Billow Observatory

A new collection of work titled 'Sodium Light' from myself has just been released on Lee Norris's excellent NeoTantra label. The work was inspired by a series of night walks my daughter and I took towards the back end of 2019; pre all the states we find ourselves in at the moment. It's an impressionistic work of night-time cityscapes. Mastered by Fraser McGowan.

Sodium Light

Night #1

'Night #1' - Taken from the release 'Sodium Light' - [Neotantra, 2021]

Night #2

'Night #2' - Taken from the release 'Sodium Light' - [Neotantra, 2021]

~ LAAPS 023 ~ [SEQ.03 - LP23]

artist : Seabuckthorn
 album : Of No Such Place
duration : 39.34 mn
 date : November 04th, 2022

edition :
-  vinyl : limited to 200 copies / solid silver LP / hand numbered 
- cd : limited to 200 copies / hand numbered + handcrafted, sealed

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pre-order : October 07th, 2022 / official release : November 04th, 2022
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Guitars, field recordings, clarinet, tongue drum, cymbals, effects and mixing by Andy Cartwright.
Double bass on 1,2,3,5,6 by Phil Cassel.
Recorded at home between March and April 2022 in Veynes, France.

Mastered by Ian Hawgood
Cover photo taken by Andy Cartwright in Le Dévoluy in Oct 2021.
 Design by Sprflxgrfzm

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Links :
https://laaps-records.com/
https://seabuckthorn.bandcamp.com/
https://seabuckthorn-music.com/

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℗ & © 2 0 2 2 - L A A P S - L A A P S  0 2 3

Seabuckthorn - Hand In The Upward Sky

wistful

FRKWYS Vol. 13: Sunergy

Closed Circuit

II: Plains/Patterns

Nulstil

Pulsus

Kercheval

Taken from 'Shimmer Raga' (HH102), the official label debut from Melbourne-based musician and sound designer Zoltan Fecso.

Digital + Cassette Tape release date: August 17th, 2018.

Digital + tape on Bandcamp: goo.gl/DL86Da
Apple Music / iTunes: smarturl.it/ShimmerRagaApple
Spotify: smarturl.it/ShimmerRagaSpotify

Zoltan Fecso / Soundcloud - @zoltanfecso

Shimmer Raga

TAPE / DL

Zoltan Fecso - Time Bath (feat. Anna Morley)

Written and produced by Greig Baird 
Layout and design by 扎克 
-- 
© Healing Sound Propagandist 
HSP-05 | MMXIX 
pastinsidethepresent.com/hsp 
healingsoundpropagandist.bandcamp.com
license
all rights reserved

In the Summer of 2019 Greig Baird and his family moved home and into a new area of a city they have lived for many years.

The layers and layers of history in this new locale were palpable and inspired Baird to create this small collection of music, ‘Once Hallowed’.

This new area was home to a Franciscan Friary established in the 13th century and later home to a church, Allhallows-on-the-Wall built in the 19th century. This church was later a corset factory, then later a parachute factory during war time. The last burials in this place were conducted in secrecy by the light of a midnight moon during the cholera epidemic of 1832. The wall outside Baird’s home dates to Roman times and was once the south-western city limit.

The burial grounds now deconsecrated and long abandoned are also home to the catacombs of the city. Again abandoned long ago, bodies long removed, tales of stolen skulls and grave robbing, and the stone of which they are built are all that remains. The areas wildlife, dog walkers, children playing, students hanging around, drunks falling asleep on abandoned tombs and the city’s drug dealers plying trade all make the place what it is. Often beautiful as the light changes and Falcons fly above, the sounds of the day city form into the nocturnal; sometimes sad as the desperation of people’s modern situations becomes abundantly clear.

The relics of the past experienced in our present creates something else. Something deeply inspiring, creating an atmosphere deeply felt and not entirely understood.

Glare

'Glare' - Once Hallowed - [Healing Sound Propagandist, 2019]

Excerpt from a release with Longform Editions. Listen/purchase the full track here https://longformeditions.bandcamp.com/track/immaterial

// 
Earlier this year I spent a two-month period on residency in Hong Kong. I was instantly drawn to the colour and vibrancy of the city, as well as to certain materials and objects that kept reappearing on my explorations.

Billowy, gauzy construction cloth that covered spiny bamboo scaffolding, the devastatingly-inviting colourful-sheen of single-use plastics, discarded durian husks, the deep blue night-time sky made hazy/dreamy/luminous from neon lighting, lush and vibrant green foliage…

I was thinking about the small variations in the repetition of these materials, as well as the repetition of certain images and sounds.

