Shadow-walks (at home)
In my long-term (almost 20 year) project Shadow-walks, I walk with local inhabitants of places on their special walks. Then I repeat the route alone, listening for the memory of that walk and singing my response. In a sense Shadow-walks is an attempt to make a person’s traces, their shadow, audible through my singing, improvising voice. 
During the Covid 19 pandemic it became impossible to walk with people because of  lockdowns and travel restrictions, so I adapted the project into Shadow-walks (at home). I ask volunteers to send me recorded descriptions of their special walks. These can be walks they remember, daily walks they wish they could still do, or walks they can take alone but not with me. My vocals in Shadow-walks (at home) respond to how I imagine the walk while listening to people’s verbal descriptions.
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About Viv Corringham
Viv Corringham is a US based British vocalist, composer and sound artist. Her work includes concerts, soundwalks, workshops and installations, exploring people's sense of place and the link with personal history and memory. She holds an MA Sonic Art from Middlesex University, London, and a Deep Listening teaching certificate from Pauline Oliveros. She received two McKnight Composer Fellowships through the American Composers Forum. 
Her project Shadow-walks has been presented internationally in venues including Hong Kong Arts Centre, Fonoteca Nacional de Mexico, Issue Project Room New York, Onassis Centre Athens, ICA London, Serralves Museum Portugal, Ohrenhoch Berlin, and Taipei, Shantou, Bangalore, Calcutta and Delhi universities.
Articles about Shadow-walks appear in publications including In the Field, Leonardo Music Journal, Organised Sound, Art of Immersive Soundscapes and For Those Who Have Ears.
more: www.vivcorringham.org

Shadow-walks (at home) with Catherine Clover, Australia - Viv Corringham (excerpt) out March 23

A Long Wait explores vulnerability and isolation during 2020 to 2021. Placed in the “clinically  extremely vulnerable” category, Paula García Stone was not able to leave her house at all during the lockdowns of 2020. She was also unable to walk for most of the year due to fractured bones in one of her feet. A Long Wait is the product of this period of grief, loneliness and frustration. Turning to her domestic and local soundscape for inspiration, she composes here with lawn mowers, medical equipment, insects and her own breath. “I found that generally my neighbourhood all had their lawn mowers out and were doing DIY, unlike the new found silence people seemed to be describing at  the time. Somehow I managed, and I found domestic sounds and my own medical  paraphernalia interesting and useful in the bigger context of my environment. I  hoped to amplify grief and at times frustration, as well as the rhythm of time passing by,” she explains. 
Both sadness and the convoluted and disorienting experience of time are important themes in this album, but it also marks lighter, more uncanny moments amid the difficulties of the past year. Heavy rainfall, experiences of extreme heat and humidity, and even a visitation by flying ants, swirl together in the compositions, sitting uneasily alongside García Stone's quiet breaths, medical  devices and discontent. 
An album of both loud and quiet dismay as well as unexpected comforts and surprises. 
Out July 16 on CD/Digital.

About the artist:
Paula García Stone is an Anglo-Hispanic visual and sound artist. Due to type 1 diabetes and its complications, García Stone has been in and out of hospital since 1975. These experiences of both health and vulnerability as well as the medical system are central to her practice. She has been active within the arts for more than 30 years, and began composing with sound in 2003. She has worked both as a solo artist and collaboratively across composition, installation and film. For more: paulagarciastone.com

A Long Wait (excerpt) - Paula García Stone - out July 16

An album exploring longing, separation and the desire to be somewhere else. With The Yearning, Helman aims to transport the listener somewhere new, away from our current realities, as part of a project aimed at relief and release. Out July 30, digital and CD.
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Liz Helman is a London-based multi-disciplinary artist, working in time-based media. In her practice Helman is interested in exploring place and environment, in particular the subliminal and emotive aspects of space. By walking the streets, and experiencing different levels of sounds, she begins her process with field recordings, making immersive and mesmerising drone based compositions that explore layers of sound and texture. More: https://lizhelmanworks.com

The Yearning - Liz Helman - out July 30

Sounds of Mmabolela transports the listener to the Limpopo bushveld on the border of South Africa and Botswana. With recordings taken during the Sonic Mmabolela residency at Mmabolela Estates, Limpopo in 2017, the sounds have been transformed and sculpted to create an immersive listening experience of the natural soundscapes. Immerse yourself in the sounds of hippos, crocodiles, frogs, birds, cicadas, insects and more.

