound)

Debates free-flowing, profluent thought processing fails by straying too far, imparts in runabout ordinations with traits of humans. Our willingness and adaptability is reflected in phases. Familiarity unbreached remains vital to grafting absorbtion of information. This reactivates semblance. But subsequent subdivision of thought processing associated with work, not enjoyment, creates wandering moments. Here plenty, including those in the Ambient music community, take a leaf out of Autumn’s book. We profuse the breeze like a wilted shade of red – hearty motion can be lost. The leaf taken can park on a double yellow of haphazardness. Several, in certain respects, lose direction at a stage. But if things go right, alchemy is there like a shot that lights up the dark.

How do we create those alchemies? The bread landing butter side up, where taste slides together in untainted harmony? Fescal, a sound artist, graphic designer and photographer from South Korea, is said to be looking for the perfect formula. And Fescal understands a fragile truth of alchemy: it’s partly playing one element against the other. This affects the end result of interpretation from the source. So an external impetus behind “Alchemical Wanderings” is also reliance on linearity causing psyche walkabout. To Fescal’s internal credit, he’s supplanted a connective for this line of alchemy: as James Kirby put for an interview on “Sadly, The Future Is No Longer What It Was", “to make less of a fast food style release”. Contrasting that subject’s grandiosity, Fescal maintains stylistic subtlety in length and feeling, letting the music wash over you like a well-needed shower. There’s no sudden moments, and the lightening of grace keeps “Alchemical Wanderings” from tee-totalling the murk of Hauntology, a sub category that unsettles to an extent instead of medicates.

Entirety of straightforwardness is also a continual characteristic of drone across decades. From your fridge hum to the forefront of Paul Bradley’s catalogue, drone is carefully handled in Fescal’s amplitudes. Fescal’s main counterbalance is a palatable transparency, seeing the layers as part of the whole, in a continuous 50 minute suite with little silence, all liquid hues and calming stewing. Resembling the space Ambient of Data Obscura parachuted to the more organic experiments of The Caretaker, intermingling chimes and electronic bleeps early on crumble a conundrum that alchemy is a time and patience exercise, as much as it is about making snap decisions, and acting on their consequences.

“The Beautiful Neurotic”, Fescal’s only other album, released on the aptly titled Camomille Music in 2010, was an even calmer affair in places, and it seems an affinity with morphing mandate of what’s usual for both artist, and alchemy of life’s mutations is a point of concern. The handing-down of the periodic tables’ elemental basis, where moodswings in humans catapult stability out of whack, is still shown in doctors getting medication doses wrong for their patients. For neurotics: declination to conforming to what’s inside the pill, or poison furnishes a loss of “alchemy” with the contracted subject matter. So to me a stone-set-ness of behaviour is the most fundamental alchemy we can hope for. As a pensive collection of drone and natural shades, “Alchemical Wanderings” happily sways amidst flow and full tube limit, balancing its compositional equation as effectively as an avid Ambient fan desires. Now we just need a solution for it selling all 100 limited edition copies, with hand stamped metallic tags, and a capped Pyrex test tube for each, containing some precious metals.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...al-wanderings/

[DIB]

d'Eon - Music For Keyboards Vol.1

Some really nice stuff on this 14 track free download album

http://twitter.com/#!/ddddddeon/stat...39874896412672

[Muttley]

Cheers DIB, Ambient freebies are always welcome here.

An offshoot archive is in the works for "other" music reviews. But this doesn't stray too far from Ambient territory, so warrants a mention inside.

Ryan Teague - Field Drawings (Village Green)

Emotionally, the modern classical style rarely goes bananas. Surprising really: the sub genre partially grew from love for electronics. Plus a distaste for highbrow snobbishness. But its purveyors’ academia: strict routines, music theory, can tie down soaring instrumental bottle. Modern classical arranges this to encroach meandering melancholy. A collusion between feelings, creates ideas with new sources. Then there’s reliance on older forms to patch together tributary efforts, turning the wheel full circle.

