Only Love From Now On

Only Love From Now On (with Johanna Scheie Orellana)

Whatever The Weather

0°C

My Voice

Come Around

Paste

Moin - Forgetting is Like Syrup

Melon / Yep Yep

Moin - Yep Yep

Maritz

Tea For Two (Boo)

This is the first realized track of the "Catch It If You Can" series which began as the background music for a crankie presentation (https://www.thecrankiefactory.com/) by David Greenfield-Boyce, (https://www.facebook.com/puppethour) at the Black Cherry Puppet Theater (https://blackcherrypuppettheater.weebly.com/) on March 17, 2024. His presentation was based on a work by Annie Dillard, (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilgrim_at_Tinker_Creek). Having said all this, this project -- and this track -- have veered widely from the original execution.

Catch It If You Can

Lo-Fi Try

Second track from the new Jon Hassell album 'Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One)' - Out now:
smarturl.it/listeningtopictures

Following the news last month of the first album in nine years by Jon Hassell, Ndeya Records is proud to share the second piece of music from Listening To Pictures (Pentimento Volume One). Whereas first track “Dreaming” utilised a repetitive, pulsating structure of lush texture, “Pastorale Vassant” deploys a different style with it’s skittering, insectoid, electronic gamelan sound. 

It has also recently been announced that to coincide with the release of the album, Jon will be making a rare appearance in New York City, reading excerpts from his forthcoming book The North And South Of You. The writing expands on some of the thinking that has underpinned his musical work for the last 40 years since he coined the term ‘Fourth World’ to describe his graceful interface of deep tradition with new technologies.
https://issueprojectroom.org/event/jon-hassell-riffs-hyperopia-and-music

JON HASSELL ON “PASTORALE VASSANT”:
"Hillside Pastorale" in the Catalan dialect of Spain.

I was staying in Deya, on the island of Mallorca at Mati Klarwein's house where flocks of goats roamed in the hills at night, each one with a slightly different neck bell. One balmy Summer midnight I stayed awake to record this floating, constantly-changing "gamelan" that enters in the distant background halfway into the piece.

Asked to say something about the piece, I listened again and, sure enough - "Twittering Machine" - the title of a Paul Klee painting of 1922 popped into my mind. Although I knew his work for years and his Pedagogical Sketchbook was in my library, the "twittering" title was what stuck to me and I had only a vague memory of the painting. But when I looked at the painting while listening I was amazed at how they reflected off one another in a kind of unintended "tone-painting" way (where the picture sounds like the music and vice-versa).

This highlights the difference in "Listening to Pictures" as the title of the record and "listening to pictures" programatically (i.e., does the music paint the picture like the title?)
 
Another notable comparison here is how two possible angles on "listening" appear:
1) programmatically - where features of the "painting" are being evoked as in "tone painting." (Debussy - La Mer)
2) in the meaning of the title, Listening to Pictures, where vertical listening facilitates perception of shapes and a heightened consciousness of the entire audio spectrum which leads to your own "internal paintings."

NOTE: THESE ARE NOT MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE!!

© 2018 jon hassell

Jon Hassell - Pastorale Vassant

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)

Taken from Seance, a new set of songs by Maxine Funke. Out April 26 and available to pre-order now, including immediate download of tracks 'Fairy Baby' and 'Lucky Penny'.

Seance

Maxine Funke - Lucky Penny

Moin - Forgetting is Like Syrup

Moin

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