Artist: DEMIAN CASTELLANOS
Album: The Kyvu Tapes Vol.I (1990-1998)

HITD 025
Limited edition of 350 copies on black vinyl 

Label, orders: www.handsinthedarkrecords.com
Co-release with Cardinal Fuzz

DEMIAN CASTELLANOS - Lizard Raga

Alabaster DePlume 
“Peach”
Debt Records
2nd Oct 2015

A peach is a sweet and soft and good thing with a stone in the middle, and this is an album about being a person. Smartphones, analogue tape, valve microphones, computers, group games and a grand banquet were used to create this collection of songs, tunes and monologues, that use a series of contradictions to talk about being alive. 

Long-term collaborators John Ellis (piano) and Paddy Steer (percussion, bass, lapsteel, synth) join Angus Fairbairn (vocal, tenor sax) along with eleven other musicians and nearly a hundred other voices in presenting sounds likened to Ethiopian jazz and Japanese folk music. Scripts and vocal delivery evoke Ivor Cutler, Emo Philips and Leonard Cohen, for this combination of theatre, live-captured music, songs, humour and philosophy.

It is a unique collection, made by unusual means designed around the artistry and conveyance of its many contributors. Created over three years in London and Manchester, it’ll be celebrated in those two towns on the dates below, following its vinyl and digital release on Manchester label Debt Records, on 28th September 2015.

A composer, musician and performer, Alabaster DePlume (Angus Fairbairn) has toured northern Europe, appeared on UK national radio and developed theatre for Bram Stoker Festival in Dublin. His many combined arts projects are based around music, and personal inclusion. In this, his third album, he has employed as many voices as he can, in conveying a method of survival he’s been taught, he says, by everyone he’s met.

Hope grows naturally, like a
dandelion between the bricks.
I feel good…

Manchester launch: 4th October at The Wonder Inn 
London launch: 31st October at The Total Refreshment Centre, Dalston

Personnel:
Will Calderbank – cello
Rioghnach Connolly – flute 
Ellis Davies – electric guitar
Lorien Edwards – bass guitar
John Ellis – pianette, clavinette, piano
Leonie Evans – backing
Angus Fairbairn – vocal, tenor sax, acoustic guitar, yanquin dulcimer, synths
Dominie Hooper – backing 
Philip Howley – drums, percussion
Mikey Kenney – violin 
Pascal Makonese – m’bira
Kirsty McGee – bass flute
Tim Vincent Smith – violin
Paddy Steer – drums, percussion, bass guitar, double bass, synths
Rick Weedon – drums, percussion 
With selected vocal delivery from – Rioghnagh Connolly, Ellis Davies, Julia Foster, Katarzina Jablonska, Sally Jenkinson, Kasia Wlaszczyk, Oliver Conway. 
And with a chorus of attendees of the ‘Excuse Me’ studio feast, 9th September 2014, Antwerp Mansion. Meal by Samuel Buckley.

Engineered by Paddy Steer, John Ellis and Karl Sveinsson. Recorded at Limefield Studios Middleton, Madwaltz Levenshulme, Antwerp Mansion Rusholme and the Total Refreshment Centre Dalston, with additional field recordings at various locations. 
Mastered by George Atkins at 80 Hertz.
Artwork by Liz Greenfield
All songs and scripts written by A. Fairbairn. 

14 - Strange

From the album Modern Country, out now on Merge Records.

Modern Country

William Tyler "Gone Clear"

Background, context, and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/09/28/orson-welles-reads-walt-whitman-song-of-myself/

CONTEXT / POEM TEXT

Orson Welles reads Walt Whitman

Full context and poem text: https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/27/janna-levin-reads-planetarium-by-adrienne-rich/

Recorded at "The Universe in Verse," April 24, 2017.