Ryan Teague, the Bristol-based multi-instrumentalist, last touched down with Sonic Pieces’ “Causeway”. Thematically chock full of reserved, quietly expressive classical guitar playing, now he’s back with “Field Drawings” for 2012. A curiously titled modern classical album enshrouding strings, electronics and processing with delicate grace. Bartok symphonies with recycled environment: violin is the prominent lubricative agent for the constituent parts, and oozes an earnest love that’s hard to ignore.

Like a field drawing, one takes in a sketched range. “Shadow Play” and its glockenspiel merge with violin into a confluent add/subtract. Notes squiggle like a pencil lightly on the surface. This forms a forlorn landscape that’s contrasted by stattaco string presence in “Cadastral Survey”. The glockenspiel is then left to play central melody next to electronic synth dabs on “Cascades”. “Counter Turn” takes a greater Edwardian palette fit for a romance novel. The motif repeats its shades, fluttering and foaming at the edges of a bathing feel. “Games For Two” debuts the piano with a violin melody that sounds so familiar, almost like an incorporation of a classic you just slightly remember.

It’s contextually fitting to say this since Teague has been all over the commission shop, from BBC and Universal soundtracks, to TV and film scores. That finesse really shows on “Prime Movers”, where a soluble string section snuggles under the headroom of the glockenspiel. “Summary Of The Article” distills the precise piano work of Keith Kenniff, then “Cell Cycle” ups the pace with extra drama in the chords that lollop at the forefront. “Anesidora” nods back to Ryan’s Type releases “Six Preludes” and “Coins And Crosses” with its heavy-heart hopefulness. “Neo” could feature on a forthcoming mobile phone advertisement near you.

“Tetramery” is about as strikingly bananas as “Field Drawings” gets. Violins play counterpoint in kismet, pricking the listener’s attention like the call of lunchtime at the office. Excitement injected to that ol’ motionless aligning. “Tableau III” as outro plunges you to a filmic opening, as if much depends on its finishing. As a whole though, “Field Drawings” works best as a banana given time to ripen – the processing improves with persistence, the acceptance with consistence. And all bells and whistles that Village Green have granted Ryan Teague follow suit magically in 39 minutes.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...ield-drawings/

[Muttley]

Kleefstra / Bakker / Kleefstra - Griis (Low Point)

Poetry, soundwaves: stewed – business as usual for the Kleefstra brothers. “Piipisijllling”, Jan Kleefstra’s collab with fellow Dutchman Machinefabriek, caught many ears back in 2008. Carved around a cortex of Netherlands’ Frisian poetry, drones and guitars, 2012 sees Jan and Romke Kleefstra, with Anne-Chris Bakker, tread waters to Gareth Hardwick’s Low Point label. Home to Jon Porras of Barn Owl, Bakker’s electric guitar renditions with Romke work in autonomy-pilot over auto-pilot. They refractively assuage the listener into a lulled reduction of nerves across 40 minutes.

“Stadich Joust My In Han” starts the two track infusion. Composition of both the words and music aren’t idle, but they do pass at sluggishly amorphous paces. No hurry is made for guitar to exit; just remit strumming a soundscape when vocals enter. It hits a solitary note another time. The field recordings rustle up more activity, but they’re also a hodge-podge of scattered tracts, never quite developing a system. Timbre of the narcotic drones blend as rust-inhibited, like an unoccupied dormitory with garden door left ajar. Current spangles along, accumulating debris. All is seemingly hidden to hustle and bustle existing outside the studio.

History tells us poetry is often used in performance art as a way of involving others. But with the Kleefstra brothers, their intimacy is of utmost importance for imbuing the recordings with a personal heirloom; breaking barriers between linguistic stimulation and perceived vocal tone. The latter creates path to former for English speakers. For Frisian speakers, a crossover of language to widespread tongue is an enlivening comparative. Ambient topography creates accepting counterbalance. Any frowns from non-dialect voice diminish. Concurrently, intrigue with Frisian cultural induction gives new openings in the poetry. Rhyme scheme, though absent from rationalising, is overriden by consonance. Internal rhyme arises between syllables. And an adaptation of free verse, where poetry has no conventional form, manifests with a background of the whimsical electric guitars, churning away like a small power plant.

