Welcome to this Atmospheres episode curated by Bålsam

Originally from Minneapolis, Minnesota, Anthony Asher-Yates approached ambient music when he moved to Colombia, being inspired by the diversity of the ecosystems that exist in this region. Known for taking his listeners deep into the tropical rainforest, Bålsam has conjured up a dream world surrounded by nature. Anthony's music is composed by field recordings he does during his walks though the mountains where he now lives with partner Nina Nativa and his daughter.

Enjoy!

Tracklist
1. Bålsam - Stropharia (forthcoming Unknown Tribe)
2. Hitayosara Ojeda - La Siesta
3. Bålsam - Vientos de Verano (forthcoming Nature Tales)
4. Blanket Swimming - Fragment 25
5. @imphepho - remember u told me
6. Hipnotic Earth - Float Gently Dear Mother [@shimmering-moods-records]
7. @amanita-phalloides, Heavenchord @nirgoona - Amazonian Silence [@secretdomainlabel]
8. Bålsam - Las Montañas son Hijas para Alguien tan Mayor
9. @scareymusic - Rothko Fields [@jagjaguwar]
10. Air Shaper - Exit Strategy
11. Frakkur- SFTLB1
12. Tonina @user-590502382 - Pendulum
13. @murkok - Akbara
14. @themonkbythesea - Nature Scene
15. @ecovillage- Lost Trees [@constellationtatsu]
16. @anthony-asher-yates-1 - Aguamonte
17. @lorenzweber - thései (θέσει)
18. @panamericanofficial - LIghts On Water
19. Ecovillage - Spellbound ft. Tonina

Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/anthony-asher-yates
Bandcamp: https://balsam.bandcamp.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LAKEBALSAM?ref=hl
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/a_asher_yates/

Å Asher-Yates (acoustic guitar project)
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/anthony-asher-yates-1

Dream Seeds (Bålsam and Galaxy's Bachelor)
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/dr3ams33ds
Bandcamp: https://asher-yates.bandcamp.com/
Bandcamp: https://dreamseeds.bandcamp.com/releases

Tonina (Anthony and Ninas musical project)
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/user-590502382

E.M.C. atmospheres - Bålsam

FOUDRE! = Frédéric D. Oberland + Mondkopf + Saåad
"Voltæ (Chthulucene)" to be released by NAHAL Recordings & ZamZamRec
October 25th 2024 — Vinyl/Digital — artwork by Brulex

Booking: sylvain@afx.agency (FR) / damien@julia.agency (Benelux)
Promo: dali@totalblamblampromo.com / maria@modernmatters.net
Vinyl/Digital pre-order: https://bit.ly/foudre-voltae
Previous discography: https://foudrenoise.bandcamp.com

"FOUDRE! emerges as a rare seismic force created in 2015 by three major activists from the independent scene: Frédéric D. Oberland (Oiseaux-Tempête), Romain Barbot (Saåad), and Paul Régimbeau (Mondkopf). They are portrayed by international press as "super-depth sounders", "laboratories of the unheard generating a fascinating sonic magma with rugged beauty", or "Badalamenti and Vangelis covered in dust and gravel". Their collective ethos is characterized by an insatiable appetite for urgency, boundless experimentation, and the spontaneous combustion of live performances.

"Melancholic. Intense. Deep. Epic. “Voltæ (Chthulucene)” is a tribute to electricity and telluric forces, a complete celebration of life, a symbiosis for an epistemic shift. “Voltæ (Chthulucene)” is the sixth opus by FOUDRE!, a trio featuring core members from Oiseaux-Tempête, Saåad & Mondkopf. 
As the first work recorded in studio, “Voltæ (Chthulucene)” is the virtuosic result of a recording session orchestrated by Camille Jamain, sound engineer and acoustician. The album emerges as a powerful electronic masterpiece, consisting of 8 tracks whose narrative dimension evokes the score of a sci-fi movie, transporting us through the labyrinths of a neo-Lovecraftian vision, into a post-AKIRA world where human and non-human life could (re)become possible, where all forms of (sur)living beings could cohabit once again... 

