January 15, 2017
This week I had a chance to listen to the new William Basinski album, A Shadow In Time. It follows his usual style for faded electronics and uses a saxophone (to somewhat curious effect) on the David Bowie tribute track. If you have never heard Basinski before, I suggest checking out 'The Disintegration Loops' first. You'll definitely get a feel for his work with those albums.
The album is available from Friday on vinyl and compact disc. The vinyl features an exclusive mix.
January 10, 2017
Great EP of very solid tracks from this promising Belgian artist. You can pick up a copy at Boomkat.
Blinding first volley of ambient grime feels by Belgium’s Sky H1, crystallising one of 2016’s most striking entries with Motion for Bill Kouligas and Visionist's PAN X Codes imprint.
If you’ve had an ear to PAN's recent NTS shows or frequent the likes of Berlin’s Creamcake or London’s Bala Club, it’s possible that you’ve at least seen her name, if not been wowed by Air - a pensile, elegiac wonder rent in noctilucent chorals and arcing Autechrian pads - which heads and opens up the emotional floodgates of Sky H1’s debut EP.
With a vaporous construction inversely proportional to its emotional gravity, Air outlines a sense of melancholic catharsis mutual to music by Elysia Crampton, Visionist or Holy Other; expressing a struggle between states of melancholy and joy that stem from a personally turbulent period which perfuses the rest of the record.
Where many other producers are currently playing out hyper-violent beat-em-up scenarios, the more reserved Motion indulges a plangent lushness to aching affect; oscillating nervous percussion and agonised choral cadence in Hybrid with glassy soft and weightless chimes in Night/Fall/Dream imbued with the pink rawness of freshly picked scab skin, before she finds an impish sort of rave diva spirit in Tell Me, and the final couplet, Land and Think I Am beautifully nail a sort of R&B blessed with baroque posture and ambient aura.
It’s all inarguably up there with the best, most addictive new music we’ve heard in 2016, and hugely recommended if you know what’s good.
January 8, 2017
I enjoyed this new album but it's far from his best ambient work. Having lived with the iOS app edition for a few days, it quickly tires. The main problem with 'Reflection' is that the actual sounds Eno has chosen to program into the algorithm that produces what you hear are pretty uninspiring.
21st century Brian Eno has a very peculiar idea of what constitutes a beautiful sound. The actual textures and atmospherics don't do an awful lot for me and are, dare I say it, old-fashioned. They are the sort of sound he was producing back in his Koan period.
I appreciate that he's trying to let a machine dictate what happens but he could have given it better sounds to play with. While I applaud his desire to bring generative music to the fore, nothing on 'Reflection' even remotely comes close to the beautiful sounds on albums like 'Thursday Afternoon' (1985) and 'The Shutov Assembly' (1992).
Ironically, the instruments he used on Shutov Assembly (I'm guessing late 80s Korg Series, Roland D50 and Yamaha DX7 all treated and maniplulated) sound more modern and futuristic than the (largely) uninspiring sounds on 'Reflection'.
January 1, 2017
Brian Eno's new long-form ambient album is out today. There are a variety of formats including compact disc, vinyl and a quite expensive iOS app.
Digital downloads are available from Bleep.
December 29, 2016
Five years ago the British folklore research project Folklore Tapes released Two Witches by label heads David Chatton Barker and Ian Humberstone. A vinyl version was released soon after by Demdike Stare and Andy Votel's Pre-Cert imprint. To celebrate, Folklore Tapes has put together the mixtape and zine project: Library Catalogue Cassette Volume 1: 2011–2016, which includes an extensive history of the label written by Jez Winship. It went on sale on Bleep last week and sold out in a staggering two hours.
The label has offered a stream of the mixtape. And you can read more about Folklore Tapes over at their website.
December 23, 2016
A new novel from the late author is due next year in June.
The year is 1876.
Among the warring Indian tribes and lawless gold-rush towns of America’s western territories, two paleontologists pillage the Wild West. They are hunting for dinosaur fossils, while surveilling, deceiving and sabotaging each other in a rivalry that will come to be known as the Bone Wars.
Into this treacherous territory plunges the arrogant and entitled Yale student William Johnson. Determined to survive a summer in the west to win a bet, William has joined world-renowned paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh on his latest expedition. But Marsh becomes convinced that William is spying for his nemesis, Edwin Drinker Cope, so he abandons him in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a locus of crime and vice.
Soon William joins forces with Cope and stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions. The struggle to protect this extraordinary treasure tests William’s newfound resilience, and pits him against some of the West’s most dangerous and notorious characters.
You can order from Amazon here.
December 22, 2016
Enjoying watching a series of science programmes first broadcast in 1978. Interesting to see how the future was spoken about and the point at which science was back in the late 1970s. Most of these are available on YouTube.
December 21, 2016
Brian Eno has spoken a little about the up-coming app edition on iOS devices.
Eno’s follow-up to his 2016 album The Ship further expands his pioneering catalog of ambient releases, including his full length LUX in 2012. Composed of just one 54-minute title track, the generative edition of Reflection was developed by Eno and his long-time collaborator Peter Chilvers. Here’s more from Eno on the generative Reflection versions being made available on Apple TV and iOS:
Reflection is the most recent of my Ambient experiments and represents the most sophisticated of them so far. My original intention with Ambient music was to make endless music, music that would be there as long as you wanted it to be. I wanted also that this music would unfold differently all the time – “like sitting by a river”: it’s always the same river, but it’s always changing. But recordings – whether vinyl, cassette or CD – are limited in length, and replay identically each time you listen to them. So in the past I was limited to making the systems which make the music, but then recording 30 minutes or an hour and releasing that. Reflection in its album form – on vinyl or CD – is like this. But the app by which Reflection is produced is not restricted: it creates an endless and endlessly changing version of the piece of music.
The creation of a piece of music like this falls into three stages: the first is the selection of sonic materials and a musical mode – a constellation of musical relationships. These are then patterned and explored by a system of algorithms which vary and permutate the initial elements I feed into them, resulting in a constantly morphing stream (or river) of music. The third stage is listening. Once I have the system up and running I spend a long time – many days and weeks in fact – seeing what it does and fine-tuning the materials and sets of rules that run the algorithms. It’s a lot like gardening: you plant the seeds and then you keep tending to them until you get a garden you like.
The app-based edition comes alongside more conventional vinyl LP, CD, digital download and streaming offerings. “Moving the composition into software allowed an extra opportunity,” said Chilvers. “The rules themselves could change with the time of day. The harmony is brighter in the morning, transitioning gradually over the afternoon to reach the original key by evening. As the early hours draw in, newly introduced conditions thin the notes out and slow everything down.”
The new album and the iOS app are released on the January 1st 2017.
December 15, 2016
There was lots of great music this year. A few discoveries came (as always) from the electronic music forum, We Are The Music Makers. These guys are passionate and very informative.
Below are the albums I enjoyed this year.
December 14, 2016
This collection from 1985 is one of the best books I have read in recent years. It features four tales that have a meticulous construction and subtle use of horror.
Critic S.T Joshi:
In close to 25 years of writing Klein has only two books and a handful of scattered tales to his credit, and yet his achievement towers gigantically over that of his more prolific contemporaries.
I totally recommend finding a copy if you can.