I'll be playing this on my radio show for dublab (LA) on Feb 9th... www.mscharding.net

Orders open end of January 2018.

The recordings of Gaelic Psalm singing presented in the release are among the best ever captured. They document a living tradition, a form of religious singing from the Hebrides in Scotland, which is still practiced in Lewis. In Gaelic psalm singing, a precentor leads, and from here voices follow, moving together like the murmurations of birds. These recordings of Gaelic Psalm singing were originally made over two evenings in the Back Free Church on the Isle of Lewis in October 2003. The singing was spontaneous and totally unrehearsed. The recordings are now presented on vinyl for the first time by Arc Light Editions.

This is music that is transcendent and together, about the individual and the earth, movingly spiritual with or without belief. The sound comes in great waves, swells of sound that break and roll around the space. The texture relies on the individuals: this is group singing where the individual is preserved, elevated, but together.

A precentor leads off with the first lines of a psalm, and the congregation follows, some faster than others, and each one remains discernible. In his notes to the original release, Calum Martin writes that the form, called precenting (where one person puts out the line and the congregation responds) while not exclusive to Gaelic free church traditions, is in Lewis particularly influenced by the pibroch style of free ornamentation. It’s through this, he says, that the distinctive emotional swell of sound emerges. The sound relies on the congregation’s individual responses to the melody and the individual precentor’s leading. The musical term is free heterophony.

Arc Light Editions has worked directly with DR Macdonald at the Bethesda Hospice and Calum Martin on this release, and we thank them for their time. A portion of the profits from this release go directly to Bethesda Hospice, in accordance with the original release.

Official release date:
2 February 2018

Salm: Volume One

Salm: Gaelic Psalms from the Hebrides of Scotland – Psalm 16 8-9

A just discovered recording of my Harbour Symphony that I wrote for the boats in the harbour in St. John's, Newfoundland as part of Sound Symposium 2004.

Harbour Symphony Newfoundland 2004

Harbour Symphony (Dafna Naphtali) St. John's Newfoundland 2004

Martin Bartlett - Anecdotal Electronics: Live experiments & other recordings (ALE009)
Release date: April 26th, 2019
Vinyl pre-order: http://bit.ly/MartinBartlettALE009
CD pre-order:  http://bit.ly/MartinBartlettALE010
SHOP: https://arclighteditions.bigcartel.com/

Martin Bartlett should be a familiar name. As well as working with a who’s who of electronic music, he was an inspiring
His music is distinctive for its warmth and fleshiness, for taking joy from the incidental and anecdotal, and it remains a characterful counterpoint to much contemporary electronic music. It is his preoccupation with building aleatoric elements into electronic music that distinguishes his work, and he devised elegant and open interactions for instrumental performers and computer-controlled synthesizers. This included building his own electronic devices, and extensive work on the Buchla 400.
He worked with or studied under Pauline Oliveros, John Cage and David Tudor, and collaborated extensively with Don Buchla, and some of their live performances are included on the LP Anecdotal Electronics. He also studied Carnatic vocal music with V. Lakshminarayana Iyer in Madras and then on to Burma, Thailand and Indonesia where he studied shadow theatre. He studied South Asian music with Pandit Pran Nath, gamelan with K.R.T. Wasitidipuro. He was particularly interested in the Javanese gamelan, which led to him founding the Vancouver Community Gamelan in 1986.
His performances were often collaborative – for the Western Front’s second anniversary in 1975 he devised the four- channel piece One Piece for Everyone, a composition where he prepared and cooked a cauliflower curry on a table connected to a synthesizer he had built, while reading from texts on food. When the curry was cooked, the piece ended, and everyone was fed.
Bartlett was a prolific writer, and he expresses himself in fresh, lucid, and wonderfully descriptive prose, offering clear thinking on social aspects of electronic music performance; on the barriers between the performer and the ‘black box’ and on possibilities for organic systems in electronic music. He also wrote accounts of his sailing trips, treatise on performance practices, and technical academic articles on the systems he built, along with the incandescent manifesto-like piece Electronic Recalcitrant (which forms the cover artwork for Anecdotal Electronics), in which he hoped that electronic music would be imbued with “organic codes of growth and metamorphosis” so that he could
“pluck elegant and fleshy electronic sound fish from the frothy algorithmic sea of possibilities”.
It is unclear why Bartlett’s work remains unknown. Perhaps it is because it remained largely inside the academy. Perhaps his commitment to live performance and community activity means it was more transient than the work of others. Perhaps his openness about his sexuality played a part in his music not receiving much recognition – one can only speculate. But correspondence in his archive shows that rejection and general lack of interest from labels was a source of great personal discontent, leading to Bartlett working again with the Western Front to release his final opus Pythagoras’ Ghost shortly before his death.
Bartlett died young, of AIDS-related causes, in 1993, but his music remains a rich source of inspiration, and is characterised by an irresistible and unselfconscious charm that renders his sound unique.

Credits:
Compiled and edited by Luke Fowler with Jennifer Lucy Allan. 
Artwork by DR.ME.
Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.

Anecdotal Electronics: Live experiments & other recordings

Muscle Music

Martin Bartlett - Muscle Music

Here

The Pregnant Dream

Ruth Anderson "Here" (ALE011)
Release date: March 6. 2020

Vinyl & Digital album
https://ruthanderson.bandcamp.com/

https://arclighteditions.bigcartel.com/

Ruth Anderson - Pregnant Dream

Arc Light Editions presses important albums to vinyl. We do not claim to be crate diggers, nor are we interested in expensive monolithic deluxe reissues. We hope to make available on vinyl some releases which have been out of print for too long, are extortionately priced second hand, or which have never been graced with a vinyl release. Arc Light Editions is curated by Jennifer Lucy Allan, in collaboration with Multiverse Music. Email us: arclighteditions@gmail.com

Salm: Gaelic Psalms from the Hebrides of Scotland – Psalm 16 8-9

ArcLightEditions

Recent comments

April Kleppe

Mike Harding

Byo-Jo Recordings

Related tracks