
Track taken from the album 'There Can Be No True Beauty Without Decay' / HB50 - Released October 2013

Ian M Hazeldine records under the alias Antonymes, hailing from Hawarden, a small village in North Wales, whose most famous inhabitant was William Ewart Gladstone. He creates atmospheric melodies, using various pianos, celesta, strings, church organ and field recordings, and has had releases on Soundcolours, Cathedral Transmissions, Hidden Shoal, Time Released Sound and Rural Colours.

With a long standing interest in music making and active listening, Hazeldine works with any influences, from his surrounding landscape to the artists he has worked with. His compositions often take on a semi-improvised structure with accidental atmospheres used as a starting point. As well as his own projects, Hazeldine also works with Marconi Union's Richard Talbot, under the name Prospector. He also works as a graphic designer, film maker and photographer, having art directed many of the Hibernate releases including our critically acclaimed vinyl series, and has worked with many other artists and labels including Facture, Field Rotation and Olan Mill.

In late 2009 Antonymes released 'Beauty Becomes the Enemy of the Future' on Cathedral Transmissions of which the CD is now unavailable. Since then he has revisited the album, which has culminated a new release, 'There Can Be No True Beauty Without Decay'. Hazeldine's own reworkings are intertwined with those of friends Ian Hawgood, Isnaj Dui, Offthesky, Field Rotation, Wil Bolton, Spheruleus and James Banbury to create an album of captivating melancholy and beauty. The guest reworkings venture into other, darker territories, where one might be harder pressed to identify the original material.

The sleeve features beautiful images of the North Wales landscape by Richard Outram, fitting the music perfectly.

Credits:
Mastered by Jason Corder (offthesky.com)
Photography by Richard Outram and Ian M Hazeldine
Art Direction by Ian M Hazeldine

“Majestic testament to a talent that is fully realized… Hazeldine’s work is distinct, yet the parts remain hazy in one’s memory, dreamlike” - The Silent Ballet

"So moving that I myself am at a loss for words" - Delusions of Adequacy

"Not only music for dreams, but rather a complex mosaic by a romantic minimalist" - Ondarock

"Unfolds at a beautifully measured pace" - Textura

"Barely visible movements of slate grey cumulonimbus, slowly building its massive architecture, rumbles of thunder emanating from its core" - Futuresequence

"Amazingly uplifting listen with surprise euphoria hidden around every corner" - Norman Records.


Misshapen Beauty [i]

Antonymes : In Formation

Antonymes music emerges from the adjustments and erasures of ambient, the pace and persistence of minimalism, where music expresses nothing but itself, from the serenity and austerity of Morton Feldman and the profound prettiness of Harold Budd, from the relationship between continuity and repetition rather than of contract and interplay, from secrecy, from quietness, from pause, from thought, from emptiness, from time, from far off, from itself, from where it is set and where it is setting off to.   
 
“My chief aim is to make a piece of music. You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in, then there we are.”
 
Antonymes makes music at the edge of, and deep inside, and from above North Wales, which you can think of as a very real place, available to be visited at any time in the solid present, and also as a very strange, fantastic, ultimately unreal place, which is all it has ever been, legend, spirit, mist and fluctuating stillness stretching back to a time and place where it was seemed like the beginning of a dream, one that would always become another dream, and another, and so on. It’s worth mentioning that Antonymes is of North Wales: to take an approach to the music understanding the location where it was made up and produced, to approach the music as if it is the beginning, or the end, of some kind of map, that will take you up mountains, across streams, to the sea, where the tide comes in, and the tide goes out, under the waves, through the woods and into the obscure wilderness that stretches between one patch of land and another, between one village and the next. So: Antonymes, of North Wales, recalling the lines of the great North Welsh poet RS Thomas, “to live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky, dyeing the wild rivers in all their courses.’
 
Formed at some point during 2008 by designer, photographer, conceptualist and musician Ian M Hazeldine, as a group that could contain just himself, and others when it seemed appropriate, Antonymes first album was titled ‘Beauty Becomes The Enemy of the Future’. Released initially on David Newlyn’s Cathedral Transmissions label in December 2009, and as a self-published book in spring 2010. A second 2010 release, ‘31: Before The Light Fails’, was released as a digital download and as a special box, an edition of one, containing music and photography, representing Antonymes fear and suspicion of the herd mentality. The piece consisted of two tracks to be played simultaneously in separate rooms. One review described the work as “a daring and inspired exercise in creating a timeless work of art.” Various pieces by Antonymes have appeared on compilations produced by Soundcolours, Dezordr, Cathedral Transmissions and Audio Gourmet.
 
Antonymes music is made up, something coming from nowhere, with no clear sense of what might happen next, and yet a vague sense of what might happen after that. It begins at the piano, where notes, space and intention, and something of the soul, and the mind catching itself combine over time, until a shape appears, which suggest other shapes, and lines, and something else, an anatomy, the lateral spread of a single surface, and a shadow or two. A composition, the result of a mystical sequence of events involving improvisation, imagination, presentation, communication, intuition and manipulation, has been completed. It is the improvisation, certainly, more of Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran and La Monte Young than jazz, the patient, probing occasionally accidental forming of structure, tension and atmosphere around spontaneity and a form of focussed daydreaming, which is a near relation of a form of praying.

Paul Morley, January 2011.