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Nikki Sheth is a sound artist based in Birmingham, UK. She uses field recordings to produce site-specific soundscape works. Her practice involves extensive field recording, multi-channel soundscape composition, multimedia installations and soundwalking. She has been on field recording residencies around the world and her installation and sound works have been presented internationally. She was awarded a Sound and Music award in 2020, nominated for the Phonurgia Nova Awards in the ‘Field Recording: Soundscape’ category in 2020 and was an Honourable Mention for the Sound of the Year Awards in the ‘Composed with Sound’ category in 2021.
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This work was originally released on Rummage Records in 2020, this is a re-release after that label closed.

W: nikkisheth.myporfolio.com

Limpopo - Nikki Sheth - from Sounds of Mmabolela out Sept 3

Oblique is a stripped back suite of slippery uncanny minimalism.
Centred on Yantis's improvised saxophone work and Corder's digital creativity, the album is constructed almost entirely from a single pre-pandemic studio session in Denver and builds on the earlier trio work represented by Jason Corder, Carl Ritger, and Cody Yantis's album Possession. Now a duo Corder and Yantis offer a tense and tightly focused set of nail-biting compositions, which sees Corder taking control of Yantis's saxophone work to paint widely divergent sonic characters.  
The sax is called upon to deliver heavy abrasive drones, melodic fragments, sharp blasts, gurgles, rumbles and bumps, before twisting and sliding into Justin Forthuber's percussion work. 
Part free-jazz, part soundscape, Oblique is a release full of suspense, the soundtrack to a thriller not yet written. It calls forth the idea of a release but never quite grants it.

Aslant from Oblique by Corder & Yantis out Sept 17

A longing as deep as the winter snow infuses Hiraeth, suffocating, beautiful and haunting. Composed by Iranian musicians Farshad Xajehnassiri (tarxun) and Siavash Hakim in the cold months of 2015, this album presents longing not as a quiet and controlled mourning, or an almost pleasant nostalgia, but as deeply disorienting landscape, a salve one moment, the next overwhelming, abrasive and menacing.

The comforts of memory and nostalgia here exact a price. Winds howl, fences, windows and strings vibrate, voices echo, distort and dissolve, as Hakim's trumpet insists on a remembrance already futile and taunting. In naming this album Xajehnassiri and Hakim turned to the Welsh word 'Hiraeth' to describe a longing for a home which perhaps never was, and in its eight compositions it is to these twin qualities of memory that the pair return again and again. A vision so sweet it taunts, a longing so strong it becomes a house in which to dwell. A cocoon of sound: potent and intoxicating; familiar and strange.
credits
releases November 5, 2021

hiraeth
(n.) A deep, wistful, nostalgic sense of longing for a home to which you cannot return; a home that is no longer or perhaps never was.

tarxun:Guitar, Bass, Electronics, Field Recordings
Siavash Hakim: Trumpet, Piano / Organs, Synthesizer, Xylophone, Setar, Ney.
Mastered by: Nima Aghiani
Photography by Farshad Xajehnassiri and Siavash Hakim.
Design Farshad Xajehnassiri, Siavash Hakim and Kate Carr
Released November 5, 2021

Placebo Seduction from Hiraeth by tarxun and Siavash Hakim out Nov 5

From Absence a compilation of Iranian experimental music curated by Arash Akbari. Pre-order now: https://flamingpines.bandcamp.com/album/absence

Fading Shadows Of Dusk - Siavash Amini - from Absence shipping Feb 8

Preview track for Siavash Amini and Zenjungle's stunning collaboration  Topology of Figments out Sept 23  at
https://flamingpines.bandcamp.com/

Descending Days - Siavash Amini & Zenjungle from Topology of Figments out Sept 23

A soundscape opera about relocation, urban space and gentrification.