You could argue Jan’s musings desubstansialise his poetry into a multi-media accompaniment, fraying at the edges of meaning. But there’s enough effective mood, interest and aloofness generated by his dialogue to lift “Griis” above an alien aside. As well as Leonardo Rosado’s “Muted Words”, poetry and soundscapes looks a bright star with exponential shine this early year.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...eefstra-griis/

[Muttley]

Fluid Radio have included the Wire Tapper edit as a sample of this promising sounding LP. Good imagery in this review by Steve Dewhurst also.

Matteo Uggeri / Luca Mauri / Fransesco Giannico - Pagetos (Boring Machines)

The fourth instalment in the ‘Between The Elements’ series, Pagetos begins with the early crackles of ice forming on trees, treating the wee small hours as a blank canvas on which to layer and creep before the inevitable melt and disintegration come sunrise…

This is music in extreme close up, locked on miniature detail watching individual blades of grass succumb to Jack Frost’s icy touch and the veins freezing in fallen leaves. Beginning just a shade before five o’clock with ‘Ground Frost Breeding’ and ending a minute after nine with ‘Melt’, the Italian trio of Matteo Uggeri, Luca Mauri and Francesco Giannico take us on a journey through the world beneath our feet.

Human interference is fleeting, coming in the form of distant voices during ’6:18am Icy Leaves’. One imagines billows of steam emerging from behind scarves and the low sun catching ice and eyes. But aside from what sounds like cars passing slowly on treacherous roads during ’7:27am Morning Frost’, the music is very much made of nature and its daily winter cycle. The sound of water running at 8:23am provides a definite feeling of life resuming, having undergone and survived a deep freeze. High-pitched piano tinkles sound like icicles melting and they’re undercut by a warm, life-giving tone to herald the emergence of birds and cool sunshine. ’9:01am’ is the sound of feet playing gaily on slippery paths, loose snow being gathered as snowballs and a final, soaring guitar passage to accompany the blooming of flowers and early Springtime. If there is an overarching theme to Pagetos it is one of nature’s persistence.

The titles on Pagetos make everything as explicit as it needs to be but whereas a little more delicacy may not have gone amiss in naming these brief pieces of bright winter music, a defter set of hands could not have been possible in its creation. Uggeri, Mauri and Giannico have once again proved they are European masters of suggestion, compassion and restraint.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...ring-machines/

[Muttley]

Bridging modern classical and Ambient...

Bersarin Quartett - II (Denovali)

Comparable effects can bring back pain for artists; they sporadically duck out of hard graft because of apathy to monotony. Sometimes technique blinkerdness is even worse than seeing wood from trees; what soothes the creator can come under fire from the tools. Maybe you don’t want context; living in the moment is a worldwide oyster. Possibly meaning isn’t only determinative of interpretation; things abstracted beyond recognition do seize attention besides their dementia.

Let’s go for a boat trip now. Slightly stormy weather, Bersarin Quartett, but I’m sure you won’t mind. We’ll catch some fish, watch the evening sky grow overcast. And we’ll play “II” on deck, where you’re unreeling stylistic spool as it extends. There’s catches; ideas of bigger fish to fry in the soundtrack precinct, over Ambient passages. Nods to The Cinematic Orchestra’s string-based swells, touches of BBC-acclaimed Broadway Project in there as well. We’ll sit there, on our deck chairs, admiring the horizon, with the emotional depth summoned on this record. And it’ll be a pretty time, trust me. But there’s only time until it’ll fade.

That’s the fashion of Bersarin Quartett. He’ll play a chord, like the rising current of “Im Lichte Des Anderen”, seemingly unworried with possibility of repeating it, revolve it, introduce bird’s eye view of the map in retrospection/future instability, buoying relationship with subliminal effect and subducting technique. And then sun the compositions in the heat, taking off a clammy gray sweater to sculpt in post-production. The moods can move romantically: “Zum Greifen Na” sees to cinematography aspects, taking off the lens cap, with percussive movements like marine life swimming below hold. Indeed much of “II” is best left to trade eyes in underwater speed, and I’ve found it especially nice with the lights off, speakers surrounding the head.