The phasing on/off flash of orange construction lights lining long stretches of road; the rhythmic phasing of multiple pedestrian crossing beeps heard simultaneously. the overhead circling of the kites (seabirds) in the sky; the below-water circling of plastic bags in the harbour.

For a little while now I’ve been cultivating an obsession with the relationships between sound, material/object and texture. How feeling can inform listening, how listening is feeling, and how this felt-listening can alter our perception of things as we are taught to ‘know’ them. For me listening is acknowledging the intrinsic connections between our surroundings and ourselves.

If we acknowledge the vibrancy and resonance of everyday objects how might this change our actions and thinking around them.

"My hunch is that the image of dead or thoroughly instrumentalised matter feeds human hubris and our earth-destroying fantasies of conquest and consumption. It does so by preventing us from detecting (seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, feeling) a fuller range of the nonhuman powers circulating around and within human bodies." Jane Bennett in Vibrant Matter

It occurred to me, whilst writing this and listening back, that not only are materials amplified in Immaterial but certain sounds appear almost material in themselves, such as the squeak of shoes on basketball courts, and the droplets of rain on foliage. These sounds seem not to belong to shoe or court, rain or leaf, but are formed in the entwining to become a thing in themselves. It is this connectedness through sound that I am fascinated with. Through sound unequal forms can be connected: mic distortion disguises itself as crinkling plastic bags that blends into the crackling sound of shrimp underwater.

Sound waves traverse through our bodies and our surroundings, forming knots and vibrations and connections and confusions. In sound material blends with the immaterial and new imaginaries can be made, for me this is a way out.

Immaterial was composed in parallel to these thoughts.
Like silky-soft milky tea tasted alongside a crispy-sweet pineapple bun.
//

All sounds heard on Immaterial (excepting one recording of clarinet) were recorded in Hong Kong between April and June 2019.
Composed, performed, recorded and mixed by Alexandra Spence
Additional percussion by Karen Yu
Mastered by A.F. Jones at Laminal Audio

Immaterial excerpt

~ IIKKI 011 ~

music : Seabuckthorn
photography : Sophie Gabrielle
album/book : Through A Vulnerable Occur
duration : 38.55 mn
date : March 2020

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All music by Andy Cartwright : Guitars, Saz, Charango, Effects. 
Gareth Davis : Clarinet on 'Through A Vulnerable Occur' and 'Place Memory'. 

Recorded & mixed in Veynes, France between summer 2019 – Winter 2020. 

Mastered by James Plotkin
Artwork by Sophie Gabrielle
Design by sprflxgrfzm

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edition : 
vinyl : limited to 300 copies hand numbered 
cd : limited to 200 cd (glass mastered) hand numbered
book : limited to 300 copies hand numbered + hand stamped

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pre-order : March 02th, 2020 / official release : March 30th, 2020

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Links :
https://seabuckthorn.bandcamp.com/
https://www.sophiegabriellephoto.com/
https://www.iikki-books.com/
https://iikki.bandcamp.com/music
https://www.facebook.com/iikki.books/
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℗ & © 2 0 2 0 - I I K K I - I I K K I 0 1 1

Seabuckthorn - And Bickers Into Colour

Stareside

Wash Away The Dust

A track from the album Progressions out 09/22/20 on Constellation Tatsu.

Anthéne and Andrew Tasselmyer - Progressions, Pt 1 (Reprise)

Red Morning

Danish/American/Ambient/Experimental

Boomkat's description (http://boomkat.com/vinyl/601376-billow-observatory-billow-observatory):

"Nearly a decade in the making, 'Observatory' features Jonas Munk (Manual) and Jason Kolb (Auburn Lull) striving for ambient guitar perfection as Billow. Arguably, they've come close to achieving their practically impossible mission, conducting themselves with divine patience and deliberation across 15 achingly blissful scenes at once evoking the humbling beauty of the natural world and the yearning sublimity of more soporific states thanks to near-surgical application of software and hardware effects. Unless you're au fait with the likes of Fennesz or Stars Of The Lid, you might never tell that the guitar is at the heart of this record, yet beneath its phosphorescing, crepuscular drones and plangent sonorities the simple six string generates all the source material. So the world it inhabits is essentially that one between states, simulating a quietly vibrant ecology of sub-aquatic bass rumbles, washed out expanses of mid-range swirl and keening top end whose elusive colours seem to fade and coruscate in the low light. Lovely."

U.S. Pre-orders:  http://felte.bandcamp.com/album/billow-observatory





Nulstil

Billow Observatory

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