Ambient #137

theatre

Polymath James Leyland Kirby must surely have one of the most confounding CV’s in the business: he spent years taking the piss out of the music industry with anthems rallying against the (VV)MCPS, he notoriously fell out with various well known record labels for reasons you’ll just have to google, goaded Aphex Twin with a series of ‘tributes’ and channelled his love of everything from Falco (Rock Me Amadeus), Chris De Burgh, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Stockport karaoke nights into a stream of increasingly bizzare 7”s back in the early noughties.
But at the same time he was responsible for releasing some of the very earliest material from Boards of Canada (Hell Interface: 1997), made a ruck of frankly groundbreaking industrial electronic records, brought New Beat to the world’s attention and, in 1999, made his first album as The Caretaker, a project that would go on to release some of the most loved Ambient/ Lynchian albums of recent times. SInce then he’s also produced an incredible suite of releases under his own name, scored various film projects and released three EP’s under the ‘Intrigue & Stuff’ banner which are, for our money, so ahead of their time they might just start sinking in properly by the end of the decade.
All of which brings us to ‘Watching Dead Empires in Decay’, a new album recorded under another of Kirby’s pseudonyms ‘The Stranger’ and released on Modern Love, a label that has been close to Kirby through these last eventful 15 years. It’s a dream album for the label: perhaps the most ambitious of Kirby’s career so far. It’s complex, singular, enigmatic, percussive, dark, and you just can’t work out how it was constructed. Gone are the sampled 78’s of The Caretaker, but it also doesnt exactly sound electronic - you just can’t quite fathom how any of it was put together: Field Recordings? Found Sounds? Sheets of metal scraped and hammered? Drum machines re-wired? It’s stark and unsettling, haunted, even troubling - but often just beautiful.
It starts with the sharp clang of opener ‘We Are Enemies But Not Here’ before the woozy percussive crawl ‘So Pale It Shone In The Night’ sucks you into a bare landscape: somewhere between Eraserhead and Fumio Hayasaka’s music for Akira Kurosawa. And then there are moments that break through the tension with clarity and familiarity, nostalgia even: ‘Where Are Our Monsters Now, Where Are Our Friends?’ could have been made by Boards of Canada if they had taken a turn into more noxious terrain back in 1998, while ‘Spiral Of Decline’ offsets the drum programming you’d most likely associate with a Powell record with an oblique sense of timing and space. It all ends with ‘About To Enter A Strange New Period’, an unusual, vaporous coda that offers no resolution - it just shuts proceedings down with nothing settled.

About To Enter A Strange New Period

From our Album "Inseln", released on Whitelabrecs

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Logic Moon & Henrik Meierkord - Avlägsna Öar

A collaboration between Rhucle and I, taken from the album 'With'. Released on ROHS! September 22, 2021. 

https://lontanoseries.bandcamp.com/album/with

Original photography by: getoutski 
Record label: Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series 
Publisher: ROHS! RECORDS

With

Rhucle - 'Beyond The Light' feat. Moss Covered Technology - [ROHS! Records, 2021]

Portland, OR-based multimedia artist William Selman returns to Mysteries of the Deep with his third album for the label. Drawing on influences such as David Toop, Beatriz Ferreyra, Elizabeth Waldo, and David Behrman, “The Weather Indoors” melds live and synthesized instrumentation, field recordings, and digital processing techniques in a new, more melodic and approachable direction.

Immersive site recordings open into melodic woodwinds, orchestral instrumentation, bass guitar, gongs, and vibraphone. Borrowing from the anthropologist Tim Ingold’s concept of “inversion,” this widescreen staging cuts immediately to the core of the project: the way human beings use the faculty of imagination to aestheticize their built surroundings with architecture, images of distant locales, and domesticated flora and fauna to contain the anxiety for the natural world that surrounds human life.

A clear peak in Selman's extensive catalog, “The Weather Indoors” captures his work at a moment expanding his musical and aesthetic project: Neither genre ambient nor musique concrète, but a unique sound world dense with conceptual play and moments of more traditional harmonic beauty.