This release is dedicated to the people and organisations in Brixton working to protect all that is unique about this district.

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Brixton was my introduction to London when I moved here almost two years ago. I had never heard of Brixton before I arrived, nor had I spent any time in London. I ended up here simply because a friend of a friend knew someone with a flat. This document represents the ways I have come to know this district, and through it a little of the rest of London. My work has always begun with the soundscape, and Brixton offers a remarkable one. From outdoor markets, bicycle sound systems, shop stereos and buskers to booming car hi fi systems, sirens, car washes and people simply talking and taking up space on the streets, Brixton is a noisy place. It was through listening to Brixton that I also came to hear voices being raised about how much this area had changed, about rising rents and neglected public housing, about how many people who grew up or used to have businesses here can no longer afford to stay in Brixton. I learned about the role of Brixton as a centre of Black British culture, resistance and musical production, and about how as Brixton has become increasingly gentrified the ways in which some of the sounds associated with Brixton's history and communities were being lost from this area. I learnt about some of the new silences of Brixton. I don't want to pretend that this release could ever be a definitive documentation of Brixton's soundscape, there are many far better situated than me to understand all the nuances of this area. This album is simply about the ways I came to know Brixton through listening, and the respect I gained through this process for the many struggles being waged in this district to maintain it as a community. This album is about arriving somewhere to find it in the midst of major upheaval in its social fabric, and about examining my own role in this as a new white Australian addition to the area. 
A soundscape reveals a lot about a place, through its presences, its silences, its rhythms and its pauses. A soundscape is forever being made by us all, it stitches us together in ways both subtle and sometimes overwhelming. I think in both its openness and fragility the soundscape can reveal something about the process of community making, and its sensitivity to change offers both opportunities and risks.

Kate Carr, Brixton, London.

I ended out moving to Brixton - Kate Carr (excerpt) out March 9

Disoriented drunken drones drawn from the work of long dead composers The Brightest Winter Sun is an icy wonder built from longing, fretful wanderings and slowly unfolding endings. 
These are works which crawl through changes of textures and lurch into almost non stop repetition of one phrase. Like fragments of sound remembered by a drunk insomniac at the breaking of a new dawn, not knowing where it came from or when or where he or she heard it. 

The Brightest Winter Sun Is a collaborative project by Iranian artists Siavash Amini And Umchunga. The focus of the project is reinterpreting the piano compositions of the late 18th century and 19th century composers by depriving these compositions of one their most prominent characteristics namely thematic and tonal development and progression. The track names point to the dates on which the composer who served as the inspiration, died.

1896 - Siavash Amini and Umchunga - from The Brightest Winter Sun - shipping August 31

A long awaited full length Flaming Pines debut for the Australian musician Broken Chip. Maybe Sometimes She Haunts is inspired by long afternoons and transitions, and created amid the amazing landscapes of the Blue Mountains. Broken Chip has released some wonderful singles on the label over the years with contributions to Burning Palms, Rivers Home, the Australian Tiny Portraits edition and the Birds of Feather series. All sublime works. Below are some liner notes from him. 
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This album came about over several weeks of looping a Moog sub37 and playing it through a Space Echo. The recordings were made each afternoon (just on sunset) during mid spring. All the pieces were recorded to my dad's old cassette deck which he purchased in the mid 1980’s and is now in my possession. 

These pieces all contain the feeling of drifting between day and night, and crossing over into that moment between awake and falling asleep.

Many thanks to all the kind people who have supported my music over the years. 

Big thanks to Kate Carr for her support. 

And a massive thanks to Anna xx 

Martyn Palmer, Blue Mountains, Australia
credits
releases September 12, 2018 

Cover Artwork by Julie Paterson. 
Back cover photography and design by Martyn Palmer 
All tracks by Martyn Palmer 
Mastered by Martyn Palmer

Knowing The Distance - Broken Chip - from Maybe Sometimes She Haunts out Sept 12.

