Broken20’s Tangents Series is an outlet for new, collaborative music, usually performed live. 

The Tangents Series is available on CD-r presented in a clamshell case with handmade inserts on lovely 210gsm recycled card by house designer David Fyans. It will also be available digitally. 

Tangents #02 is from BrokenThree, recorded live and improvised in Edinburgh in 2013 as part of The Outer Church. 

BrokenThree is a collaborative effort from Erstlaub, Production Unit and TVO, who are collectively the heads behind Broken20. The group was borne of necessity when The Wire’s Joseph Stannard requested a contribution from all three artists for his ‘The Outer Church’ compilation on Front & Follow records. 

When Joe brought his uncanny audiovisual activities to Glasgow and Scotland in 2013, the three embarked on an improvised live performance. A visual score was created to illustrate the relative activity of each player at any point. Rules were set: two agreed tempos, two keys, but with an agreement to work separately on the constituent parts so that each participant had no idea what the other two would play. A kind of reanimated exquisite corpse. 

There was a division of labour, too: Erstlaub would provide ground, texture and gravity, basting the overall sound in the kind of meditative drone that characterises his long-form releases such as ‘Marconi’s Shipwreck’ [Broken20]; TVO would supply beats, chaos and semi-rhythmic noise in line with his hardware-focussed recent works like ‘Red Night’ for B20 tape offshoot, Broken60; Production Unit’s remit was for notes both melodic and dissonant, ranging from subs, lush strings and plinking marimbas to the peremptory squawk of seasick pitching hospital machines first heard on ‘ICU Tracks’ [Broken20]. 

It could have gone horribly wrong. An orchestra of soloists is a dirge. But what transpired was a three-headed beauty, with a likeness to all its parents. Referencing classic ambient chill out as often as rough-edged brutalism, and possessing a clear narrative flow thanks to the score that’s referenced in the accompanying artwork, it’s a triumph for democracy, restraint, kismet and shared artistic vision. 

Erstlaub is the alter ego of Dave Fyans, the label’s Art Director and an artist who deals in sound, performance, installation, text, and still and moving images. The influences in his deep drone transmissions lean toward subconscious interventions, mysticism, psychology, extra-dimensional and liminal spaces. Aside from Broken20, he has released on Highpoint Lowlife and Moving Furniture records and recently collaborated with TVO at The Dark Outside festival on an 8 hour continuous improvised performance. 

Production Unit has released an album and an EP for Broken20, as well as recording as Dour Tonic Input for Broken60. He recently collaborated on a live performance project with TVO as part of a fundraising event for Palestine; the two are currently in production of a psychogeographical film based in and on Glasgow, with film-maker and photographer Brian McGovern. 

TVO has been lauded by The Wire as a practitioner of “meticulously textured, atypical techno” and by The Quietus as “one of the UK’s most unfairly overlooked electronic artists”. His previous releases have been for the likes of Stuff, Highpoint Lowlife, Broken20 and tape offshoot Broken60. Recent work includes the performance ‘Wind Die, We Die, You Die’ as part of the Burroughs at 100 event and his prior release ‘LiveGlasgow040414’ with Paul Purgas, the inaugural Tangents release on Broken20.

releases 29 June 2015

B20_18 Tangents Series #02: BrokenThree - Live At The Outer Church clips

“Sound has always been an integral part of ritual. The shared listening experience can give a sense of community, of synchronised brainwaves and collective movement.”

So says David Fyans (Broken20 art director, aka Erstlaub) in the programme notes for his new audiovisual release on Broken20, ‘The Somnambulist’s Field Guide’. The programme notes exist because the piece is borne of a live performance-based installation, utilising immersive sculptural audio and meditative, hypnotic video in order to create a magickal space within which the collective listener, as a single organism, may embrace a sense of ‘otherness’, meditate on the spacial and psychological qualities of sound, and traverse dense and varied landscapes, conjured from the absence of silence.

As Broken20’s art director, Fyans is responsible for constructing the design aesthetic of the label. On ‘The Somnambulist’s Field Guide’ he builds on his previous audiovisual work such as ‘Marconi’s Shipwreck’ (bk20_ 08), this time presenting the visual aspect of the work as a slow-moving celestial presence, its landscape gradually shifting and pulsing in an unnerving endless ripple. The piece has been brewing for two years prior to this DVD/digital incarnation and has manifested in various forms - previously, drowning a gallery in full blackout with the audience breathing in an incense of Mugwort and lounging on cushions in a deeply meditative ritual state. It has also been performed straightish (although with Fyans challenging himself and his narrative by performing the sections in a chance order).

