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https://www.instagram.com/scissorandthread/
https://www.youtube.com/user/ScissorAndThread

Beginning with 2012’s Leland New York artist Francis Harris has been doing a deep dive into the sonic swells and contrapuntal granularities that articulate our most abstract, and sometimes slowest moving, virtualities. Through found sound, analog synthesis, and concise instrumentation Harris has delivered works that transcend the diagrammatic exposition often found in electronic music in an attempt to redraw the landscape of how such music is received and understood. Rather than valorize the fragment, the ambient, even in some cases the song, Harris’s albums offer networks of complex interiorities that endeavor to act as whole worlds unto themselves replete with memory, possibility, loss, and a radiant albeit tenuous hopefulness for the future. 

While previous albums, most notably Leland and Minutes of Sleep (2014) as well as two albums released as one half of the duo Aris Kindt (most notably the stellar Swann and Odette from 2017) have relied on singular thematic and narrative drives that were often of a personal, collaborative, or hermetic in nature, Thresholds is an album that aspires to sonic universality and the presentation of a fully formed psychoacoustical world. That being said it is not an “album of ideas”. Inspired by the ecological and political upheavals of the present and the role of speculative thought as an avenue of global transformation Thresholds is the work of a mature artist fully in control of his powers. Both expansive and nuanced the album widens the aperture of the affective possibilities of the electronic assemblage; themes skip from one track to the next, elevating and informing each other in tangible fields of abstract figuration. The titles, while often heady, concisely allude to strategies implicit in the construction and arrangement of the works: Cut Up, within the context of the album, is exactly that. Luck Takes a Step juxtaposes stately synths with just the right touch of playful fluctuation and latent atonality. The title track itself is a knotted mass of uncertainty and propulsive beats the breakdown of which is a nervous series of fits and starts that resonate not just within the track but as the fulcrum of the entire album: the threshold of our Threshold: 

“…we are caught up in our own original transversals of time to the point of dissolution, and that which remains a part of the contrivance of ourselves is ultimately that which crosses the threshold and is somehow, miraculously, reconstituted on the other side of it. Because it is via the threshold that we can best observe the conditions of experience as lived even as we cross to the other side of understanding, rejoining the ancient equilibriums of which we, in our depths, are comprised.” (From the liner notes) 

No track overstays its welcome and with the help of standout vocalist Eliana Glass, and instrumentation by Dave Harrington, Mark Nelson (Pan American), Will Shore, Greg Paulus and Gareth Redmond, and mixed by Phil Weinrobe, the result is a dizzyingly pure inward gaze that is first and foremost an album about connection.

Thresholds

Rebstock Fold

Francis Harris - Rebstock Fold

Artist: Roméo Poirier
Title: Living Room
Cat#: faitiche 28
Release: Oct 7th 2022
Format: LP/DL

Living Room (faitiche 28) is the third solo album by Roméo Poirier and, following his much praised Hotel Nota, his debut for Faitiche. The French musician and producer transforms the layering of different times into a free-flowing pulse that sounds both nostalgic and mysteriously ahistorical.

Poirier takes music seriously as a time-based art – not just in the sense of duration, but also in the way time is refracted into autobiographical experience, historical dimensions and stages of evolution. By immersing and reflecting himself in these different layers, he creates a succession of new balances between various tempos, iterations and developments. 

Poirier’s music emerges from a continual questioning and reformulation of his own oeuvre and thus of his own past, drawing on an ever-expanding archive of self-recorded loops. “I always resample myself, using fragments of a track to make a new one, as an ongoing process,” he explains: “The sound is evolving with me in parallel and the loops carry in their DNA all transformational stages, filled with previous tracks, sedimented.”

Originally a drummer, Poirier connects his various sources almost without a clearly identifiable beat. He prefers an organic pulse, mutable like the human sense of time and its fluidity. The aquatic feel of certain tracks on Living Room is no coincidence: among other devices, he uses a waterproof loudspeaker and a hydrophone to play back and rerecord tracks in the bathtub.

Drawing on a sample collection assembled by his father, also a musician, the human voice enters Poirier’s music for the first time. But it remains free of overly unambiguous signifiers. Besides its link to time, the fascinating thing about music is that it has meaning without needing to be decoded. Living Room goes back to the private but universal origin of human experience: “I liked the idea that a possible quest for a musician could be echoing the first encounter we had with language, in a prenatal state: its prosody, melody and tones, without being cluttered with meaning.”