This album focuses on a derelict and abandoned holiday resort at Laem Thian bay on the east coast of the island of Koh Tao in Thailand. The resort is situated in a small cove that is only accessible on foot via an overgrown path and a walk of several miles - a journey very few tourists bother to make. It is clear at first sight that the fading white building has been vacated for some time. The concrete structure opens out onto a small sandy beach that would have provided an idyllic holiday setting at one time. A number of palm-thatched holiday cottages with dilapidated roofs slide down the hillside. There are signs of vandalism; graffiti decorates the walls, the remains of camp fires, broken glass and other detritus litter the floors - but remnants of the previous occupants also remain. Children’s toys, kitchenware, hand written notes, menus, mattresses, a plastic telephone and four cassette tapes - rusty, caked in sand, weather damaged and corroded by the humid salty sea air. 

There is a haunting quality to the location that left a deep impression on me. The sense of isolation and abandonment it engendered was in stark contrast to the rest of the island, and indeed the rest of Thailand as I experienced it. This feeling stayed with me and in some way it permeated the rest of my stay in the country. It is that feeling that I wanted to convey through this work.
Mark Vernon.
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Mark Vernon is a Glasgow-based artist whose work exists on the fringes of sound art, music and broadcasting. At the core of his practice lies a fascination with the intimacy of the radio voice, environmental sound, obsolete media and the re-appropriation of found recordings. He incorporates these diverse elements into radiophonic compositions for broadcast, fixed media and live performances. His solo and collaborative music projects have been published through labels including Kye, Staalplaat, Ultra Eczema, Entr’acte, 3Leaves, Staubgold and Gagarin Records, as well as a series of small CDR and LP editions on his own meagre resource imprint. Along with Barry Burns Mark produces the Radiophrenia 24 hour radio festival.

The Lost Resort - Mark Vernon - Ribbons of Rust out June 26

Prison Episodes, an opus five years in the making, is Pouya Pour-Amin's cry of anger and sorrow against our times. Structured as a series of sketches, this harrowing and powerful album explores the experiences of a political prisoner from her or his incarceration to breaking point. 

In this era of political extremism, repression and very often despair, this album could not be more timely. Composed in Tehran, Prison Episodes is a meditation on political repression, defiance and the limits of endurance and hope. Harsh, grating, transcendent and despairing it offers a soundtrack to our global political moment.
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Pouya Pour-Amin is a composer, multi-instrumentalist and actor from Tehran, Iran. He has worked with Tehran`s Camerata contemporary music ensemble both as a double-bass player and a composer, and presented works at SET Fest in Tehran, CTM in Berlin as well as composing for theatre, film and TV in Iran. He is also active, along with Sara Bigdeli Shamloo and Nima Aghiani in the band Migrain Sq. Pour-Amin first appeared on Flaming Pines as part of the Absence showcase of experimental music from Tehran, curated by Arash Akbari. This is his first full release on the label. 
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A note on the artwork:
The artwork for this album is by the prominent Iranian contemporary artist and grave marker Barbad Golshiri. Entitled Quod 2010 it features words in Persian of the prison memories of A’ezam, a political prisoner of the 1980s, retold by Akbar Sardouzami. The text reads: 
'A’ezam has been degraded and tortured, living in timelessness and facelessness. She has nothing, and has turned to nothing, she says. Then one day she finds a rusty pin in her solitary confinement. She starts to draw squares, and the squares become her world: ‘Then I saw if I draw a square within another square and reach the depth, the square turns to a point. The cell was too dark, but I could see a point in the middle of the square that helplessly looked up at me and said: you should testify that I’ve been a square. You are the only one who knows that I have been and still am a square.’
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Credits:
All music composed by Pouya Pour-Amin
Violin/Viola: Adel Poursamadi
Trumpet : Sardar Sarmast
E.Doublebass : Pouya Pour-Amin
Mastered by Lawrence English at Negative Space.  
Album Art : Quod by Barbad Golshiri

Have mercy, for crying out loud, O lord of the world! - Pouya Pour-Amin - Prison Episodes - June 26

Composed during Vietnam's monsoon season and propelled by the composers' fear of drowning, Degradation is inspired by flooding, torrential rain and the ocean.

