Long awaited third album from experimental Afghan-American outfit Naujawanan Baidar. Available 7/8/2022 digitally or on limited cassette from Radio Khiyaban (Eindhoven, Netrherlands)

Order: https://radiokhiyaban.bandcamp.com/album/khedmat-be-khalq

Naujawanan Baidar - Koh Har Qadar Boland Bashad Baaz Ham Sar-e Khod Rah Darad

Naujawanan Baidar - Dur Nest

What Did You Say Before That?

this is a very similar patch as Untitled VI, except that now there are three voices instead of one: SMR, piston honda (which is also in the rosie efx loop from time to time, which is a bad habit/crutch that i lean on way too often) and e350. SMR is droning and fluttering into clouds, while the piston honda and e350 are both hitting an optomix before going into rings for some reverb. there is also a field recording churning in the background inside the disting, which i am randomly and manually controlling the playback speed on. 

i could listen to this for hours (and did)

Untitled VII

Two totally infectious sets from Decoy - the trio of John Edwards, Steve Noble and Alexander Hawkins - reunited with pocket trumpet and saxophone player Joe McPhee on the closing night of his four day residency at Cafe OTO.

In the eight years between the recordings which make up ‘AC/DC’ and their last release ‘Spontaneous Combustion’, Decoy and each of its members have been practicing individually at the very top of their form. Coming together again in such celebratory circumstances and in the good company of a fantastic crowd set the scene for a very special night. 

As they begin, Alexander Hawkins casts a needling surface between his Hammond organ and John Edwards’ loose splatters and slaps of low end bass. McPhee skitters over them with his pocket trumpet by way of introduction; Steve Noble strikes his rims in anticipation. The mood in the room is that of a rock band reformed, of a certain number of “boys” being “back in town”.

The first set sees moments of frenetic free jazz peel off into weirdo soul territory and when switched to saxophone halfway through, McPhee’s romantic lyricism is utterly beautiful. When a groove sets in, Hawkins’ B3 ascension in harmony with an ever powerful Edwards-Noble rhythm section sees the room thicken and swirl to the point of giddiness. There is one unreal part at 22:22 where we’re sure you can hear Edwards’ bass vocalising. 

Regrouped for a second set, Steve Noble’s metallic textures meld with detuned arco bass to create an unholy atmosphere, ripe for Hawkins to play out the eerier end of the Hammond. When McPhee sounds a sax motif the band catches it quickly and it’s soon wickedly morphed and stretched by each player, recurring to absurdity in a stoned out funk free for all. 

The whole recording bleeds enthusiasm and joyful imagination and is a brilliant document of an unforgettable evening. Decoy are a limitless band who play nowhere near enough. We cannot attest to them any more, Book them, buy this, go and see them if you can.  

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John Edwards / bass

Alexander Hawkins / hammond b3

Joe McPhee / pocket trumpet, alto sax, voice

Steve Noble / drums

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Recorded live at Cafe OTO by Shaun Crook on Friday 10th May, 2019. Mixed and mastered by James Dunn. Artwork and layout by Oliver Pitt. Printed in an edition of 1000. OTOROKU023CD.

ROKU023 - Decoy with Joe McPhee "AC/DC" [sample]

from Ombrophilia, released in 2009 on either/OAR and re-issued on vinyl by Aposiopèse. Also available in digital format at bandcamp http://tomokosauvage.bandcamp.com/

01 Amniotic Life¹

in recent years, the turkish drone-pop composer ekin fil (born ekin üzeltüzenci) has been refining her talents in the realm of the film score. since her first recordings that were published by root strata and students of decay, she has always exhibited a preternatural ability to express the saddest of emotions through sound. once channeled through the lens of a gauzy shoegazing smear of guitars and voice, she has peeling away layers of her ephemeral songs to reveal their emotional core. that compositional process that works so well for her award winning film scores informs the soft-focus tenebrous pieces of her 2020 album coda. 

it’s true that any number of these pieces on this album could announce the finale to an emotionally draining movie, but ekin sculpts the entire album as a whole, dissolving one perfectly tempered piano motif, an impressionist ambient plume or a sibilant vocal melody into another. just at the threshold of perception, she occasionally invokes cascades of distant noise that easily can be interpreted as the ominous premonitions for natural disasters - incoming storms, earthquakes, or tidal waves. this subtle disquiet amidst the introspective melancholy furthers the emotional weightiness of coda.

her somber, blissful compositions have considerable gravity of their own in the constellation of grouper, felicia atkinson, and harold budd.

Coda

Ekin Fil // On Sand

The music of Naarm/Melbourne composer Lisa Lerkenfeldt channels a unique wavelength of foreboding, interstitial electronics, incorporating strategies of musique concréte threaded with veiled currents of melody and hypnosis. Recent recordings for Vienna Press, Longform Editions and Aught Void have demonstrated different depths of process and finesse but her latest, Collagen, captures perhaps the most complete and complex manifestation of her craft to date.

Drawing on a disciplined palette of peach wood combs, contact microphones, piano, strings, and feedback, the album moves in low, looming arcs, ascending to strange purgatories of opaque atmosphere. Lerkenfeldt cites a core aspiration to “elevate the everyday,” transforming common objects into otherworldly sound sources, which colors Collagen with a beguiling tactility, like vibrations traced in sand. The tracks shift in frequency and feeling, alternately heady and bodily, acoustic and synthetic, isolated states of static, light, and undertow skirting the outer rings of ambient, noise, and modern composition.

