Sean McCann - Ten Impressions for Piano & Strings
Edition of 300 LP / Digital Download

Worldwide: Jan 16, 2015
US: Jan 20, 2015

Realized over a four year period, Sean McCann’s Ten Impressions for Piano & Springs is a document of transition and maturation. Slow moving cloud forms over corporeal landscapes, these impressions whisper of McCann’s imminent & decisive lean towards classical & avant-garde musics, culminating in 2013’s Music for Private Ensemble on his own imprint, Recital. Less a final statement on ambient music, more a meditation on change, discovery and process.

rootstrata.com/release/RS97

Sean McCann - Guardian

Safety is a rare thing in this world.
But I'll keep you safe.
You don't have to die like the others.
You just have to trust me.

[Aftermath] mus_safewithyou

Late Night Tales: Belle and Sebastian, Vol. 2

On the Other Ocean

Full stream of Ellen Arkbro's stunning composition "Mountain of Air," a rework a track from her latest work, 'for organ & brass,' out on Subtext Recordings on April 14.

More info: https://www.xlr8r.com/news/2017/04/premiere-hear-a-stunning-new-composition-by-ellen-arkbro/

@ellenarkbro
@subtext-recordings

More info

Premiere: Ellen Arkbro - Mountain of Air

Kate NV - пес DOG

Learn more: https://smarturl.it/rvngnl50

Taken from для FOR.

©2018 RVNG Intl. / https://igetrvng.com

для FOR (RVNGNL50 - 320 - Promo)

пес DOG

Kate NV - пес DOG

PREORDER/ https://shelterpress.bandcamp.com/album/the-flower-and-the-vessel-2

Félicia Atkinson  'The Flower & The Vessel '
Shelter Press / SP110

French poet and ASMR auteur Félicia Atkinson has frequently fixated on the elusive interwoven relationship between microcosms and macrocosms – how even the quietest creative act ripples outward in unforeseen ways, a whisper with no fixed meaning. Her latest work pursues this notion in a more literal and lasting fashion, as it was crafted while pregnant on tour, in impersonal hotel rooms in foreign cities. She describes it as “a record not about being pregnant but a record made with pregnancy.” Each day and night, finding herself far from home, she asked herself “What am I doing here? How can I connect myself to the world?” The answer gradually revealed itself: “With small gestures: recording my voice, recording birds, a simple melody.”

In truth there is nothing simple about The Flower & The Vessel. The album’s 11 songs span a vast pantheon of whispering textures, opaque moods, and surreal spoken word, leading the listener through a mirrored hall of beguiling mirages. Atkinson cites a trio of French classical compositions from her childhood as formative influences on this particular collection: Maurice Ravel’s “L'enfant et les sortilèges” (“a scary opera for kids”), Debussy’s “La Mer” (for its union of narration and music) and Erik Satie’s “Gymnopédies” (as an exercise in negative space, irony without cynicism, and “melody with doubt”). There’s certainly a shade of classicism woven within these tracks, however veiled, abstracted, or unorthodox. Melancholic piano motifs repeat then retreat into a radiant frost of shivering frequencies; processed voices recite cut-up poems and interviews over delay-refracted Rhodes and Wurlitzer; iPad gamelan patterns flutter from meditative to melancholic and back again, offset by pointillist patches of delicate software synesthesia.

Although much of Atkinson’s past discography is shaped by speech and the lyricism of language, The Flower & The Vessel ventures farther into silence, absence, and voiceless wilderness. Among her sources of inspiration were “women who wonder, dream, and create vacant spaces in their art,” as well as Ikebana flower arrangements, which reflect her own relationship with listening: “structure combined with everyday noises, selecting them to make a sparse music bouquet.” Field recordings from Tasmania and the Mojave Desert murmur beneath hushed reverberations of gong, vibraphone, marimba, softly processed into an elegant emptiness, alternately eerie and serene.

Her mode of minimalism has long been one of reduction, riddles, and curation, but here Atkinson’s synergy feels close to apotheosis, emotive but ambivalent, a ceremony of expectation and invisible forces. The 19-minute closing collaboration with SUNN O))) guitarist Stephen O’Malley, “Des Pierres,” is one of the album’s few pieces tracked in a proper studio (Music Unit in Montreuil, France) but it broods and burns with the same subliminal majesty as the rest of The Flower & The Vessel: an ember in amber, seeds planted in shifting sands. Atkinson’s voice flickers like a flame, framed by slabs of shadowy feedback. Her process may be personal is but its impact ripples to the edges of existence: “How does the act of creation connect us, not only to history, but to the cosmic? It’s a process of taking, and then giving back. It makes us belong to the world.”