The Somnambulist’s Field Guide takes on its largest installation on September 1st, 2016 at CCA in Glasgow as part of Cryptic’s endlessly challenging and diverse programme of productions. During this performance, the projection will take place ‘in the round’ on the floor in the centre of the space, providing a focal point of sorts to the ‘ritual’ that acts as a mandla for the audience to share their experiences around. Sonically, the piece drifts through discrete sections over the duration of its seventy-plus minutes in the manner of Fyans’ previous works, each section blending into the next. This makes for a deeply transitory experience; the listener does not suddenly find themselves thrown into new territory, rather realises that they are no longer on familiar ground and must take in and process their current surroundings in the drift.

As conceptually rooted as Fyans’ work ever is, the piece also displays a reverence for the deep and dusty grooves of Basic Channel and other acolytes of submerged/degraded audio such as Huerco S, Loscil and Tim Hecker.

David Fyans is an artist and freelance producer/designer/technician who deals in sound, performance, installation, text and moving images to convey the conceptual ideas behind his work. His main influences lean towards subconscious interventions, mysticism, psychogeography, extra-dimensional and liminal spaces, and ruminations on time and our understanding of it. He performs sculptural audio, ritual performances and improvised works regularly as Erstlaub and under his own name on Broken20, Highpoint Lowlife and Moving Furniture amongst others.

B20_26 David Fyans - The Somnambulist's Field Guide

Format: DVD, 12” vinyl, software and source code.

Spatial has always been more exploratory than your average stepper, but with his audiovisual (or “opti-sonic” as he puts it) project 'Primitives', every aspect of his output blooms outward with android rigour.

'Primitives' was born when Spatial devised a performative installation of light and sound by coding his own software, exploring  the OpenFrameworks platform. Influenced by the likes of Sally Golding, Bruce McClure and Greg Pope, he sought to investigate a similar materiality of light, sound and space manifested via the digital domain, to “explore sonic and optical intensity articulated by simple geometric figures and extreme frequencies.” He continues: “Projected images drive a sensory assault, consumed by your eyes, then ears, and existing somewhere between perceptions.” Elsewhere in his manifesto he states that he's “interrogating hacked code for excruciating light” and that it “brings a new realisation to the relationships between seeing sound and hearing colour.”

'Primitives' has made live appearances at Cafe OTO & Apiary Studios in London and Supernormal Festival in Oxfordshire building the piece to its current form via a variety of evolutionary configurations, developing from the initial single screen staging to an expanded setup that fully inhabits that performance space. The logical next step is to release it to the wider world in some shape – the work itself, Spatial's software that created it and the underlying code to hack the project. But how does a producer and DJ release these related strands into a coherent package that envelops the project's handmade, atavistic blossoming, both visual and aural? How could that blend with his prior output? And fundamentally, who would be mad enough to pull it all together?

Step forward Broken20, the Glasgow label founded on “an aesthetic, not a genre – releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz”. And as Broken20's first foray into vinyl following a multi-format splurge of tapes, DVDs and custom made USB sticks it made sense to collaborate on a 12” that was more than just a slab of wax.

So we have 'Primitives', a DVD containing short films of live A/V content alongside an executable version of the software and the source code plus a 12” record containing four commissioned interpretations by Spatial himself, Broken20's TVO, Bass Clef and Sculpture aimed somewhat more at the dancefloor. The combination of media represent the totality of the 'Primitives' experience.


The DVD contains a series of live, improvised audiovisual art works under two distinct sections: Single Channel & Expanded.

The Single Channel works are most revealing of the performance process and the underlying software. These screen recordings highlight each sequence as a composition of four AVUgens - base units combining visual representation and its effecting properties on the accompanying sonic component. Deliberately simple relationships, such as a polygon interacting with a sine wave, animate, coalesce and interplay to create an immersive sensory experience.

The Expanded section takes this technical setup and explores the relationship and geometry of light and sound inhabiting a performance space. Recorded live using various cameras and segmented into a number of short visual works, these films liberate the software from its digital domain to focus on the material aspects of the output within an architecture. Embracing the ensuing degradation of the stylised visual perfection into hacked light, the audio is freed to breathe deep within three dimensions, enjoying the implicit bit crushing and dithering that occurs as it’s captured through the camera’s built in microphones.

On the accompanying 12”, Spatial kicks off, his almost-4/4 beats underpinning skippy percussion and no little bass heft. Insectoid whines hover around the demarcations of tonality while dubbed out squawks bounce back against themselves and oppressive drones linger offstage.

