that's fantastic Ben I really like, and what's more the family has left the room so I only need to make myself a cuppa

Silencing of the reefs forject in collaboration with TBA21 Academy. Recorded in Greenland, Belize, Dominican republic 2007, 2012 and 2013.

freeze to melt

Performed by Elisabeth Smalt. 
Released on the CD Subvoice - unsounds.com/shop/physical/subvoice

Music For Viola

Faex Optim - Escape From New York (Cover)

COLOR SQUAD RECORDS 090/ALB026

https://colorsquadrecords.bandcamp.com/album/void-folder

CSR090 - S̸t̀҉͞r̴̢a̵̡͡n͜͠g̀͘e M̡ea̸t̷ - Void Folder -  Sovum - Hlit

Climbing Higher and Looking Further

Bit of an oldie that I decided to fix up. Oldschool-Knivtid!

Hoppas att allt är bra

A version of the soundscape produced by three balloon-assisted kite tail sound systems for the Air Matters exhibition, Waterman's Gallery, London 2019.

Ascending Composition 1 (For Planes) representative soundscape - Kate Carr

Pie Are Squared is Italy-based Egyptian musician Mohammed Ashraf. He has previously released music through labels such as Handstitched*, Lost Children and on Eilean Records as Śruti, his collaboration with Omar El Abd. Some of you may also recall this year's 'muri', which was the 13th addition to our Home Diaries Series.

'Con Calma' is a serene album for quiet contemplation, as minimalist tones glide and encourage a sense of detachment. It began as Mohammed gathered recordings on his mobile phone whilst travelling, which were later fed through various chains of effects. Guitars and a range of utilities were used to craft these lulling tones, with the wealth of source and detail somehow liquefying into a collection of daydreams. 

These reveries were assembled from lengthy loop sessions, which Mohammed listened to for almost a year to help him detach from the mundane office routine. He wanted this work to be a form of escapism, yet free from anxiety; a slow, calm exit.

Con Calma is not completely weightless and feather-lite; at times the light abrasion of distortion joins the wash, to add texture. The album is best enjoyed with the tracks played in sequence, as they envelope you into a sense of contemplation, starting from humble, quiet beginnings, journeying through air and rail in 'Flügezüge', onto more than a hint of stormy seas towards the second half, before closing with the daze of its final moments in 'Away, World, Away'.

Releases 25/07/2020
Written and produced by Mohammed Ashraf
Mastered by Ian Hawgood
Photography by Mohammed Ashraf
Packaging design by Harry Towell

Con Calma

wlr076 Pie Are Squared - Con Calma

From LAL-102 - Red Brut - Cloaked Travels LP.

Following her debut LP (KRAAK, 2018) and a string of tapes and 7-inches, Red Brut drops her second album, Cloaked Travels. It is a joined release by the Finnish labels Ikuisuus and Lal Lal Lal.  

In many aspects, Cloaked Travels is an amazing realisation of what Red Brut does best: molding the absurd, the amateurish, and the crude into beautiful and elegant sound pieces. These eight “songs”, organised in two suites, dwell between abstract avant-garde and pop sensibility. Working with cassette tapes, Red Brut enhances the ambiguous qualities of her sounds with the warm distortion and background hiss typical of the medium. The music leaves the listener to him- or herself, happily lost in small universes that contain many layers of beauty, discomfort, and intimacy.  

Susan Sontag once claimed that diaries, despite secretly kept by the author, are meant to be read by others. Red Brut’s intimate and highly personal take on musique concrète is characterised by a homely feeling: sounds of doors, kids outside her house, a synth that sounds like a house pet, muffled whispers of her voice. Her compositions sound like you are secretly reading her diary. You are in the uncomfortable position of watching someone chasing her own tail, unaware of the fact that she is being the object of our gaze.  

Unaware? Cloaked Travels displays on a certain point the sound of a squeaking door. Over and over until it starts sounding like a wild free jazz solo. Is Verbiesen playing tricks on our minds? Is she actually the Unconsciously Watched? Or is she cloaked as that character, and in fact very well aware that we are peeping into her inner emotional universe; maybe she is even projecting a fake version of what sounds like here day-to-day, intimate environment — making us conscious of our own gaze? Again Sontag comes to mind: she deliberately projected a well-constructed character in both her diaries as in public life.  

Cloaked Travels contains distinct and carefully composed pieces that play upon the tension between the concrete and the abstract. Every song acts like a Cave of Plato: we are unable to see what is actually happening, we only see the shadows of a door moving or the sounds of someone gurgling. The album suggests some fundamental questions: is what we conceive as reality nothing but a derivative of the Ideal? Is there really something behind the shadow, or is the shadow the actual reality?  

- text by Niels Latomme  credits released July 3, 2020

Music & artwork by Marijn Verbiesen. 
Final montage by Michiel Klein. 
Mastered by Samuli Tanner.

Climbing Higher and Looking Further

Ben Ponton

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