Plutonic Rainbows

Kassel Jaeger - Swamp/Things

Resting at the junction of concept, emotion, and phenomena - tapping the multidimensional potential for narrative and meaning possessed by each - Swamps/Things encounters an artist of remarkable craft, delving toward the unknown, deploying organized sonority as object and environment, as much as action, movement, passage, and arc.

Seemingly possessed by an entropy entirely its own, the temporal gives way to the poetics of space, while the density of an endlessly evolving climate, laden with cacophonous happenings, renders itself still. Flickering images of the natural world - memory and the imagined reformed as sound - present an operatic double for human action and thought.

From deep, fog like banks of minimalist long tone, to industrial clamors left as tracks in the mud, or the collisions of shifting pulses, overtones, and textures - captured from across the murky, drone laden waters between the acoustic and synthetic realms - moody, howling cries and tense meditations merge in ambient sheets, capturing a fleeting image of where decomposition gives way to new growth.

You can get it here.

Votel, Canty & Shipton - Popular Mechanics 4

Boomkat:

Volume 4 is perhaps the most unsettling and uncanny in the series so far, mirroring the latter stages of The Caretaker’s 'Everywhere At The End Of Time’ series with what sounds like a trace echo of disembodied choral voices floating in and out of field recordings and found sounds coalescing in ghostly formation.

As per usual, we’re not gonna attempt to guess any of the included material, except to say that to us it sounds like deepest drone, concrète and sound art deployed at an almost imperceptible BPM, with diffused obscurities merging into foley, industrial and phantasmagoric atmospheres and the kind of multi-layered chicanery this lot have become so effortlessly good at piecing together.

Ennio Morricone

Legendary film composer has died aged 91. My favourite works from him include The Mission, The Thing and State Of Grace.

Exhalation

Continuing to read Ted Chiang's Exhalation, a wonderful collection of short stories.

Dalhous - Lost, Discarded Or Simply Forgotten

Digital release of a 2015 tape originally issued on Blackest Ever Black. A collection of demos from 2009 - 2015.

Ryan Simpson at Tiny Mix Tapes:

The process of taking a song from a “demo” to a “finished” track is puzzling to me. I’m not a musician, so maybe there is some aspect of it that I am missing out on, but when I hear a b-side or demo collection I inevitably find myself scratching my head over why tracks were shelved. This is, of course, the case here, where what is advertised as a series of demos or forgotten tracks feels as fleshed out and solid as a full-fledged album.

I enjoy this collection more than either Dalhous album and the reason is simple: sonic diversity. Maybe it was an attempt to stay stylistically and thematically focused but I have a hard time separating the tracks on those albums; they all kind of lump together into a mass of gently floating electronics. With this cassette collection of demos there is an adventurousness and a willingness to experiment that seems (intentionally or not) bred out of other Dalhous releases. It makes you wonder why these pieces were rejected from release on either album or EP in the first place; what about the songs here made the creators say “naw, let’s shelve that one.” Because maybe they were wrong.