The TVO|SPL interpretation immediately suggests a muscular tone and that's borne out in torn percussive shards, squealing feedback intervals and clattering loops, but it keeps one eye on the 'floor with techno thump and a skewed hypnotic groove. There are breakdowns of some sort in there, but they may not be musical.

Bass Clef showcases broken Eski: sparse rippling synths rail against a square bass chassis and disembodied spring reverb claps, before ghosts enter the machine as pensive chords and tinkling melodies that recall classic electronica. It's classic Cumbers.

“Opto-musical agglommerate” Scuplture are turning heads, and their freeform rework of 'Primitives' doesn't disappoint. Part Herbie Hancock, part Farmers Manual, it's a heady concoction of reclaimed modal drones and glassy hits that takes the source material and launches it inward.


Overall, it's difficult to imagine these interpretations growing from the austere and brutal shapes of the 'Primitives' installation, still more to grasp how they manage to imbue strains of its character throughout. Alongside the wealth of supporting material, the full package of 'Primitives' showcases nothing so much as the purity of a pliable concept extended through time and space.


B20_14 Spatial - Primitives Interpretations clips

Third in the series is ‘The Ruin of Tallis’ from Broken20 art director David Fyans. with his Erstlaub alias currently MIA and, geographically dislocated from the landscapes that usually inspire him, it finds him in a newly introspective state, mirrored in his recent visual and audio works. The release is a collaboration with writer Gareth E Rees whose text is entitled ‘A Vision Of Duncan Sharp’.
Fyans again provides the imagery for the release. He continues his recontextualisation of found objects used on the first couple of releases in the li_series - TVO’s ‘Installation Pieces’ and Dirty Hope’s ‘Storm Katie’ - as his unified “visual language” continues to accrue. Sonically, ‘The Ruin of Tallis’ takes influence from a host of drone forebears. It builds from a gentle fade into subtly pentatonic shifting sands, replete with ebbing harmonics and flowing counterpoint, calling to mind LaMonte Young and Alvin Lucier. The pace of change is undoubtedly glacial, but Fyans states that “I wanted to focus on that idea that if you can get over the relative fixed nature of the drone, the amplitude and harmonic structures start to define it.”
Rees runs www.unofficialbritain.com and is the author of  'Marshland: Dreams & Nightmares on the Edge of London’ (Influx Press), which he describes as “a time-travel journey through the Lea Marshes, weaving together supernatural stories, local legends, weird histories and tales of my own encounters and mishaps.”. In ‘A Vision Of Duncan Sharp’, he describes an uncanny experience revolving around a park bench, a maniacally laughing ghost and the underlying strangeness of our everyday existences. Moving outwards from the marshes, Gareth E Rees has spent the last 3 years living and writing around Hastings and the South East Coast.
The audio progresses over a narrative based on a series of tidal washes, as volumes build and break in slo-mo sequence, but its development is aided by subtle arcs that move in different cycles, generating ever-new combinations of tone and colour. In the piece Fyans attempted “a sort of take on my idea of Thomas Tallis-esque choral music, by means of investigating the notion that something can do very little on the surface, meaning that you get lost in the details and textures that remain.” The piece can be approached as one would a sculptural work, imploring the listener to map the surfaces, the shadows and light in an attempt to grasp the whole from a passing temporal viewpoint.
For his accompaniment, Rees sought to investigate “the way objects take on spiritual significance”, echoing the art for the li_series. By its close, there’s a clear sense of release, of sorts, and of having snatched a glimpse of the crazed inner logic of nature and time. This matches the feeling of spiritual deep cleanse that tends to accompany Fyans’ best work, where its meditative aspects lead to redemption and closure.
Like previous li_series releases, the thematic overlap between text and sound is only partial; a feeling in the gut more than a tick-box exercise in matched content. The full series, released in monthly instalments, will run to 10 editions throughout 2016.

B20_23 li_series 03 David Fyans - The Ruin Of Tallis clip

Laica is the pseudonym of Cambridge’s Dave Fleet, co-owner of the Arrell imprint and a prolific recording artist in his own right. 

A single 22 minute track, ‘One Quarter Dust’ evokes the personal tribulations and ultimate redemption that bore it. As Fleet puts it, “this is my catharsis record. After some difficult times, it took me an age to get my head around making any kind of music, as I saw it as part of the reason for those upheavals.” The piece bears this out, spanning eerie gossamer strands, degraded half-heard echoes and deeply unerring maximal drone, before engaging a sense of release in its final, juddering death throes. 