A great strength of “II”, as that artistic spool really untangles, is its convergence from Electronica influences to modern classical lines. “Der Monde, Der Schnee Und Du”, translating from German as “The Moons, The Snow And You”, develops interlocking geniality with classical and Dubstep tempo. Crushed-down snares splinter the space between bars, constructing an emphatic precipice. From the slow surge of extra weight, it doesn’t tip you into a state of overwhelment. Instead, while the mood darkens, the build is uplifting in a widescreen extent. While “Im Glanze Des Kometen” adapts a decaffeinated take on leftfield Drum & Bass rhythms, rousing attention. This variation is wholly welcome from sight of blackening clouds above as it plays with us, and you, the listener. There’s not a huge amount of Drum & Bass-inflected Electronica out there that utilises classical palette – it was only Nils Frahm & Anne Muller with “7 Fingers” finale “Long Enough” that played that role in recent years from outside, with vocals to boot. Much a case that the majority of any scene can’t see the trees from the wood after a while.

As we come to shore with piano being instated, “Keine Angst” impressions the delicacy of Frahm. But here, Bersarin Quartett lets the strings pull bodies close. There’s a physical regularity that is immensely comforting, letting a free-floating consciousness enter with the calming depth charges of “Hier Und Jetzt”. This is my favourite: those Ambient synth sighs and majestic string overlays, feel like words unsaid put to music: slightly sorrowful, placid. Then the bass pattern kicks in, which soon unreels light beats. Four minutes pass and electronic synthesis hits the four layer mark. The emotions lighten again on “Jedem Zauber…”, almost a call for retranslation of the harbour, to a portal of beaming light.

“Nichts Ist Wie Vorher” (“Is Nothing Like Previously”) climaxes the 69 minute, 13 track suite with live drums alleviating any muscularity pent up in the ‘scapes. Roaring instrumental noise of our ship ties around post-rock-post, delivery of finish is bang on the money and everyone with an iota of taste for Ambient and classical is happy again. This is a mighty album that transcends its genreification, galvanises those genre fingerprints all the while, and goes heart to heart with the very top of the cinematic soundtracking elite. Get your hands on this gem when you can.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...n-quartett-ii/

[Muttley]

Sparkling Wide Pressure - Grandfather Harmonic (Preservation: Circa)

Sparkling: check. Wide: depends. Pressure: comfortingly pocketed. Frank Baugh’s “Grandfather Harmonic” opposes misnomer, yet for his doing-on-tin alias, there’s a real sense of ghostwriting about spirits of past. Here, Baugh’s grandfather is inspiration, plus the rural Tennessee home he previously occupied. Still, there’s sidechained counter-cultural danger, where the only humane route back to feeling is either warmth of the soundscape, or the overseen familial connection.

Listener/comfort relationships posited this generation can be globally observed stemming from four decades ago in the UK. I recently watched “Prog Rock Britannia”, a film screened on BBC 4, where contributors including Robert Wyatt and Rick Wakeman alluded to today’s typical post-potency. Not comedown, but refractive to a lighter structural level. In an informational shift from band to audiences at the time, some didn’t care of their output’s critics. It centred, as Gary Brooker said post – “A Whiter Shade Of Pale”, “to make a great work” with Procol Harum’s more experimental strands of prog. Strange time signatures, percussive invention, technical virtuosity staged by groups, lifted less laboriously from Classical quarters. Scores became fertile jams; the resulting composites were shipped to the US for fate or freedom.

Fourty years later, where prog once made a poetic spin lyrically, alembic-pentameter with the media to sharpen broad contextual appeal, American Baugh’s tracks turn that idea on its head. Spinning tyres in the mud of Smiths-like post-punk vocals, and the electro-acoustic milieu, bumping up against the paradoxical directionlessness of prog in the late seventies. There’s a rough-hewn sparsity on display that enmeshes perception into something personal. For sounds that establish roots among the trees, then chauffer the electric guitar to accompany the synths, that’s no mean feat. The work though has a view of being over quicker than it has begun. 50 minutes sweetly nibbling decay causes many with taste for these sonics wanting more, but it’s far from a flaw.