Since their purely exhilarating experience at the Visions Festival in 2019, FOUDRE! has undergone a delightful metamorphosis. The creative forces of the three-headed monster get unleashed. The musicians seek less the mental than the physical, embracing a frantic, corporeal, and direct turn. With “Voltæ (Chthulucene)”, the trio, identified as drone ambient, takes a twist resolutely post-techno. Emancipatory alloy of English rave, punk urgency, and electronica, with strange and electrifying echoes of ancient trad sounds. Hybrid and telepathic orchestra, composed of analog synthesizers and modular systems organically connected to acoustic instruments (baglama, winds, percussion, vocals), forming a kind of neural network twinkling at the heart of the night. 

Between contemplation, lightning flashes and illumination : the pulse, the rhythm. Hallucinated time fraction, progressing through a 3D landscape, stroboscopic and technicolor effects. A tale of struggles and resistances on universal and microscopic scale, images of cybernetic fauna and flora, a psychedelic futuristic delirium where hybrid characters of human/machine/vegetable could start to dance, mutate, and merge within everything around them. 

An intensity, an elegance reminiscent of Pita’s records on Editions Mego, the originality and intelligence of the music of Autechre, the legendary electronic abstract duo from Manchester, the energy and fervour of Black Dice, the technoid noise rock trio from Brooklyn, as well as the softness and beauty of the Japanese composer Ryuichi Sakamoto. 

The album cover is signed by Brulex, featuring creatures and chimeras, with a concrete and colorful stroke, in correspondence with the album and the U-turn of FOUDRE!, decisive and brilliant."

Voltæ (Chthulucene)

Order

FOUDRE! "Visions from Zūrūtetsu" [NAHAL Recordings & ZamZamRec]

Taken from "Beneath The Sea​/​Time Flowed Past Indifferently Above Us", the forthcoming album by Knivtid

https://shimmeringmoodsrecords.bandcamp.com

Knivtid - Undergrowth Rest

*limited vinyl and cassette editions via leavingrecords.com -
https://leavingrecords.com/plant-music-vol-3-the-golden-teachers
___
Experience the high strangeness of plant music—plants that “sing.” For years musician Nico Georis has used biofeedback instruments to connect a variety of flora to analog synthesizers, letting their biodata create music that is strange and existentially gorgeous.

Nico’s work in plant music happened during a six year span, and was set in motion by a simple desire to find a fresh supply of long-form ambient music for relaxing to at home. After a chance encounter with an obscure technology dating back to the 70’s allowing plant electricity to be converted to MIDI data, Nico began experimenting with using his house plants to generate endlessly evolving ambient music. “I was looking for music that I couldn’t find, and I realized the plants & I could make it.”

Here was an opportunity for another type of ambient music, one not born of the human brain, to emerge. A music that moves beyond human thought forms all together, and leans deeply into the green. Culled from hundreds of plant songs recorded between 2016 - 2022 both at home and in the wild Plant Music Vol. 1 and 2 represent the “greatest hits” of Nico’s plant music years.

Plant music Vol. 3 marks the newest installation, showcasing music generated from psilocybin mushrooms, known by many as “Golden Teachers”.

◯

"This music is created via an artistic translation of electrical biodata into musical data. Two mushrooms and the mycelium connecting them are hooked-up to sensors, and their fluctuating electrical conductivity is translated into an equivalent flow of music notes (MIDI). These notes are then filtered into musical scales and routed into synthesizers that generate tones.

These recordings have been arranged into a variety of solos, duets and trios. They reflect what we feel are the most fascinating and beautiful examples of psilocybin mushroom music, straight from the tub."

◄░░░░░░►

Nico Georis is a keyboard player, producer & songwriter from California. He produces music from his studio at Granny's Dancehall in a ghost town amidst the wilderness. His music, a unique amalgamation of global influences, presents an imposing total aesthetic that is all his own.

Made with the help of Bob Otis and Lovelle Femme.
Special thanks to Matt Baldwin who helped conceive and organize this recording while also co-editing a few songs.
Cover photo by Matt Baldwin and Gabe Georis.
Artwork and layout by Victoria Stöcker.
Mastered by Will Smith.

Breathing Hills

Sillage 
(SEE-yahz)
(n.) The lingering sense of someone's presence, like a perfume left in a room, evoking memory and absence.

