Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/mhlived

This album is also part of Lost Tribe Sound's Salt & Gravity Series:
https://losttribesound.bandcamp.com/album/salt-and-gravity-series

Last year in and out of lockdown, Dupé made an album about his great-aunt Margaret, who spent her entire adult life in service at Abbotsford Convent. Margaret’s life story was both ordinary, and even more so in hindsight extraordinary. She lived a life that would be considered extreme today… a life without freedom. Reflecting upon her life proved to be humble, emotional, and fertile ground for 21st-century perspective whilst exploring narrative and biography through music.

While the music serves as most uninhibited expression of Margaret’s story, these writings from Dupé help provide further insight into Margaret’s life: 

Margaret was my grandmother’s sister, I didn’t know my grandmother but I met Margaret several times as a child. We would drive all day from Canberra to Melbourne from before light to after, to spend time with our relatives since both my parents were born and raised there.

Visiting this diminutive elderly woman with white hair in a bun and black habit and large crucifix was a strange procedure since she was clearly a prisoner in this convent. With both of her parents dead, her sisters put her into Abbotsford Convent as a grieving nineteen year old unwed mother.

A nun would sit at our table listening to the conversation to remind us all of that fact. Margaret was a “bad girl” and as such had been kept away from the children and reforming girls that were also in the convent. She existed within this small village of impounded women, day by day through two world wars, Vietnam and the death of her entire family. She slept in a dormitory, rose at five for prayers, worked in a laundry all day and had only one possession, a secret radio to listen to the races and footy. Her dormitory was in a building within a grey concrete courtyard which was gated and had one tree within it whilst restricted beautiful grounds lay all around.

As a teenager, Margaret was working for a married farmer in the western districts and had fallen pregnant to him (I don’t know if it was consensual) and had a child which she named Eileen after her favourite sister. The child was taken away and when she had another child a year later with the same man, she also called her Eileen (probably believing the first child had died). The first Eileen lived and went into the world equally oblivious to her mother’s plight and the second Eileen died after birth and was quietly buried in a suburb in Melbourne where Margaret would be buried 65 years later.

When she arrived at the convent, Margaret was given a new name and the gate closed behind her for the rest of her life. My father loved this wiry rebel (named Jock by him for her jockey-like stature) who lived both a hard and a sheltered life. Researching and reflecting on Margaret’s life made me deeply consider gender, class, compassion and the Catholic Church as connected to my family and more broadly. The archives from the convent where she lived for over six decades provided no trace of her existence except for a record of being slightly ill twice in the 1960s… no photographs, no accounts of any activities or interests.

Margaret Hammett Lived

I had a friend

Tony Dupé - I Had A Friend (from Margaret Hammett Lived)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/mastrokristo

Presenting ‘Departures’ (out now on Lost Tribe Sound), the debut album from μastroKristo. ‘Departures’ is a nocturne, built from a humble and quiet rehearsal for untuned piano, tuba, bassoon, and tapes. It's a tribute to the night, and to all the failed and successful attempts at falling asleep. In gentle gray and pale blue hues, its watery, moonlit emotions spill forth... a siren’s song tempting heavy eyelids to take the final plunge towards a long night’s sleep.

‘Departures’ makes use of the worn mechanics and incidental noises generated by μastroKristo’s nearly 100 years old John Spencer & Co upright piano and its exposed soundboard. The artist takes advantage of the fragile character found in the low fidelity recordings and uses it to serve an equally important role as the piano itself. The tired piano hammers collapse in cascading cyclical patterns, resting comfortably inside the hiss and the wow and flutter effects brought on by an old TASCAM cassette recorder. Further still, these moments are glued together by the relaxed conversations between a tuba and a bassoon, which help lend a certain film noir like character to the music. This combination of forward motion and fluidity creates an intoxicating ebb and flow.

Departures

Waves

mastroKristo - Waves (from Departures)

Listen / Purchase: https://lnk.to/meltingworld

Ryan Chamberlain (aka Arrowounds) originally envisioned 'The Rise and Fall of the Melting World' as an extension of the previous two albums, 'Oncotype Sketchbook' and 'The Loneliness of the Deep Sea Diver,' although with the intended purpose of exploring the "aftermath and resurfacing" from the events that inspired those creations.

Chamberlain aimed for a more open sounding terrain to represent a clearing of the mind or the ability to breathe again, though there were multiple occasions throughout the making of 'Rise and Fall' where the waves came crashing back down into the depths. Nothing is ever that easy. Continuing health scares of those closest to Chamberlain and the overall climate of anxiety the world maintains always threatened to darken and pollute the soundscapes during their creation.

Field recordings from Chamberlain’s new living environment; far from the city, also played a huge role in shaping this album, maneuvering the senses of uncertainty and isolation throughout. Traveling in the mind, projecting ones being through nature, spilling out amongst the moss and soil into your own film of wreckage… senses perceive as much as deceive.

As it stands, 'The Rise and Fall of the Melting World' is the perfect closing to the trilogy of albums, with its lingering threads and cancerous tentacles breaching the surfaces and branching into unknown landscapes.

The Rise and Fall of the Melting World

Caverns of the Behemoth (Edit)

Arrowounds - Caverns of the Behemoth (Edit)(from The Rise and Fall of the Melting World)

Wandering

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#211 - La spiritualité

My Significant Other

for cello, transducers, and sampler.
ensemble mosaik (Mathis Mayr and Ernst Surberg) live at Acker Stadt Palast, Berlin.

Gravity and Center (cello + sampler)

London-based Slowcraft continues to craft... slow, and quiet, beautiful music... the type of music that I love waking up to and observing the dark sombre sky open up to the world for another short day. For the latest release on this boutique label curated by James Murray, we are gifted with a six-piece album by a Czech composer and field recordist, Tomáš Šenkyřík, titled Hajú, which is an old Moravian word that loosely translates to “hush hush”. Today's track premiere of "Advent" is as appropriate as ever, with the seasonal preparation for the holidays, which began yesterday, November 27th. The word is a Latin adoption of "adventus" which means "arrival," and whether you are of Christian faith or not, the approach towards this time is sensed by everyone. For me, it's like a ramp down off the highway of the year, about to enter through the tunnel, where night and quietude surround a slow transition in-between, before a ramp-up into busy January, where somehow everyone exhales anew. This journey is perfectly soundtracked by Hajú, with its "subtle weaving together of acoustic elements, soft synthetic manoeuvres and evocative field recordings to spellbinding effect." These gentle, minimal, and fragile sounds are cradled further by warm strings and piano keys, concluding with a lovely lullaby, with vocals by Marie Puttnerová, "a modern-day framing of Moravian folklore guided as much by ambient minimalism as the ghosts of Dvořák and Janáček, one in which the family hearth forever glows with unmistakable warmth and generosity of spirit."

Hajú

Advent

TRACK PREMIERE : Tomáš Šenkyřík - Advent

Bandcamp & Streaming

LENZE - Drio

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.

Gravity and Center (cello + sampler)

Joshua Mastel

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