“We are contaminated by our encounters: they change who we are as we make way for others. As contamination changes world-making projects, mutual worlds—and new directions—may emerge. Everyone carries a history of contamination; purity is not an option.” —Anne Lowenhaupt-Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World 

Releases May 19, 2023

Written, produced, and recorded by William Selman
Mastered by Rafael Anton Irisarri at Black Knoll Studio NY
Dolby Atmos Mixes by Matthew Patterson Curry
Photography, Video Direction, and Words by William Selman
Design by Gabriel Benzur
Editing by Chris Zaldua

Worldwide Distribution: Space Cadets

© Mysteries of the Deep
MOTDLP016, 2023
mysteriesofthedeep.net

The Weather Indoors

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MOTDLP016 – William Selman | Voyage In The Blue

Lilith (string version)

When I read the title of Milana's open collaboration (@milanazilnik)I thought on terms like devil, armageddon. Like if a dark age, the age of the evil is coming. 
And though the end-result is not sounding so evil classical music is often related to ancient times, when people still believed in things like this heavily influenced by priests and religion. In our modern times the believe on the personified devil is gone, but if I just switch on the News on TV I think sometimes, that there are some devils on work, so maybe he is still around.
About the recording: I have transcribed the melody of Milana's track to develop a good line for the violin. Later I recognised, that she also had provided a midi-track, which could be easily translated in notation, so the transcription was unnecessary, but transcribing something is always a good training for the ears.
Anyway I shouldered the violin and just recorded a single violin-line to achieve something like a classical chamber-music.

Milana- Darkness awaits (violin by heartscore)

A remix for one of my inspirations. Thank you to @Emancipator for the opportunity to remix one of his songs. 

Thanks for listening. : ) 


<a href="https://theartistunion.com/tracks/6b6b34?soundcloud_ref=description" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Download for free on The Artist Union</a>

Free Download

Emancipator - Valhalla (Feverkin Remix)

Ocoeur - Progression

from 'Symmetry'
Denovali Records · den227
available on 3xCD | 4xLP | DIGITAL formats at [http://denovali.com/rd]

Limited collectors edition containing the albums:
Progress Chance
Assimilating The Shadow
As Iron Sharpens Iron, One Verse Sharpens Another

Ricardo Donoso has composed a new paradigm of ambient music, in which concrete textures and digital synthesis expand on an abstract world in constant movement & mutation. Under a chain of progressive rhythm’s, cinematic textures and elegant melodicism, Donoso’s work pushes through with piercing strength, manipulating a sonic wave through space with nothing but pulse and mind blowing intensity.
Although Donoso’s work has coalesced into a much broader and dynamic beast, his early work continues to be a source of inspiration. ‘Symmetry’ now compiles Donoso’s first three albums, lovingly referred to as the “Digitalis Trilogy” which includes Progress Chance, Assimilating the Shadow and As Iron Sharpens Iron, One Verse Sharpens Another in a deluxe 4LP boxset & 3CD edition.
A truly entrancing journey of polyrhythmic counterpoint, the ‘Symmetry’ collection takes in influence from minimalist composers such as Reich & Riley, early techno and trance, and lush and deeply harmonic ambient music. It’s possible to look at the ‘Symmetry’ trilogy as a blueprint to Donoso’s later work in both its musical scope & thematic grandeur. Amidst all of its wide eyed, dreamlike states there is always a rumbling of subtle violence piercing just underneath the surface creating a truly immersive experience.

Progress Chance

Ricardo Donoso - Morning Criminal

I have the honor to present you the remix/arrangement of the brilliant song "Time" composed by Hans Zimmer, to the well-known and ambitious movie "Inception"(2010)directed by Christopher Nolan.Personally I very recommend the movie and original song.
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Hans Zimmer - Time (Instrumental Core Remix)

Welsh musician and composer. If you like my stuff, please like, repost / share. And follow for more tunes

Lilith (string version)

Marc Dauncey