With highlights like “Looking To Remember” and its Colin Potter-esque synthesizer bubbling, Baugh compensates for the damage punk, and after, what post-punk did to the infrastructure of inter-genre subtlety; what ultimately assailed prog long term. Guitar dabs intrude on a softly grilled underlayer; white noise and harmonica-like interventions crisp up the rind. However this is all too polite to be archingly progressive. Instead, dwelling in a kind of between-zone, relishing your thoughts to a wider periphery from passiveness. It seems via “Cross Plains”, Baugh is implying self-analytical milestones to this theory. Making butter by hand, pasting everything with a conditioned base. “Pump House/Spring Water”, our longest piece by far at 15 minutes, sounds like an avant distillate of Loren Connors combined with ardent glitch elements. Baugh has chosen synths that embolden the LPs links with prog; those backing whistly melodic lines symbolise a Yes record of yesteryear.

So, in “Grandfather Harmonic”, beside Baugh’s ancestry reminiscence, he’s issued through Preservation something dissecting not only of rhythmical density landfill/contemporary electro-acoustic music, but prog rock from the past, carrying realms untouched by those with lesser experience. Released for Circa, the label’s sub-outlet, we see random art and randomized revelations of an era, personally dating back to my own folks’ teens, becoming pulled towards sensations of the oblique. Do you play harmonica? Maybe that’s the next step.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/03...ther-harmonic/

[DIB]

En - Already Gone (Students of Decay) LP/CD/DIGITAL

http://sod.experimedia.net/096/

[DIB]

Orcas - Orcas (Morr Music) LP/CD/DIGITAL

Orcas – comprised of haze-pop auteur Benoît Pioulard and post-minimalist composer Rafael Anton Irisarri

http://www.anost.net/en/Music/Vinyl/LP/Orcas-Orcas.html

[DIB]

Ingenting Kollektiva - Fragments of Night (Invisible Birds) LP

http://soundcloud.com/invisible-birds/fragments-of-night-iboo4-mix

http://invisiblebirds.org/catalogue/ib004.html
http://boomkat.com/#vinyl/514608-ing...ments-of-night

[Muttley]

This is really good:

Various Artists - Lost In The Humming Air - Music Inspired By Harold Budd

“I’m actually hopeless at music, except for this narrow niche. And so that’s all I do. It simply comes out that way, I can’t help it.” – Harold Budd, Sound on Sound interview 1997.

Back in 1953, a 16 year old Harold Budd bunked off school with some friends and whilst driving to the Californian coast listening to AM radio heard a cheery Stan Getz jazz saxophone, brush cymbal piano number that had him so enthused he took up jazz drumming in local bands.

There follows an on /off love affair with music initially balancing two bit local jazz outfit work against lowly jobs, conducting bands during military service through to studying harmony and wrestling with academic avant garde minimalism and drone-style composition throughout the 60′s and early 70′s. An ongoing inability to find performers who could accurately translate his requirements into sound provided the catalyst for a move from composer to performer and the development of a unique style of improvisational piano playing. More than a quarter of a century after hearing Getz, Budd collaborates with Brian Eno to begin a musical trajectory that has formed a bedrock of neo-classical composition where beauteously free-form and delightfully weighted piano meet delicate electronic soundscapes.

Rumour has it that he doesn’t own a studio, not even a piano and long ago gave up ownership of books in the name of ‘freedom’. Despite the conjecture I can’t help but love this idea of his total disconnection from the trappings of musical life yet still ably retaining the capability to sit at a piano and deliver work as stunning as 2003′s ‘La Bella Vista’ – a collection of impromptu, improvised performances produced by Daniel Lanois.

Listen to La Bella Vista, The Pearl, The Plateaux of Mirrors and any of his numerous collaborative works (with John Foxx ‘Translucence+Drift Music’ being a particular favourite of mine) and it’s clear how Budd has been such a huge influence to so many – something Martin Fuhs (Marsen Jules) and Rafael Anton Irissari (The Sight Below) would talk about often until eventually hitting on the idea of paying their respects in the form of this compilation – released in Budd’s 50th year of composing and the profits of which head to a charity of Budd’s choice.