It calls to mind none so much as Broken20’s outgoing art director Erstlaub aka David Fyans, in the segmented yet holistic approach that spans numerous discrete sections yet feels entirely selfcontained. It’s clearly proved to be a fruitful exercise, with Fleet now working on a collaboration with Graham Dunning, scoring a documentary film and a remix of Chra from her ‘Empty Airport’ album [Editions Mego]. 

As Fyans departs, David Coyle (davidcoyle.co.uk) joins Broken20 as art director.

One Quarter Dust

Buy at store.broken20

B20_33 Laica - One Quarter Dust (stream)

Broken20 return with their second in a run of 3” CD releases, Ordeograph's field recording and found sound odyssey, 'Transparencies'

Originally released via a netlabel and a short run of self-made CDrs in 2006, 'Transparencies' is comprised of sound captures from in and around London.

Ordeograph is one of the aliases of Andy Myers, who describes the tracks' gestation: “After a depressive breakdown and recovery and during a period of creative block with various other projects in the summer of 2006, I began to make field recordings with a very cheap stereo mic and a HDD recorder with the intention of finding interesting snippets to loop and process into my existing projects.”

“I decided to use the recordings in a more sculptural way to explore texture and space, and the capabilities of the software I was using. Each piece was worked on quickly and with a light touch using a handful of effects with the intention of revealing the ambience of each place by blurring the details.”

In download form (also included with the physical release) 'Transparencies' spans a mammoth two and a quarter hours, embellishing the original five tracks with a further four from the same sessions and two newer pieces including one written especially for The Dark Outside broadcast in 2017.

The CD features a bespoke mix of the tracks by Broken20's TVO, building a narrative through the cavernous non-rhythm of 'Thunderstorm' and reaching an eerie climax with queasy melodies that had hitherto lain hidden in plain sight among the source material.

Physical copies will follow on from the format of Laica's 'One Quarter Dust', the 3” CD sleeve once again transcending its limitations by folding out into a visual feast from art director David Coyle.

b20_34 Ordeograph - Transparencies Continuous mix

Broken20 return with the third in a run of 3” CD releases, Stephanie Merchak’s timely societal commentary cloaked in deep, foreboding drone, ‘The Prospect of our Annihilation’.

All four tracks were created using field recordings recorded by Merchak on construction sites in Lebanon. The recordings were processed beyond recognition to depict through sound an apocalyptic future where the earth has become inhospitable. Merchak writes: “This concept piece was inspired by some worldwide alarming news: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault partially flooding after permafrost melted, 1.12 trillion tons of iceberg breaking away from the Larsen C ice shelf and drifting to open waters, an Anthrax outbreak in western Siberia after an unusual heatwave melted permafrost releasing spores, a study by Chris Thomas and his colleagues at the University of Leeds warning that a quarter of land animals and plants may be doomed by 2050 due to global warming...”

She continues: “One of the culprits of climate change is the construction industry, which is one of the biggest sources of emissions and energy consumption. Humans keep building and replacing forests and green spaces with concrete thus endangering hundreds of species, increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and contributing to soil erosion. In summary, humans are destroying their home.” As the contemporary activity is extrapolated to an apocalypse in Merchak’s vision, so the field recordings are morphed to their logical conclusion. Hence sonically, the sense of mechanical dread is manifested in lumbering semirhythmic motifs that stagger on- and offstage like drunken actors, playing on unsteady stage-boards of atonal drone.  In contrast to the glacial crawl of most  dark ambient productions, nothing in  ‘The Prospect of our Annihilation’ remains static for long – except the tone and its implied warning. Physical copies will follow on from the format of previous Broken20 3” CDs by Laica and Ordeograph, whereby the inner sleeve is crafted to disrupt its physical limitations, bringing forth further visual interpretations on the source material and its underlying message.

The Prospect Of Our Annihilation

B20_35 Stephanie Merchak - The Prospect Of Our Annihilation

b20_40 Z_GNG_SLMNDR Teaser

Broken20 is a new label from ruaridhTVO, with assistance from production unit and erstlaub

Broken20 will release all sorts of music. Rather than be genre-tied, we will be releasing music rooted in a particular aesthetic – releases concerned with decay, erosion, entropy, mistakes and errors, line noise and tape hiss, hum and buzz.

We’ll primarily be a digital download label, although there will be forays into highly limited cd- and dvd-r variants of our releases. We hope to eventually release some vinyl editions.

Albums by Ruaridh Law