Over three tracks Rắn Cạp Đuôi, an international music and visual arts collective based in Saigon, take us on a journey from breaking waves to inundated landscapes, and underwater horrors.

Rắn Cạp Đuôi, whose name translates to 'snake bites tail', are comprised of members Phạm Thế Vũ, Đỗ Tấn Sĩ, and Zach Sch. Additional collaborators include: Lý Hà Trang, Đỗ Hoàng Tuấn Anh, Bjorn Bols, Colton Cox, Josie Turnbull, and Trần Duy Hưng.

Ikkikki from Degradation by Rắn Cạp Đuôi out June 26

From the album Silent Spring by Linda O'Keefe out October 14 on FP.
An exploration of natural and human soundscapes, with a focus on the new sounds associated with renewable energy.

Silent Spring (excerpt) - Linda O'Keeffe - out October 14.

Graham Dunning explores the world as a giant record player in his new tape Something About Still Trying. Well known as a turntable experimentalist  Dunning brings this sensibility to field recording in this album which sees him building a giant stylus out of a stick for A Tracing of a Single Tide, re-configuring a windmill as a huge turntable in Windchange, and finding a recording which sounds like a scratch loop to compose the opening title track.
Something About Still Trying is out January 30 on cassette.

A Tracing Of A Single Tide (excerpt)  - Graham Dunning - Something About Still Trying out Jan 30

A single 20 minute piece made from fragments of love letters. 
Special thanks to: Tanya Serisier, Lucille Calmel, Kjersti Andvig, Jurgen Ots, Nicola Carr, Jeanette Rhenstrom, Jimmie Peggie, Sarah Lamble, Maud OK, Paula Garcia Stone, James Webb, Marcos Filipe de Neves Ferreira, Malfada, Carolina Cunha e Silva, Flavio Derbekannt
This piece also contains an excerpt from Salomé Voegelin's Text score for writing a love letter.
This work is a longer version of a piece first made for BBC show The Verb, for their episode on loneliness.
Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering.

Where To Begin (excerpt) - Kate Carr - out April 28

Very happy to present Hadi Bastani's debut double album Emergence 'a hazy ballad of a refugee and a travelogue' charting his exile from Iran to Belfast, and subsequent re-connection with his homeland through composition. Words from Hadi are below. Album design by Amir B Ash. 

"emergence was formed within a feedback system that began as I made contact with composers, producers, coders, and artists in Iran whose works and words formed the basis of my academic research. The research was a way to rediscover the space I had left behind and the bridges that were burnt, through practices and imagination of individuals with whom I had shared memories without having met most of them. In these ways this work exists as a hazy ballad of a refugee and a travelogue. It is an aphasic narration of my journey from a sunny nowhere to a rainy bunker in Belfast. It is my story, one of an Eastern nomad finding refuge in Western academia, only to reimagine musicking in the alleys of my distant home. As such, this collection is both an impulse within the resonance chamber of Iranian experimental electronic music and the resonance of its diverse and colourful impulses. It is also a diary that anachronistically narrates the different stages of this journey. It brings together a host of field recordings, found object recordings, live improvisations, recycled sounds, synthesis, and voices, produced in Tehran and Belfast over the span of 10 years. It is an escapist soundscape that is meant to mark a period, stain it with sounds, and materialise it through composition. It is a dialogue between two times, places/spaces, cultures, modes of doing, thinking, and sociality. Since each of these are multiple, emergence too is a heterogenous assemblage. It is a playful engagement with conceptual and physical objects and memories. It is a musical album carefully curated for Flaming Pines, whose presence within the Iranian scene has been a passionate and nurturing one."
-- Hadi Bastani, May 2020

impulse | resonance from Emergence - Hadi Bastani out June 5

Durations, the powerful debut album by Hamed Mafakheri, is drawn from his experience of war as a child in Tehran. Out July 3. 