The Flower And The Vessel

Moderato Cantabile

FELICIA ATKINSON — Moderato Cantabile (SP110)

First Terrace Records have the honour to present an album of new work by influential and idiosyncratic artist K. Leimer.

Kerry returns to First Terrace with his first full length on the label following his part on the 12” split series with FTS001. The album finds the composer working in a solemn & focused mode, rendering deep sonic landscapes that shimmer, sink into themselves and play host to a slowly emerging carousel of auditory apparitions. 

Emerging in opposition to the sunless days & countless distresses of current US politics, each track is imbued with a refreshing sense of equanimity - in Kerry’s own words, "Authoritarian ideas that have persisted somewhere in the depths of human nature for millennia have resurfaced at a crucial moment for the environments we all inhabit — natural, cultural, intellectual and economic. The power and influence of this ideology will again prove catastrophic, as it already has for many people in many parts of the world. Authoritarianism, along with the refutation of our shared responsibility to one another and to objective knowledge in favor of personal gain & gratification consistently lead to disaster. Yet, somehow, a significant number of people seem to feel that this time will be different. To some extent they are right. It will be infinitely worse. 

Irrational Overcast is preoccupied with the perpetual failings of human tribalization, of assuming dominance over nature, of choosing belief and ideology over objective reality. The impetus was brought into immediate focus by the destructive impulses and actions of such excrescences as the Trump Administration and his republicans, as well as the blatant dishonesty and bigotry of thousands more retrograde, ill-informed nihilists operating in and outside the pubic sphere. 

I do not profess that music — especially an experimental, lyric-free music — can change or influence such circumstances. But this is the context in which we now live, and this has shaped the music of Irrational Overcast — a coping mechanism for living under clouds of baseless beliefs and simplistic ideologies that disfigure and stifle what is an admittedly difficult though really quite lovely world. Music, to my mind, can not clearly express anything so literal, or metaphoric, or allegoric — but Irrational Overcast makes the effort to articulate the problems created by some enduring and banal aspects of human behavior. Which is the reason it is built of lo-fi, deformed emergent or regressing or fragmented phrases, subsumed by distortion, noise, wow and flutter… and played with the understanding that there can be no more bedtime stories.”

The album is released worldwide on July 5th, on LP & digital formats, with artwork featuring images from Richard Misrach’s series of photographs documenting American petrochemical landscapes. A limited run of 30 editions will be made that include a bonus tape titled ‘Irrational Clearing’ - featuring two beautiful long form tracks from the Irrational Overcast sessions.

Irrational Overcast

Order the LP

K. Leimer 'Uncertain Instruction'

Overworld

Sakura

Kodomotachi

Tar (Jan Jelinek Remix)

Purchase: bit.ly/3oh8DpK
Catalog #: GN59
January 22, 2021
CASS+DIGI

Ever the aural adventurer, Carmen Villain has long traversed a boundless array of sounds, deftly moving from art nouveau pop to fog-laden avant-dub. Yet at every artistic turn, the Norwegian-Mexican’s chameleon-like charm seldom loses its alluring, organic beauty. Fresh off her contribution to 2020’s A Little Night Music… compilation, Carmen joins Geographic North’s Sketch for Winter series for its 9th installment. Perlita, named after Carmen’s grandmother living in Puebla, Mexico, is a sweetly somber reflection on the ever-present cycle of and hibernation and reemergence.

The A side begins with “Everything Without a Shadow”, a wide-angled and windswept vista of expansive permafrost and still-glowing embers of a recently extinguished fire. A sign of life in an otherwise desolate place. “Two Halves Touching” continues to drift through the frigid scene, lightly pulsing underneath a muted but vibrant tundra until coming upon echoes of voices chanted into the snowdrift. “Light in Phases” follows the cue with hurried hesitance, uncovering a sonic slush of radiant zither, blurred voices, and calm resolution.

“Things That Are Solid” begins to thaw the B side, strolling through newly uncovered verdancy, welcoming murmurs peeking out of the snow. With “Molina”, any last remnants of Winter have disappeared, leaving only a solemn suite of piano motifs breaking ground like seedlings bursting to life. With help from Johanna Scheie Orellana on flute and alt-flute, the album’s closer “Aqua Azul'' floats along with unencumbered motion like a happy stone skating across a tranquil pond.

Carmen Villain - "Agua Azul"

GeoNorth

Related tracks