Introducing "Nonexistent Landscape" by Sayaka Botanic, out on October 15th on Quanta Records.
For her second solo release, Sayaka Botanic (one half of group A) weaves together her sonic and visual experiments, setting them in dialogue.
"Nonexistent Landscape" offers a counterpoint: an imaginary landscape in which the sense of strangeness stems not from indeterminacy or interchangeability, but from an eerie quality.
"Nonexistent Landscape" will be available both digitally and as a limited tape & zine edition, housed in a custom bag.

The Path

qu-bit Chord... october garden

Instrumentals IV

https://eighthhouse.bandcamp.com/album/instrumentals-i-iv

Pure

November

End of the Day

The basic tracks for some of these songs were scattered through other music I had recorded over the last ten years.  Quarantine has given me the time to hear some of this music with fresh ears. In most instances dozens of instrument tracks were stripped away to find some forgotten core that made me nod or smile.  Then I started again.  All new recording has been done since the start of lock down and tries to put a sound on the subtle dislocation of a global disaster that is mostly (for me) expressed in my daily life as an absence, a taking away rather than a presence; a distantly felt thing.  

All tracks recorded and mixed at Shadowbear Studio.  Mastering at Black Knoll Studio.  Photo taken by Csilla Varadi.

Elegy For Patient Zero

Simple experiments geared towards performance, these pieces were recorded using Monome mlr & Grid, Organelle/Orac, Montreal Assembly CT5, Chase Bliss Audio Mood, and Mutable Instruments' Rings & Clouds.

I hope you'll enjoy!!

Performed/Recorded by D.Harper 6/2020

Mastered by Porya Hatami
http://poryahatami.com/

Poppy botanical by Walter Müller, 1910

Petal

I recorded some sounds on my vacation and mixed it with my cello, enjoy!

Sommarlovsmeditation

this blended edit features two snippets from the forthcoming TONUS release "Modulation Grid II": first half features a snippet of the original recording by TONUS (featuring Dirk Serries and Martina Verhoeven) and the second half features a snippet of the 30minutes reconstruction by A-Sun Amissa.

read more: https://www.midirarecords.com/release/md-092-tonus-modulation-grid-ii/

Modulation Grid II

TONUS X A-SUN AMISSA - Modulation Grid II (Blended Edit)

It was back in February 2012 that Michel contacted me to say he had sent me an mp3 "with a funny melody". "I am just wondering if you can play that. Exactly with the same tuning", he said. I had a listen and thought "You must be joking", as what I was presented with appeared to have no fixed notes nor conventional tuning, and sounded almost impossible to play. (I learnt later that the synthesized tune he had sent me was a melodic tracking - via software - of the musical pitches inherent in the voice of a man talking, recorded in Ghana by his friend Mark Dingemanse from the Radboud University). I put the strange sounding melody on repeat so that I could listen to it again and again, and by playing along continuously with it I eventually found the required notes on the trombone. After a week I could play the whole thing. And that was 2012. More recently, I found myself thinking, "Whatever happened to that tune". I had done a lot of work on it, and it seemed to have disappeared with no resulting composition appearing. So, I searched through my archives, found mine and Michel's original recordings, and played around with them until I had the beginnings of something coherent. At this point I contacted Michel, and he performed his usual magic, and eight years later we have our composition! Over the years Michel and I have occasionally swapped musical ideas, and our 'B-side' is the result of another such exchange, from a recording a year earlier.   (Robert Jarvis, Faversham, December, 2020)


This single is a download only.

An Agreement Of Sorts

An Agreement of Sorts

buy at bandcamp

Robert Jarvis & Michel Banabila: An Agreement Of Sorts

taken from the project 'mineral veins' (dissolves)  natural substances breaking down under environmental pressures, interactions and distortions. 

(recorded using JrF d-series hydrophones & adapted geophones)

mineral veins | Lugnas Dissolve (extract) - headphones / speakers needed

What a strange, odd, mixed-up year it has been.  The yellow spanner of Covid-19 really wrecked a lot of plans. I was all booked to travel to Estonia to record, but it had to be cancelled.   Very noticeable was the sunlight, perhaps it was because there was few jet trails, but when the day was cloudless the sunlight could be absolutely dazzling, it had the strange effect of making it feel like we were living in paradise.     Because of the restrictions I am so glad the woods is only within a moderate cycle distance from my home.  I am very fortunate that I have two fairly good places to record relatively close by.  I even found a wild sand dune area not even five kilometers away,  I hope to record more there in the future.   Disc 1 track 2 is from a much longer recording, it is probably one of the best recordings made during the 2020 season, I had made a few recordings, near the stream, then a bit less close, then a bit further away and another even further away, as I wanted a sound where the stream was a suggestion rather than really dominating the sound picture.  The Blue Tits nested in a cavity block in the wall of my home, there is an vent on the inside of the block, so I only needed to place the microphone up to that to get a fantastic close perspective recording.  
I include two recordings of the Blue tits as they sounded so different when I recorded them a week later.  Sometimes I would get great results by leaving the old Marantz recorder hidden in a bushy place while I go not too far away to record with the new recorder, I love how I had no idea of what it has captured for me, only later when the track loaded on the computer did I get to see if it captured anything worthwhile.  This was the case with Blackbird - alarm calls (Track 3 on disc 2).  I think the peaks came in at about minus six db.  This year was my first time to use Contact microphones and a Hydrophone.    
At the beginning of April my dad Desmond died, he was 89, a great age.  Apart from Covid, we could see he wasn’t going to live much longer, he had been deteriorating noticeably for months up to that.  Why then are the covers for the two discs so strange ?  
A birdsong production should have birds on it !   My dad was big into sun power and indeed wind power even long before it became popular.  Over by my workshop he had placed a few sun power panels on the wall, these were wired into a small room to a panel on the wall with six switches.  I thought it a good way to remember him by including a picture of part of his panel for disc one front cover.  I was going to include the six switches in the picture, but my heart of hearts said no, it didn’t look good, too much scruffy brown, but I include it in the zipped folder (If you are buying it on Bandcamp)so you can see what I am talking about.  I had almost chosen it, as it occurred to me one morning that the six switches are like the levels of lockdown (I hate that term, but I have to use it here) thankfully we didn’t have a level six, maybe that is like in a movie I saw where the authorities came and boarded up a house with the people still inside.  In the end I used the part of the photo with the meter.   
The butterflies . . . Dessie we call him, was always interested in butterflies, that is where I got my interest in nature, as a child he used to bring us for walks up along the canal to see the wild flowers and butterflies.  The picture comes from one drawer of his small collection of Irish butterflies he put together maybe around the late 1940’s or 1950’s ??  Very few of them are even in one piece now, this drawer just looked the part, it was all mixed up and spoiled like the year had been, the summer we never really had, at least not the way we wanted or had planned it.

A Strange Year - Disc One - (Album Sample)

limited tape, vinyl and cd releases with a focus  on ambient, drone, experimental noise sounds and darkjazz

TONUS X A-SUN AMISSA - Modulation Grid II (Blended Edit)

Midira Records

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