www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera
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https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-016-phantom-limb-with-brueder-selke

German Duo Brueder Selke (https://soundcloud.com/ceeys_bruederselke) takeover this month's episode of https://soundcloud.com/phantomlimbgroup 's Spirits Commune, showcasing the music of Q3Ambientfest, a musical happening they curate, bringing together both established and emerging artists:

“We mixed smooth and silent with bright and intense pieces and invite open-minded music lovers to discover today’s contemporary composers and performers featured on Q3A.“

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Spirits Commune 016 - Phantom Limb [with Brueder Selke]

In the 1970s, Ellen Zweig was a young poet experimenting with ideas of the reading as a performance and of the poem as an oral medium. Her presence in New York’s Downtown scene, even during a period of such creative and artistic fertility, represented an astutely expressive voice, a wordsmith bending conventions, and a uniquely musical approach to spoken word. By 1980, and her two pieces “Network of Letters” and “Sensitive Bones” (both collected here on Fiction of the Physical), Zweig had introduced and perfected a technique she named the “human loop”. Here, she directed multiple performers to repeat a single poetic phrase over and over as they recorded to tape: inevitably, the loops phase in and out of synchronisation with time, creating a sonic collage of drifting, rippling syllabic waves that rise and fall with natural tides. In keeping with Zweig’s key creative codes, the text becomes performance, and in turn it becomes - dreamily and hypnotically - abstracted from the written word. Delivering her poetry like this, even the deftness of Zweig’s pen and her rapturously evocative imagery become foundation stones to new, longform musical expressions.

In the following years, Zweig became a celebrated touring performer, gracing stages of iconic creative institutions while rapidly ingesting cultural influence for her own work. Over the 1980’s, marking her growing reputation as a sound artist and a performer of poetry, she performed by invitation at prestigious arts venues worldwide, and participated in international festivals of sound poetry. In the same period, her “Impressions of Africa” series of work employed her “human loop” technique while exploring fantasies of a faraway continent with crafts, languages, music and peoples tantalisingly distant from her own. The polyrhythms and interwoven melodic lines of African music dance in symbiotic tandem with Zweig’s performance poetry, acting like multicoloured threads of equal weight, woven together in transportive vibrancy. Fiction of the Physical piece “The Act of Watching” was part of this series, performed with phased voice, skittering kalimba and warbling analogue synthesis. Around this time Zweig began working with then-rising experimental musician Gregory Jones, whose contributions to her spoken word pieces are much-coveted but sadly largely lost, though whose musical accompaniment remains in spirit via Fiction of the Physical’s connections with musicians David Weinstein and Dylan Henner, long after his passing.

Sensitive Bones

www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera
Check the full tracklist on our website:
https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-019-phantom-limb-with-puck

This month's Spirits Commune has been curated by Ralph from Puck, a small independent record shop and cafe in the heart of the Seven Dials neighbourhood in Brighton.
Like the stock in the shop, the mix has a bit of everything - some old, some new. Puck was established during the first lockdown in 2020 and has been going from strength to strength ever since. If you’re ever in Brighton, pop in, have a browse and enjoy a fine cup of Joe!

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Spirits Commune 019 - Phantom Limb [with Puck]

www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera 
Check the full tracklist on our website:
https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-20-with-pram-of-dogs

Commune by https://soundcloud.com/phantomlimbgroup with Pram Of Dogs

This month's Spirits Commune guest host is anonymous UK musician Pram of Dogs, whose haunting new album Unland is released on Phantom Limb's Spirituals imprint on July 14th. Their mix is formed primarily from filmscore, incidentally the day-job of the one or two musicians that make up Pram of Dogs depending on the release. From Popol Vuh's famed early Herzog soundtracks, to Jodorowsky's “Holy Mountain” score, the mix is as transportive and varied as a real movie.

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Spirits Commune 20 - Phantom Limb [with Pram Of Dogs]

www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera 
Check the full tracklist on our website:
https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-21-with-andy-curtis-brignell-caina

“I'm delighted to have been asked by Phantom Limb to present an hour of my favourite Japanese Jazz, and I've mostly chosen selections from its first two decades of life. In what is very much a reflection of the febrile student politics from which it emerged, the 60s J Jazz scene musically and interpersonally explored the tension between discipline and freedom, inventiveness and tradition, control and chaos. I've tried my best to choose recordings which reflect this ethos as it is what has drawn me inexorably to the genre.” - Andy Curtis-Brignell / Caïna

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Spirits Commune 21 [with Andy Curtis-Brignell (Caïna)]

www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera 
Check the full tracklist on our website:
https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-22-phantom-limb-with-cameron-graham

Phantom Limb invite UK drummer and sound artist Cameron Graham.