The resulting ‘Lost in the Humming Air’ pulls together thirteen heavy weights from across the world of modern ambient and invites them to contribute a piece representing either the music of Budd or his influence upon them and is, you’ll be very pleased to hear, really something quite special…

Deaf Center open proceedings with an extraordinary netherworld exploration of cello, piano and guitar typically drenched in moody reverb and atmospherics. Loscil and Martin Fuhs continue the, unsurprising, theme of piano tinged ambience with some stunningly pretty work whilst Biosphere ups the experimentalism with sneaky ‘I’m hiding round the corner to surprise you’ blasts of piano and tinkering with sustain and decay edits.

Xela breaks a ‘no compilations’ rule to contribute a deeply emotive hiss imbued track ‘The Only Rose’ that will have you closing your eyes for a private little weep whilst Marsen Jules and Andrew Thomas follow with crystalline swathes of sound, the latter introducing gently pulsating tight techy rhythms around delicate shimmers of piano and electronics. Mokira spirals off into a wonderfully wonked out piece of Basic Channel style dub inflection – perhaps a nod to Budd’s work with Eraldo Bernocchi – and Rafael Anton Irisarri marries creaking dampness to spacious light touch piano typical of Budd’s style.

Without wishing to fill your screen any further with endless words praising this release it remains to be said that there is not a duff track in sight as Porn Sword Tobacco and a heart meltingly brilliant collaboration between Brock van Wey and his mother Criss bring things to a close in continued spectacularly high quality.

This is a moving and fitting tribute to a legendary musical figure and a compilation you simply need to own – not just as a timelessly stunning release but it’s all for a good cause too – go and purchase!

Lost in the Humming Air is released April 9th on Oktaf.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/04...rious-artists/

[DIB]

TEN // 'Kami' (A-Sun Amissa Remix)

Free download or pay what you want here http://www.gizehstore.com/products/16929

[Muttley]

Noxroy - Cotyledon Observatory (Rest + Noise)

Andrew Fitzpatrick got his start in All Tiny Creatures (Hometapes), but has collaborated with Sparklehorse engineer Beau Sorenson, Collections Of Colonies Of Bees and Yellow Ostrich. “Cotyledon Observatory” is his inaugural release as Noxroy, presenting content walking through the Spring season, in mood and build. As a drone sequence with everything under 9 minutes long, there’s signature clear meaning and arrangement, nothing pretentiously done, but a resulting hitch of static styling is resting noise fit for background noise, where demographic links are second to none.

The saving grace of “Cotyledon Observatory” is a shimmering timbre applied to the drone. This stops patience from being upstaged by your daily activities, giving more rest to the stress in turn. Melodies on “Osteoma” tilt like Greek yoghurt on a spoon angled 45 degrees, passing thick and fluid in the midst of a vaporous historical attachment to this music. While opener “Atlas/Wings: Infinity” gleams with a slow essence of peace inscribed sparingly on sound. I imagine an elderly couple, who’ve never gone their separate ways, rock solid, now aurally used to their own hums, moans and monotone. Their voices become a granular data entry procedure, processing one outlook together. So the idea of Rest + Noise is a fitting label suffix for Noxroy as such.

You don’t feel like this is a guitar album, but the drones are partly made up from it. With digital software and effects pedals, tint is flavoured with surprisingly clean production that opens doors to you. But “Cotyledon Observatory” is altogether a stimulative anomaly, not only in writing about it, or looking at the writing post-listening. With the plethora of similar music around, a desensitization effect occurs, and this initial – and lasting – impression, makes details hard to pick out. Counteracting sustained interest fastens one onto Ferris wheel-like fancying, a wish for rotation and sensation, something new to chew on. And consciously, microwave wavelength size and emotional magnetism, at 40 minutes, stops “Cotyledon Observatory” from being better than a good album of that “Rest + Noise” penchant. It’s got the compositional potential, even if drone isn’t always that technically crafted. However its rest and noise formula, over duration, is locked in central station, never chancing an underpass walk, a true moment to sit down, or a real opportunity to make epic noise. You’ll probably like it as a drone lover, as I did. So let’s hope as a debut album, this is the start of greater resting, and noisy developments for Andrew Fitzpatrick.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/04...n-observatory/

