Mythology Volts

After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM’s 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, an album noted for “an astute synthesis of ‘library music’ and solo acoustic guitar,” and “a seamless blend into the uncluttered and airier side of classic 1970’s giallo,” After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth—of strings, outdoor recordings, electronics, reeds, and percussion—featuring new FM players Anna Krippenstapel (Frekons (Freakwater + Mekons), The Other Years), Jim Marlowe (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Tropical Trash, Sapat), Eric Lanham and Benjamin Zoeller (both from Caboladies). The various combos perform with both a distinguished efficacy and unhurried Sunday drift—charged and beautiful, pulsating and pleasing. The production is subtle and tasteful. Mutating past the old saws of bounded individualism, a strange form of tentacular life accrues, cyborgian-fungral-tangles of the more-than-human variety. 

Robert Beatty’s cover art of otherworldly and interconnected river-scape gradients, coupled with song titles like “Reservoir,” “Falls Fountain Removed,” and “Sympathies for the River,” cue and clue the listener toward a river as a singular multitude analogue for the album. Interstitial gaps, clearings and openings give rise and merge into an accumulated flow from the tributaries of spirited improvisational performance, palimpsestic song cycles, and high fidelity studio production. The composite sound-image of After the Bend refuses to put both oars down into any one of the eddies of the folk, sound, chamber, electronic, or jazz idioms, and instead glides along the currents found within the slipstreams between.

Gathering samples, a River Doctor Limnologist inspecting the properties of After the Bend might note the specter of Leroy Jenkin’s free-violin heat-light deepin the water’s thermal stratification. Or mortgage the late-Maestro’s time with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to pay down the growing river heat budget. Or take one’s dirty buckets to the banks of the 19th laundromat where Walt Dickerson plays his vibraphone parts from Divine Gemini with dowsing rods. Or excavate the bedrock in the drainage basin, noting skeletal remains of a Shostakovich string quartet attempting to tune up a Kentucky Fiddle’s subsequent influence on the chemical composition of the water. Or consult the historical revisionist reenactment troupe’s episode of Fishing with John (Fahey) in which Codona, The Sea Ensemble and Nuno Canavarro guest host as their fleet of paddle boats churn river water into a regal lager, and all the fish get drunk in their quest for the leaner enamel Hosianna Mantra GPS coordinates of the Fattened Herb.

Bush and Marlowe recorded and produced the album at End of an Ear Studios, located in the Portland neighborhood, in the west end of the city of Louisville, bordering the Ohio River, between Kentucky’s Upper South and the Indiana’s Midwest, during the first year of the global pandemic, amidst the planet’s sixth great extinction event. As good a time to be alive as any other -Kris Abplanalp

Vinyl/Digital available 05/12/22 on Students of Decay

Sympathies to the River

ParalSense 170

Confield

Lentic Catachresis

49 CraMoRD+dlpl

Search Job

FAKTOR4 - Radiomix 2023 Part2

Catatonia

LINE_151

Serbian sound artist, poet, curator, and researcher, Manja Ristić returns for her second release for LINE after 2023's 'Awakenings' (LINE_138). Her new album 'Ma' recalls the incredibly subtle, detailed works of Steve Roden, Francisco López, or Bernhard Günter fused with the adept field recordings of Jana Winderen and the delicate resonances of Toshiya Tsunoda. Two entrancing long form works incorporating field recordings, acoustic instruments, and unexpected found sounds.

> https://lineimprint.bandcamp.com/album/ma 

Ma — depth of the space, of the environment, of relations and mystical interrelatedness. The hidden or obvious void that defines the form and liberates from it at the same time. Ma and the sound? The weight of emptiness and quietness is revealed by unexpected density—the space chants, the chants spread in waves, pulsations, a pellucid spectrum of timbre.

“I hear the water dreaming” echoes in my mind.

Patterns of the forest chorus build pandiatonic clouds, on the brim of sonic hallucinations, we hear the space breathing, vellum of light expanding, beyond our hearing range.

Sounds of Ma deep in the ground, on the surface, underwater, on the surface of the water, in the air, between gravity and the air; Ma between air and objects, tubes and thermal bodies, between the Moon and its reflection; bottom of the silent lake and the stratosphere far beyond our world next to the frozen planet with the hidden ocean.

Ma of the soul caught on the tape.

Nothing is necessary.

Nothing holds everything together.

-

List of field recordings and samples:

• Giant anthill in the abandoned forest quarry
• Cricket chorus next to Pohořský rybník lake
• Hydrophone recording of the “silent lake” Stierhüblteich
• Hydrophone recording of the river Schwarze Aist and its various tributaries
• Bowing cymbal under the full moon next to the Schwarze Aist (recorded by Abby Lee Tee)
• Museum of Contemporary Art Ljubljana—ventilation in the man’s toilet (recorded by Mark Vernon)
• Cassini passing between Saturn and Enceladus Moon (NASA sounds)
• Dad’s boiler
• Breath and broken tape recorder hum extracted from Toru Takemitsu’s tape “Ki Sora Tori” (1956)
• Bowing glass vase
• Two wine glasses gently trembling in front of the fan
• Electro-magnetic field around the broken socket
• Violin

Sounds, composition, images, text by Manja Ristić
Mastering La Plant Studio

Plasma 2050B

merzbow

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