Photograph of Janna Levin by Molly Walsh / Academy of American Poets

POEM TEXT / CONTEXT

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2018/04/23/ursula-k-le-guin-hymn-to-time-janna-levin/

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Hymn to Time" by Ursula K. Le Guin

Artist: Nick Zammuto
Title: Tonight We'll Go For A Ride
Album: We The Animals: An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Release Date: November 9, 2018 Digital / February 8, 2019 Physical

Pre-Order: www.temporaryresidence.com/products/trr308

We The Animals is the award-winning new film from Jeremiah Zagar (In A Dream). Based on the best-selling novel by Justin Torres, We The Animals is Zagar’s first narrative feature. It reunites Zagar with Nick Zammuto, the renowned composer and co-founder of beloved collage-pop pioneers, the Books. Inspired by the film’s setting in rural upstate New York – and influenced by the early ambient electronic music that galvanized the Books two decades ago – Zammuto pairs that earthen, wooded isolation with dynamic pulses of customized electronics and sparse, crystalline layers of melodic soft synths. The juxtaposition is arresting, and gives the soundtrack a unique heft befitting of its subject matter – and betraying of its minimal instrumentation. Beautifully edited and sequenced to act as both a companion to the film and a standalone album, We The Animals: An Original Motion Picture Soundtrack is as subtle as it is startling, and succeeds in making even the heaviest emotions feel momentarily weightless.

We The Animals: An Official Motion Picture Soundtrack

Nick Zammuto - Tonight We'll Go For A Ride

Poem text and context: https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/05/31/helen-fagin-walt-whitman/

101-year-old Holocaust survivor Helen Fagin reads Walt Whitman

Robbie Basho - Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes
A 5CD Box Set - All Tracks Previously Unreleased
Available 12/4/2020
PRE- ORDER : http://www.tompkinssquare.com/bashoboxset.html

Robbie Basho (1940-1986) is widely regarded as one of the progenitors of what's commonly known today as American Primitive guitar. Growing up in Maryland alongside neo-traditional guitar explorers John Fahey and Max Ochs, Basho's path would take a decidedly different turn, bringing Hindi, Indian, Japanese and Native American musical traditions into his work. His albums for Takoma and Vanguard have left an indelible trail of influence across generations of musicians, from William Ackerman and Pete Townshend to Ben Chasny and William Tyler.

Liam Barker first became aware of Basho having purchased Tompkins Square's reissue of Venus in Cancer, released in 2006. This led him on an incredible fact-finding expedition, unraveling the many layers of mystery surrounding Basho's life and death, all deftly compiled and depicted in his documentary film, Voice of the Eagle : The Enigma of Robbie Basho.

During the research process, Barker came across a large cache of unheard Basho tapes recorded throughout his career, ranging roughly from 1965-1985. By arrangement with Basho's Estate and the original custodians of the tapes, Tompkins Square is set to release Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes, a 5CD set of previously unreleased material, on December 4th, 2020. The set includes notes by Barker, Henry Kaiser, Steffen Basho-Junghans, Glenn Jones and Richard Osborn, as well as many unseen photographs. The box set package featuring gold foil inlay, poster and extensive booklet, was designed by Barbara Bersche, known for her work on the 2009 Grammy-nominated Alan Lomax in Haiti box, as well as the new Dust-To-Digital Harry Smith B-Sides box.

TSQ 5715 - Robbie Basho / Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes - 5CD set

Song of the Avatars : The Lost Master Tapes

American Sunday

In 1968, Dr. Bernie Krause was leading a booming music career. A prodigiously talented musician and early master of the electronic synthesizer, Krause was busy working with artists like the Doors and the Beach Boys and performing iconic effects for blockbuster films. Then Warner Brothers commissioned him to create an album incorporating the sounds of wild habitats, so he headed into Muir Woods with his recording equipment. What he heard changed his life and triggered a fifty-year odyssey.

Then and there, Krause decided that he wanted spend the rest of his life recording and archiving the music of wild animals and wild places. He quit Hollywood and began traveling the world. The soundscapes he recorded were full of epiphanies about the origin of our own culture and music, about the profound connectedness of creatures, and about the unseen tolls of human activity. Previous wildlife recordings isolated the calls of individual creatures, but Krause recorded habitats as a whole. He soon proposed a new theory of ecosystem functioning: that each species produces unique acoustic signatures, partitioning and occupying sonic niches such that the singing of all of the creatures in a healthy ecosystem can be heard, organized like players in an orchestra. 

Today, Krause’s astonishing archive contains sounds made by more than 15,000 species. It is, as The New Yorker aptly put it, “an auditory Library of Alexandria for everything non-human." Fifty percent of the recorded habitats no longer exist due to habitat destruction, climate change, and human din. We spoke with Krause about the beauty of and perils facing wild music, the extraordinary science of soundscape ecology, and how sound impacts the welfare of animals. The music in this episode is from Wild Sanctuary (www.wildsanctuary.com).

Astrophysicist Janna Levin reads "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich

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