[Muttley]

Trouble Books - Concantenating Fields (MIE Music)

Sometimes music doesn’t become thinking material – you just embrace it for unconscious appeal hardwired into you. The Pop aesthetic thrives and survives on this ideal, transforming the most twee and seemingly meaningless song into a full-spectrum psychological rendition of progression, hereafter illusory digression from the norm. It helps that, in the last 20 years, after Britpop hogged the limelight and transfixed the dominant 90s working class audience, electronic soundsets began to re-haggle beyond dance floor and disco tagging, greeting central command of the Pop artist’s studio. Consider Moby transferring from Rave classic “Go” to radio-friendly “Porcelain”, featured in Leonardo Dicaprio-starring “The Beach”. Or where dubstep became modern comma on Electronica, you’ll find the fast-rising Delilah spinning Chaka Khan pop integration – also titled “Go” – into 140 beats-per-minute refractions, glueing popular culture to shorthand phrasing for what’s in, what’s selling, at this moment, but maybe not forever.

Nudging me regarding Pop now, is not song statement simplicity – palpable universally, unless we’re talking Felix Kubin robo-pop – but worldwide adhesion with conventional record marketing. I’ll call this underpinning an “attraction trio”: lust, infatuation and love. When applied to pop wholesale, this ever-moving triad designates itself in temporary emotional placements. Hooks and lyrics circularly keep flames burning between the three, yet paradoxically suffer attention deficit disorder, when enshrouded by the confines of Pop structure – the 3 minute love song; a reliance on artificiality; an emphasis on larger-than-life choruses. Ambient, especially drone, is interconnected – since while reference points differ – drone’s modulation and synthesis overriding sweetness and light – the emotional timeline remains rooted by the universe’s law of attraction. So those that make up our universe, turn over their thoughts like the pages of a never-ending book. And these ideas and beliefs – essentially – concantenate.

The merging of Pop and Ambient is just what Trouble Books, the husband/wife duo of Keith Freund and Linda Lejsovka, are signalling at on their latest LP, “Concantenating Fields”. Like their previous two LPs as Trouble Books – “The United Colours Of…” and “Gathered Tones”, the album length remains a very easy 30-40 minutes. Unlike Moby, Delilah, Felix Kubin et al, they’re at a stage of critical mass that’s really to be enamoured. Stylistically, opposing their last two albums, the soundsets have had paintstripper poured all over them, allowing the Pop, and Ambient to commingle less acoustically and more electronically. There’s still those snatches of the past: acoustic and electric guitar; an aura of condensing things, meeting self-targets and ressuscitating an internalised format – influence intake/consume/extract. As Pitchfork’s Zach Kelly wrote of their last, a self-titled collaboration with Emeralds’ Mark Mcguire, for example, “while their calm, flat vocals may prove a little too distracting for some”, they have gradually been reconfigured as socio-puzzle pieces, slotting in holes previously filled by noise, violin and a convergence of the maintained elements. Pulling a sweetheart, cordial mood nearer to electronic shoestring has now begun to take place.

As only two of the tracks on “Concantenating Fields” are instrumentals, it’s an important keystone for the couple’s innocent take on the normally banal Pop lyric, piloted by the attraction trio, to be vocally illuminated to fairy dust via limp-wristed singing and half-spoken word. Two highlights of this working are in “Lurk Underneath” and “Dead Bee In A Golden Bowl”, where Lejsovka and Freund alternate roles on “small modulations”; not having “much to say”, negating the OTT superficiality of lust/infatuation/love in Pop, preferring following up their affectionate interplay of, including other niceties, “You’ve got bigger plans than Monday’s garbage day”, from 2010′s “Sudden Loop”. Pop xenophilia: trying to trawl as many foreign bodies, customs and cultures into one industry-feeding phenomenon as possible, gets downcast here for continuity of artistic rudiments: alternative arpeggio/guitar flux, dancing like fireflies in background/foreground; tempo taken off high-speed railroad, preening something you might please yourself with when no-one else is looking. So, “Concantenating Fields” fits its “nocturnal” press thought, counterpointing earlier, rustic reinventions of the daily life cycle. Trouble Books transcendentally introspect also, bringing sunshine out at night, double-heading welcome of environmental impulse, manifesting it in Freund’s and Lejsovka’s attic, or Mike Tolan’s living room in Akron, Ohio.