"Rolling back the clock, I just remember sounds, sounds of red, yellow and white of air raid alarms, aircrafts, and explosions... Having the experience of war at the age of 7, I knew one day I would translate what I felt and heard into something meaningful. Little did I know that this would evolve with me and transform into an obsession with war which could justify my tears watching a documentary in Berlin about World War II like an individual who has experienced it personally. In creating this set, my goal has mostly been to depict sounds from the images in my head and the events in my present or maybe previous lives. Like a painter drawing in my mind with colors, I utilized the sounds around me to make a meaningful picture. I recorded many sounds, and described my ideas to my friend Ankido Darash, who plays cello, to improvise in different locations. Then I would sit down, sometimes with a clear idea, but other times with a vague one, yet I knew the work would lead to this result; it would guide me at times. And this is how it kept rolling…"  
Hamed Mafakheri, Tehran, June 2020.

Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering.
Photography: Sherry Akrami

First Duration - Hamed Mafakheri - from Durations out July 3

A Distant Light is full of music made for slowing down. New Zealand-based duo Michael Upton and Shanan Holm work with synths, field recordings and guitar, to craft slowly evolving works where small surprises and idiosyncrasies bubble to the surface, dissipate and return. A Distant Light is an album which crafts a space for stepping back. It asks for concentrated listening, and rewards you with shimmering dreams carved from liquid time.
Written and produced by Shanan Holm and Michael Upton
Mastered by Antony Ryan at RedRedPaw
Art by Kate Carr

A Distant Light - Montano - from A Distant Light out July 3

From poking stove elements with pencils, to recording the ambience of a teapot, and playing balcony railings, mnk is an album which restlessly re-imagines everyday sounds. FenGi is the moniker of the Turkish sound artist Altuğ Kaptan, and mnk represents his extended examination of the vibratory and the resonant. It is an album which blurs the boundary between object and instrument, at one point Altuğ performs by simply opening and closing doors, at another he reworks recordings of the violin. Altuğ describes himself as someone who ceaselessly records sounds, seeking spontaneous moments amid the everyday. In his debut solo album mnk we discover an artist both courageous and frenetic, who sitting amid the boiling stove pots, and the sliding doors of his home finds music.

Mastered by Nima Aghiani
Art is the work Rug by Tuba Kaptan

dng - FenGi from the album mnk out July 3

These recordings are recorded in Kunming city, from early February to early May in 2020. The random sound clips reflect the process of the whole city from silence to vitality, and personal life from public to private space and back again. Life in private space substantially affects the openness of public space, and vice versa, the closure of public life has made private life cramped and boring. The daily life that swings between the two has gradually become a longer "new normal" that everyone has to overcome.

This piece comprises 24 field recordings, each 60 seconds, separated by 3 seconds of silence. This is an equal arrangement, and they are arranged as neatly as the hand sanitizer on the shelf. In these sound clips, private life, media messages, and slowly reviving urban life are intertwined during the period of home quarantine.
Luo Fei, Kunming, China
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这些录音绝大多数来自今年2月初至5月初三个多月的时间内，我在昆明的实地录音。这些随机收录的声音片段反映出整座城市从沉寂到恢复生机，个人生活也从公共空间退回私人空间再返回公共空间的过程。私人空间里的生活也实质性地影响到公共空间的开放度，反之亦然，公共生活的关闭让私人生活变得局促和无聊。摇摆在两者之间的日常生活逐渐成为大家不得不克服的更为漫长的“新常态”。
这个录音作品最终收录了24条实地录音片段，每段60秒，每个声音间隔3秒。这是一种平等的排列，它们像货架上的洗手液一样整齐摆放。在这些声音片段中，居家隔离时期的私人生活、媒体讯息、慢慢恢复生机的城市生活交错混合在一起。

Kunming Record During Covid 19 (excerpt) - Luo Fei - out Sept 3

Cycling is enjoying a surge in popularity in these pandemic days, and this collaboration examines some of the linkages and soundscapes this boom has entailed. It stems from an online residency hosted by Iklectik in London and Lacking Sound festival in Taipei, which brought together UK and Taiwanese artists to explore quarantine in May of 2020. With Taiwan one of the world's major producers of bikes, and Londoners forced onto waiting lists to purchase one Kate Carr and Sheryl Cheung decided to examine their respective cities of London, and Taipei through the prism of the bicycle. This piece explores the bicycle as a musical instrument, as well as an object which can somehow speak to this particular moment with the pandemic. It offers a glimpse of our real and imagined cycling soundscapes as we are plunged into, and attempt to escape the 'new normal'.