Written and produced by Roméo Poirier
Design by Tim Tetzner
Mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi
Text (back cover) by Lamiral Poirier
Thanks to Jan Jelinek, Tim Tetzner, Anna De Smet, Lamiral Poirier, Sylviane Poirier, Octave Moritz, Will Boyd, Guy Tournay, Antoine Pasqualini, Fabien Leclerc, Rutger De Brabander, Frans Robert, Anna Wery, Vittorie Degli Innocenti, Lucas Kraft, Léna Burger, Christophe Le Poëc, Augustin Gigleux, Daphné Vagegne, Jonathan Soskin

Roméo Poirier: Muscle de sable - Jan Jelinek Remix (remixed by Roméo Poirier)

Dharamshala Rain 8

Roberto Musci - The Way Of Discreet Zen (03:31)

Roberto Musci - A Tale For C (03:28)

Roberto Musci - Tower Of Silence (02:12)

Live From A Shark Cage

Plastic Energy Man

From the album Raw Silk Uncut Wood (Latency 014)  
latency.fr/catalogue/raw-silk-uncut-wood

1. Raw Silk Uncut Wood feat. Oliver Coates(10:00)
2.  Mercury feat. Eli Keszler (03:56)
3. Quietude (02:32) 
4. The Sick Mind (04:24) 
5. Supine (01:27) 
6. Nahbarkeit feat. Eli Keszler and Oliver Coates(10:07)

"What works reliably is to know the raw silk, hold the uncut wood. Need little. Want less. Forget the rules. Be untroubled."

Laurel Halo presents six instrumental pieces that form a meditative, cinematic listening experience. Inspired by recent film score work for Metahaven and Ursula Le Guin's translation of the 'Tao Te Ching'. Featuring cello work by Oliver Coates and percussion by Eli Keszler.

Working in abstraction leads to a deeper longing for touch and closeness. The tactile sensation of struck organ keys and bowed strings, wood and felt on drum heads. Smoke and dirt and stone. Febrile and tactile, hairy and hissy. A clover of highway onramps, a continuous flow, like old leaves melting on their way down a stream at the back of a house. Constant contradiction, the truth's nowhere.

DATE
July 13, 2018

COMPOSER
Laurel Halo

FORMAT
Vinyl, Digital, Streaming

MASTERING
Dubplates & Mastering

DISTRIBUTION
Honest Jon’s

FEATURING
Oliver Coates (cello)
Eli Keszler (percussion)

ARTWORK
Jill Mulleady

@laurelhalo
https://www.latency.fr/

Raw Silk Uncut Wood

Laurel Halo - Raw Silk Uncut Wood (feat. Oliver Coates) (Latency 014)

Jan Jelinek - Them, Their

Somewhere Decent to Live

Space Afrika - uwëm/creātiōn (Tracya remix)

Three emotional years in the making, Be With and Efficient Space finally present Steve Hiett’s Girls In The Grass. Pressed alongside the long awaited reissue of his one-shot masterpiece Down On The Road By The Beach, these ten balearic soul instrumentals are of equal necessity; unrivalled beauty rescued from the fashion photographer-guitarist’s Paris Tapes (1986-1997). 

While recordings unintended for release should often be approached with caution, this is a rare case of unheard material being assembled as an indispensable and coherent piece. Girls In The Grass is something super special. The light and shadow that defines Hiett’s music is arguably more compelling here. It speaks to us in a language that feels profound, yet entirely comforting and familiar. 

Girls In The Grass reintroduces Hiett’s languid electric blues boogie, crafted on Saturday afternoons with fellow art director Simon Kentish. Kentish would cook, pour some wine and then utilise his arsenal of technology. He’d dial up a chugging rhythm, together with some ambient pads or keyboard textures, and anchor the weightless gauze of Hiett’s six-stringed touch. 

Hiett’s guitar sings with the same clean, crisp tone as Down On The Road, animated by a carefree weekend groove. Unlike his defining album which was boiled under pressure, these subsequent sessions have all the time in the world. The naïve melodies chart a missing link between Vini Reilly’s ventures into electronica and Booker T, sounding like sun-warped takes on wordless, fractured non-hits from his heroes The Beach Boys. 

Remastered for public pleasure by Simon Francis, these private moments are adorned with Hiett’s singular photography and feature typically idiosyncratic liner notes from Mikey IQ Jones.

Steve Hiett - Are These My Memories? (ES011/BEWITH062LP)

PLEASE DON'T SEND DEMOS

www.musicfrommemory.com

Amsterdam based record label releasing visionary electronic music from both past and present.

Sublabel: @secondcircle

Roberto Musci - A Tale For C (03:28)

Music From Memory

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