Although each piece exists in its own rare air the composite panorama they present is striking in its sweep and subtlety. Lerkenfeldt's muse seems one of evasion as much as evocation, navigating negative spaces for their subliminal whispers of dread or beauty. It's an aesthetic both ascetic and exploratory, minimalist mirages of resonance, texture, and gravity skewed through the pensive glow of room tone.

But Lerkenfeldt is too versatile an artist for purist restraint, which Collagen demonstrates dramatically in its closing cut, “Champagne Smoke.” A quivering bowed eulogy ebbs under a flickering film of distortion, slowly swelling in sorrow until suddenly the screech goes silent, revealing a murmuring phantom haze hidden beneath the strings, like a specter lost in an abandoned house.

14 Gestures associated with this album will be performed in experimental film and online viewing room of graphic notation at 14gestures.com from 29th July to 29th October, 2020.

Collagen releases on Shelter Press in LP / DL format on August 21, 2020. LP mastered and cut by Kassian Troyer at D+M, designed by Bartolomé Sanson with art by Lisa Lerkenfeldt, housed in reverse-board inner and outersleeve, including a 16 pages limited edition score book.
credits
releases August 21, 2020

All music by Lisa Lerkenfeldt
Mastering by Kassian Troyer at D&M
Design by Bartolome Sanson
Scores by Lisa Lerkenfeldt

Collagen

LISA LERKENFELDT 'Collagen' (SP120)

BYRON WESTBROOK - Electric Blued

VCR  CS  SS096
http://www.secondsleep.org/

VCR_excerpt side A

Pre-order now available from Imprec.com

Harry Bertoia's Glowing Sounds LP contains three versions of the same composition, each transferred at different tape speeds in accordance with the artist's instructions. This is the third LP to be released from Bertoia's extensive tape archive and it's the first, of many, to be released using instructions left behind by the artist himself.

Bertoia wrote the concept for this Glowing Sounds LP on a note in 1975 and slipped it into the master tape case where it sat unread for 45 years. The idea was simple, transfer the original recording at its original speed and two slower speeds. Bertoia noticed that the results, however, were profound. 

Recorded on January 20, 1975 using two large gongs, Glowing Sounds is one of the most powerfully minimal recordings yet discovered in Bertoia's collection. The artist's note left with the tape indicated that it was recorded at a speed of 15 IPS (inches per second) but slowing it down to speeds of 7.5 IPS and 3.25 IPS were quite effective for enhanced playback. Side A features the original 15 IPS recording and the 50% slower 7.5 IPS recording. Side B features a 20 minute, ultra-slow version at 3.25 IPS. 

Long, deep drones and powerful overtones define the sound of this recording. Comparison of the three speeds provides a revealing magnification of Bertoia's gongs, overtones and the artist's inventive approach to performance, composition and recording. 



Bio: 

Harry Bertoia first gained some artistic visibility in the early 1940s, then came into prominence with his sculptural, ergonomic chairs, produced by Knoll Furniture beginning in 1952, which quickly became classics of modernist furniture. Inspired by the resonant sounds emanating from metals as he worked them and encouraged by his brother Oreste, whose passion was music, Harry restored a fieldstone "Pennsylvania Dutch" barn as the home for this experiment in sounding sculptures which he had begun in the late 1950s. Bertoia was an obsessive composer and relentless experimenter, often working late into the night and accumulating hundreds of tapes of his best performances; Oreste, too, would explore and record the sculptures' sounds during his annual visits to his brother's home in rural Pennsylvania.

Harry Bertoia's recently dismantled Sonambient barn collection was an attentive listener's paradise full of warm, expressive instruments that were gorgeous visually and audibly. Nothing could prepare you, even on return visits, for the overwhelming experience of entering the spacious wood and plaster interior where gongs, some of them giant, hung among the ranks of standing sculptures of various metals. Over nearly twenty years of adding, culling and rearranging, Bertoia carefully selected nearly 100 harmonious pieces ranging in height from under a foot to more than fifteen feet. He considered this barn a full experience, sights and sounds comprising not a collection of works, but one piece unto itself. It was here, deep in the woods, that his Sonambient recording work took place.

Learning by experimentation was common for Bertoia and he mastered the art of tape recording, turning the Sonambient barn into a sound studio with four overhead microphones hanging from the rafters in a square formation. He would experiment with overdubbing by performing along to previous recordings, sometimes backwards, constantly improving his methods while also honing his performance skills. Bertoia was a careful editor of his own work and only chosen recordings remained, each with a date and carefully considered observations written on a note included with each tape. Through these pieces of paper a the artist's logic can be uncovered, a careful approach to composition, ideas, feelings and forms. The story of Sonambient barn collection will slowly be told through the release of recordings from the archive as well as installations and performances built from Bertoia's own recordings, lectures and a book.

Glowing Sounds

Harry Bertoia - Glowing Sounds (slowest) - LP -  Pre-Order

Independent record label based in the Netherlands focusing on unique, street-level sounds emerging from the contemporary SWANA (South → West Asia, North Africa) undergrounds/diasporas.

Naujawanan Baidar - Koh Har Qadar Boland Bashad Baaz Ham Sar-e Khod Rah Darad

Radio Khiyaban

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