Comparisons to Trouble Books’ Electronica-inclusive, sometimes dream, always Ambient-natured musicality also triad: as an oven-baked pie of Auburn Lull quirks, Christopher Willits’ soothing boundary surfing, and “Golden Hours” Brian Eno Pop. Bridging gaps between acoustica, modern circuitry and contemporary songwriting, indeed, the pair are said to apply Eno-ish “Oblique Strategies” – Josef Alber’s “Interaction Of Colour” book – their self-concantenation device. What separates Freund, and Lejsovka from average novelty-recording references is an unpretentious, carefree everyday matter musing, through sound pace, lyric to surface relationships, relishing personal integrity. The male/female baton passing of “Demagnetizer” evokes a satisfying call/response pitch; relaying into surrounding tunes’ instruments and vocals, causing intelligibility landslide. Immediate record satisfaction increases, and even though the drums are a little tepid, they direct you along the attraction trio – damageable by obviousness of LPs targeted at mass media, in a state of temporary inertia/ignorance/intrigue – one counter-triad to life’s brighter side. There’s also a project polarity occurring, mentioning Freund’s solo release, “Constant Comments”, reviewed by Fred Nolan on Fluid in July 2011. Noting there that the titles, among other things, were rather abstruse, “Concantenating Fields” couldn’t be so alike even if the inspiration antenna was tossed down a ditch and left to pick itself up, by memory one, then memory two.

As with field recordings’ multiple-take-to-get-right, cutting out sentences that say all the right things, hit all the right notes, discarding the rest, is a by-product of love diffusing in some relationships, focusing on work that resists any kind of conflict with antimatter devices: tunnel-vision, sleep deprivation, the be-all times, the end-all times, where the transience of experiences create increased immersions the further poles apart these are in stimulative quality. The “concantenating” title link of Trouble Books’ record aligns well with the concept of musical conjunctio: a term from alchemy meaning conjunction and pressure of dissimilar elements within one psychic space, where positive feelings, knowledge and insightful observations spawn transformatively. The trimming of sentences to words, and reimpressioning of them into sonic passages with the synthesizers, including those “Collapsed Arpeggios”, sees Freund and Lejsovka cover ground well worn by many synth pop, any-subgenre-you-like Pop on top, as well as Moby, Delilah and Felix Kubin. Nevertheless, if Ambient is to, in future become a form of postmodern anti-pop – and some would argue this already happened by scenic design since the late eighties – it makes sense for Trouble Books to be seen as a crossover exponent of the two genres.

Conclusively, as much as you might lust about it, as attraction gives to many men and women humanistically; as much you might get infatuated with it, as is conditioned to women and men temporarily, you’ll grow to love “Concantenating Fields”, for a long time to come. Or so you should. It may only be an album of grass thoughts, as Freund has it, but as written by Max Ehrmann in 1952′s “Desiderata”:

-

“Neither be cynical about love;
For in the face of all aridity and disenchantment
It is as perennial as the grass.”

-

Here’s to the next Ambient Pop LP that manages to absorb thinking material like that.

http://www.fluid-radio.co.uk/2012/04...nating-fields/

[DIB]

Various Artists - escala 2.3 (Free download)

escala 2.3 is a joint project between Escala netlabel and Sismógrafo Radio3. A massive release divided into three volumes which brings together many of the best ambient, drone, soundscape and electroacoustic music producers.

http://escalared.com/archives/651

[DIB]

d'Eon - Music For Keyboards Vol.2 (Free Download)

http://stereogum.com/1014491/deon-mu...premiere/mp3s/