Cycling (excerpt) - Kate Carr + Sheryl Cheung out Sept 3

Experimental vocalist and sound artist Yifeat Ziv debuts on FP for our 100th release with her glorious exploration of sounding in the Brazilian Amazon. Some words from her text accompanying the release are below:
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"The forest reverberates my voice. The density of the trees and the thick canopy reflects sound waves and creates an echo as if I was singing in a closed space, maybe a chapel. I didn’t expect it. This echo feels like a mirror, it feedbacks my vocal intervention, reflecting traces of my own sound pollution in the Amazon’s dense soundscape." --- Yifeat Ziv
Out on CD/digital.
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Thanks + credits:
The piece was created as a response to my experience in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest as part of the Labverde artist residency in August 2019.
Premiered as part of “Other Creatures, Entities and Faint Beings” event at Cafe OTO London (curated David Toop). 
The album recording is based on a live performance at IKLECTIK London in January 2020, as part of "The Field is Not a Field" event (curated by Mark Peter Wright).
Thank you: AER Art for the Environment programme (University of the Arts London), Labverde 2019 team, scientists & group of artists, David Toop, Marco Tarantino, Guy Fleisher & Yoav Ronat. 

Field recordings, vocals & composition by Yifeat Ziv. 
Mastered by Simon Scott at SPS Mastering.
Cover photo by Hilnando Mendes. 
Design: Kate Carr

Amazonian Traces of Self (excerpt) - Yifeat Ziv out November 17

A visit to Rome’s 16th-centry Villa d’Este provokes feelings of circularity, cycles, connections. Cardinal d’Este not only sought to revive and surpass ancient Roman architecture and design, his villa was literally made from the past: marble and statues from the ruins of Emperor Hadrian’s nearby 2nd-century villa provided an ample supply of antiquities. But it’s not just the recycling of 1500-year-old materials and ideas that gives Villa d’Este its overwhelming sense of eternal return. Its complex system of fountains, water jets, canals and pools is a feat of engineering, providing a constant flux without the need for any pump. 

Cycles of additions, modifications and imitations have never stopped. Abandonment and degradation seem always to be matched by renewal and renovation. Ivy and moss have advanced in layers, overgrown and flowing. Twentieth-century copies of ancient Roman fountains have taken the place of ‘real’ statues sold off to sit in museums. Like a spiral slowly unravelling, the villa has never stood still. But it’s the invariable, but everchanging, stream of water that most strongly signals the villa’s rhythm of succession. Its climax at The Fountain of Neptune is overwhelming, and it’s here that one might find some present-day meaning from this cascade of sounds, shapes and ideas from almost 2000 years ago.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of the 21st century’s third decade, quotidian life goes on even though the connections between us have suddenly and simultaneously expanded and diminished. After decades of excess and misbalance, COVID-19 is sweeping across the globe but still managing to discriminate. Everything is upside down but the bottom is still the same. The loop narrows at the same time that it increases the breadth of its grasp. Scale is everywhere and local, all at once. Seasons shift. Disequilibrium uncurls. Fairness is still unfair. 

In the northern suburbs of Melbourne, Australia, life endures despite grim reports of our daily tally. We’re drawn into a 5-kilometre radius under a ‘lockdown’ intended to reign in the virus. Time and space stretch and meld. Boundaries blur and sequences bend. Familiar is new and strange is normal. Circularity, cycles, connections. Meta and micro. A daily walk on drawn out paths. A treadmill in its groove. A school bell rings familiar tones but echoes on its own. The big and the small. The loud and the quiet. The seen and the unseen. The haves and the have-nots. And the hopeful call for The Great Reset.