"It's a kind of anti-curated selection of some of the musical languages – harmonic threads, timbres, rhythmic constructs – that informed my album and that have remained important.. added to that, a few tracks that have remained extremely dear to me for a bit longer (plus one and a half of my own recent sketches). I wanted to share as much of John Object's music as possible. He's a formidable Ukrainian musical talent, + is right now there fighting, for nobody knows how long. He uploaded his 'Life' album last year as a kind of insurance policy should he not survive the war. The music is so disparate, so immediate, but it's all fuelled by an urgency, speed and charm (even violence). His music needs to be heard more!"

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Spirits Commune 22 - Phantom Limb [with Cameron Graham]

www.openlab.fm | 106.4FM in Ibiza & Formentera
Check the full tracklist on our website: https://openlab.fm/news/spirits-commune-022-phantom-limb

For our final Spirits Commune show of 2023, Phantom Limb staff have collated tracks from their favourite releases of the last year. As expected from a collective of self-identifying music nerds / deep listeners, the span is broad: the show covers the Detroit ghettotech hip-hop crew Hi Tech, LA-based experimental composer Laurel Halo, Jamaican solo artist Unkle G, London death metal / grind band Vacuous, Parisian R&B singer ULTRA MIA, and Maltese indie-noise trio Beangrowers alongside lots more. 2023 has been a strange and challenging year for independent music in many ways, but has provided an abundance of creative riches from artists emerging and high profile.

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SPIRITS COMMUNE 022 – PHANTOM LIMB

For our fourth instalment, Richard Skelton and Phantom Limb Publishing are bringing us a psychogeographical mix.

British musician and sound artist Richard Skelton has been exploring the natural world, its cycles of life and decay and our relationship with landscape and human-constructed spaces with experimental atmospheres. Skelton has just published his latest album, Border Ballads (Corble Stone Press). After spending the last two years living in the rural northern edge of the Scotland-England border, a boundary demarcated by various watercourses, this hinterland topography has informed a series of musical recordings, twelve miniatures fragments of a larger whole, such is their unity in tone and timbre. 

For this mix Skelton shares that this mix is loosely constructed around absences, vacancies, and dereliction. The image of a deserted church, now falling into disrepair, located deep in the north Cumbrian interior: I pass by the building on a regular basis as I traverse the labyrinthine back roads between Scotland and England. Fittingly, therefore, all the music in this mix is sourced from vinyl — the ever-present sound of cracks and pops attesting to a kind of degraded materiality.

Perhaps predictably, the first recording that came to mind was Nico’s ‘No One Is There’ — a favourite song with a haunting melody, and my selection moved out from there, looking for records that had similar resonances, regardless of their provenance or genre. I was therefore interested to discover overlaps between the Baroque inflections of Boismortier’s ‘Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders’ and the synthetic swells of Vainqueur’s ‘Elevation’, or the howling sonorities of Gareth Davis’ clarinet and Jandek’s cracked harmonica. 
The whole mix is held together by the rich field recordings of Joshua Bonnetta’s ‘What Lies in It’, which itself is a document of a Californian ghost resort, Salton Sea. In turn, various segues are made with Alan Lomax’s recordings of human voices, many of which crackle and blur with their own disintegrating physicality. These are various documents of (primarily North American) languages and dialects: Blood (00:50, Stoney (07:50, Beaver (17:48, English (25:45 & 36:00, Achumawi (48:45)and Nenet (54:05). Given this proliferation of languages, in the end, Nico herself has gone — vanishing through the cracks in her own song to leave only its refrain, looping eternally.

Tracklist:
00:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press)
01:05 Tirath Singh Nirmala & Richard Youngs — A2 (Untitled) (HP Cycle)
05:40 Stephen Vitiello — Shake (Farpoint Recordings)
19:05 Baby Ford — New York (Rhythm King)
19:37 Gareth Davis & Steven R Smith — Westering (Important)
23:46 Jandek — Harmonica (Corwood Industries)
29:06 Félicia Atkinson — The Owls (Umor Rex)
36:35 Nico — No One Is There (Refrain) (WEA)
39:00 Musica Dolce — Concerto for 5 Tenor Recorders in D Minor (Adagio) (Grammofonfirma BIS)
40:30 Vainqueur — Elevation (Version 3) (Chain Reaction)
50:10 Jessika Kenney & Eyvind Kang — Orcus Pellicano (Editions Mego)
55:00 Joshua Bonnetta — What Lies in It (Shelter Press)

Richard Skelton - No one is there, August 2019

The Other Side

Space Between

Ugandan rapper MC Yallah joins Phantom Limb for the release of her blistering new 12” Mama Waliwamanyii. Produced by Irish electronic artist Eomac (one half of R&S Records’ Lakker), the EP fuses Yallah’s breakneck Luganda language rapping with Eomac’s powerful, purposeful beats.

https://phantomlimblabel.bandcamp.com/album/mama-waliwamanyii

Sensitive Bones

Phantom Limb

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