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BLWBCK is anon-profit association based in Toulouse, France. We love drone, ambient, psychedelic, lo-fi, chill tsunamis, electronic or any kind of music which can emulates drugs effects, contemplation, simultaneously create pleasure and deep sadness.

https://www.blwbck.com

AllMusic Favorite Folk Albums of 2013
Acoustic Guitar Magazine Best Albums of 2013
Rolling Stone 'Best Under-the-Radar Albums of 2011'

There are plenty of ways to tie Arborea to the freak folk and new American guitar movements that emerged in the early 21st century. Though the Maine-based husband-and-wife duo of Buck and Shanti Curran presented a halfway point between otherworldly female vocals à la Joanna Newsom and deeply disciplined guitar playing à la Jack Rose, the sum total was something altogether removed. In large part, the Currans belonged more directly to the lineage of musicians who grew out of the late-'50s folk revival, seeking to connect current music to ancient traditions, as opposed to using it as a vehicle for strictly personal expression, without sounding the least bit like revivalists.

Buck Curran served time in the Navy before settling in Norfolk, Virginia and getting a job at local guitar shop Ramblin' Conrad's. The store also acted as a local folk center and booked performances by musicians like Bert Jansch (of Pentangle), Mike Seeger (of the New Lost City Ramblers), and others. Curran mixed sound there, learned to become a luthier, and played in local blues bands. Following the marriage of Buck and Shanti Curran, the two moved to Maine, where they raised two children, and Buck worked building and repairing guitars. After more than a half-decade of marriage, in 2004, Buck purchased a banjo for Shanti, which came in a minor tuning, and the two began to make music together, quickly creating a small repertoire that blended Buck's studied chops with Shanti's haunting voice. They named themselves Arborea and, in 2006, self-released Wayfaring Summer.
The two began to tour extensively, preferring to play house shows and other more musician-oriented venues conducive to intimate performance. Using MySpace, they connected with the national network of bands that had found an audience in the wake of Devendra Banhart and Joanna Newsom's successes, including the Philadelphia label Language of Stone. Their sound broadened to include other instruments, including harmonium (played by Shanti), electric slide guitar, and ukulele. Buck produced a pair of compilation albums. Leaves of Life benefited African charities and featured Devendra Banhart, Alela Diane, and others. We Are All One, in the Sun was a tribute to guitarist Robbie Basho. Arborea, meanwhile, recorded several more albums, including 2006's House of Sticks and 2011's Red Planet, sometimes in collaboration with Espers cellist Helena Espvall. 
 -Jesse Jarnow/All Music Guide


The fragile. 
The antiquated. 
The sounds of breaking down. 
Dusty photo albums 
and deteriorating recordings. 
These are the things that intrigue us.


Antonymes : In Formation

Antonymes music emerges from the adjustments and erasures of ambient, the pace and persistence of minimalism, where music expresses nothing but itself, from the serenity and austerity of Morton Feldman and the profound prettiness of Harold Budd, from the relationship between continuity and repetition rather than of contract and interplay, from secrecy, from quietness, from pause, from thought, from emptiness, from time, from far off, from itself, from where it is set and where it is setting off to.   
 
“My chief aim is to make a piece of music. You make it for yourself firstly, and then if other people want to join in, then there we are.”
 
Antonymes makes music at the edge of, and deep inside, and from above North Wales, which you can think of as a very real place, available to be visited at any time in the solid present, and also as a very strange, fantastic, ultimately unreal place, which is all it has ever been, legend, spirit, mist and fluctuating stillness stretching back to a time and place where it was seemed like the beginning of a dream, one that would always become another dream, and another, and so on. It’s worth mentioning that Antonymes is of North Wales: to take an approach to the music understanding the location where it was made up and produced, to approach the music as if it is the beginning, or the end, of some kind of map, that will take you up mountains, across streams, to the sea, where the tide comes in, and the tide goes out, under the waves, through the woods and into the obscure wilderness that stretches between one patch of land and another, between one village and the next. So: Antonymes, of North Wales, recalling the lines of the great North Welsh poet RS Thomas, “to live in Wales is to be conscious at dusk of the spilled blood that went into the making of the wild sky, dyeing the wild rivers in all their courses.’
 
Formed at some point during 2008 by designer, photographer, conceptualist and musician Ian M Hazeldine, as a group that could contain just himself, and others when it seemed appropriate, Antonymes first album was titled ‘Beauty Becomes The Enemy of the Future’. Released initially on David Newlyn’s Cathedral Transmissions label in December 2009, and as a self-published book in spring 2010. A second 2010 release, ‘31: Before The Light Fails’, was released as a digital download and as a special box, an edition of one, containing music and photography, representing Antonymes fear and suspicion of the herd mentality. The piece consisted of two tracks to be played simultaneously in separate rooms. One review described the work as “a daring and inspired exercise in creating a timeless work of art.” Various pieces by Antonymes have appeared on compilations produced by Soundcolours, Dezordr, Cathedral Transmissions and Audio Gourmet.
 
Antonymes music is made up, something coming from nowhere, with no clear sense of what might happen next, and yet a vague sense of what might happen after that. It begins at the piano, where notes, space and intention, and something of the soul, and the mind catching itself combine over time, until a shape appears, which suggest other shapes, and lines, and something else, an anatomy, the lateral spread of a single surface, and a shadow or two. A composition, the result of a mystical sequence of events involving improvisation, imagination, presentation, communication, intuition and manipulation, has been completed. It is the improvisation, certainly, more of Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, Alvin Curran and La Monte Young than jazz, the patient, probing occasionally accidental forming of structure, tension and atmosphere around spontaneity and a form of focussed daydreaming, which is a near relation of a form of praying.

Paul Morley, January 2011.

We travel looking for the small things...

Northern Migration is following