David Evans, August 2020

Credits:
Recorded, composed and mixed by David Evans
Mastered by John Lee at Phaedra Studios
Art: Louise Kellerman
Design: Kate Carr

We must all act together now (excerpt) - from Waiting for The Great Reset - David Evans out Oct 27

Inspired by her teenage experiences and the stories of others with a similar background, Bangladeshi-Australian sound artist Shoeb (Sia) Ahmad explores the blooming of one’s inner sexuality, meditations on intimacy and exploration of personal relationships in im/modesty, a 60 minute sound work that uses a text narrative for three voices to guide the listener through a psycho-geographic trip of one’s sub-continental heritage, written for and manipulated from Indian electronic instruments, harmonium and percussion as well as field sounds recorded in southern India and Bangladesh.

‘im/modesty’ was originally developed as a multi-speaker installation during a residency in Kerala, Southern India in 2016. Upon commission from the Australian Art Orchestra, the original installation work was reworked into a semi-composed/semi-improvised work for small ensemble and premiered as part of their Meeting Points series at the Arts Centre Melbourne in December 2018.
im/modesty will be released during the worldwide celebration of Transgender Awareness Week 2020 and this album highlights both Flaming Pines and Australian Art Orchestra's ongoing commitment to providing a platform for diverse voices to share their narratives through music.

About Sia Ahmad
Sia identifies as a person of Bangladeshi heritage and a transgender woman. Her music is known for exploring deeply personal experiences and vulnerabilities, in an evocative mix of acoustic and electronic indie pop. She has a rich and extensive background in Australian music, creating idiosyncratic works over the last decade, mainly as a solo artist under the name Shoeb Ahmad, a name she has continued to use for im/modesty.
Using guitar, keyboard, voice and electronics, she works both as singer/composer and improviser when performing solo and in collaboration. She has released a diverse range of original music while also working on sound design for dance/theatre, installation pieces and contemporary chamber composition.
Sia has performed throughout Australia, Japan, New Zealand, the UK and the SE Asian region as a solo artist and with groups such as Sensaround, Spartak and Tangents.

im/modesty (excerpt)- Shoeb Ahmad & Australian Art Orchestra  - out November 16

"I've been working on material recorded at the former UK Ministry of Defence site Orford Ness on the East England Suffolk coast. 
Since the Ministry of Defence left in 1993, the buildings have been overrun by nature.

The excitement felt by Bletchley Park's wartime code breakers was echoed here too: Britain's greatest scientific brains, along with 400 civilians and thousands of unacknowledged Chinese migrant workers all worked on developing the UK’s first nuclear weapon.

Today the place gives us a sense of what a post-apocalyptic environment might look and sound like. Air ducts once now burst open with the packed nests of roosting birds. There are seagulls 'playing' the atomic weapons laboratories with their cries; baby jackdaws duetting with gravel footsteps; metal stairwells transformed into aeolian harps. " Iain Chambers, Orford Ness.
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About Iain:
Iain Chambers is a composer and producer whose music often deploys field recordings and location sounds as musical material.

Iain's work is heard live in concerts, radio, sound installations and multimedia. His feature-length symphonies of industrial sounds have been commissioned by BBC Radio 3, WDR Cologne and ABC Australia.

In 2019 Iain launched the independent record label Persistence of Sound, presenting new musique concrète and field recordings.

Iain is a founder member of Langham Research Centre, an electronic music ensemble using obsolete Cold War era technology to create new music. The group also create new realisations of 20th century electronic works by composers John Cage, Alvin Lucier and Christian Wolff using an unusual instrumentarium: analogue tape, sine-wave oscillators, analogue radios and phonograph cartridges. LRC perform internationally, and released “Tape Works (Vol. 1)” on the Nonclassical label in 2017.

All tracks by Iain Chambers
Mastered by Nima Aghiani
Photography: Ian Rawes
Design: Kate Carr

Secrets of Orford Ness (excerpt) - Iain Chambers out October 27

Soon: Hiraeth by tarxun and Siavash Hakim out Nov 5
Latest:
Oblique by Corder & Yantis out Sept 17
Sounds of Mmabolela - Nikki Sheth - out Sept 3
The Yearning - Liz Helman
A Long Wait - Paula García Stone

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