Sillage

Stream

beanie (slowed + reverb)

Vibration -  Indian Meditation Music (34)

Artist: Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek
Album Title: Schaum
Format: 12" LP/CD/DL
Label#: Faitiche13/Faitiche13cd 
Release Date: September 9th 2016

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: Schaum

Faitiche is very pleased to announce the release of a new album by Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek (faitiche13). Since their debut (Bird, Lake, Objects, faitiche03, 2010) they have played improvised concerts around the world. Japanese vibraphonist Masayoshi Fujita prepares his instrument with various percussion elements as well as metal objects and toys, while Jan Jelinek layers loops made using small-scale electronic devices. Schaum (German for froth, foam) is the duo’s second album.
The river, forcing its way through veins between the outposts of the forest, was a great heart. Placidly as it flowed, gently as its descent beat against its vague banks, it brought and gathered sustenance for the busily mediating humus that swelled sunwards in the strangest cell configurations, trees, plants, animals. The silence all round was uncanny and stuck on the ear. Spasmodic squelches, a gurgling in the muddy hollows of the bank beneath overhanging shagginess, the slurping of ominous cavities, that shot out now and again between the long-spun threads of time, like something detonating, testified to the steady monotony of the process. From the forest itself came a crackling rhythm. There the mighty Pan could still be heard to rumble.
from the novel Tropics by Robert Müller (translated by N. Grindell)

Dear Masayoshi Fujita,
Many thanks for the audio files. Your additional vibraphone recordings go wonderfully with the material we have already. Preparing the vibraphone with more percussion instruments was the right decision. Combined with my tightly woven synthesizer and sample loops, the result is a fragmented sense of space. I have taken the liberty of manipulating certain recordings. One might now say that our joint recordings are both a basis for further processing and new pieces in their own right.
While listening through our improvisations, I noticed a tendency towards atmospheric sounds. I am almost tempted to call them tropical. This has strengthened my resolve to work with dense background textures – among others, I’m using material produced in connection with my radio pieces Kennen Sie Otahiti? (Do you know Otahiti? SWR2, 2012) and Dialoge zur Anthropologie (Dialogs on Anthropology, SWR2, 2013): artificial field recordings, jungle and rain forest settings that do not hide their staged, fictional character. They are synthetic and speculative. As you know, I have long been obsessed with the tropics. This obsession involves a mental image of a specific quality of landscape: deliriously extravagant unstructuredness, hostile to life but also excessively productive. I am fascinated by the idea of installing clear minimalist forms amid such luxuriant tropical growth. Perhaps my image of the city of Brasilia is a good example: the utopia of elegant and ascetic modernism, surrounded by rampant vegetation. Lianas and concrete: that’s exactly how our music should be!
Corresponding to this, I would like to expand our liner notes to include a quotation from Robert Müller’s novel Tropics – an expressionist travelogue published in Germany in 1915. It goes without saying that this work cannot be wholeheartedly embraced: its imperialistic fantasies of omnipotence and its “master race” posturing, characteristic of that time and place, are, of course, intolerable. Please excuse my casually dismissing this, but it is not what I am interested in here. Tropics is fascinating as a nervous jungle phantasm that openly indulges in exoticism at the same time as deconstructing it. In this way, the main character’s adventure becomes a journey into the subjective. It resembles a feverish inner delirium, exposing exoticism as a simulated, utopian perspective. What it boils down to is insubstantial, nothing but foam and froth.
With best regards, Jan Jelinek, Berlin 2016

Masayoshi Fujita & Jan Jelinek: Vague, yet

Taken from the album 'taking into account only a portion of your emotions' released as CD and Download

taking into account only a portion of your emotions

pinkcourtesyphone 'Reference Point Intermission 1' (EMEGO 236)

releases November 20, 2020
mastering and lacquer cut :: Mike Grinser (Dubplates + Mastering, Berlin)
mixing assistance on "An Indefinite Lattice" :: Nathan Taylor

all proceeds to NHLC (Honolulu, HI) :: nativehawaiianlegalcorp.org

"Indefinite Lattices, the new 12-inch record by Glyn Maier, is rock music of a very different order. During visits to two mineral-rich sites, Maier collected field recordings of these environments which were then re-synthesized into four extended compositions. At Ringing Rocks in Pennsylvania, a field of boulders make bell-like tones when struck, as well as low-frequency tones that are unhearable by humans. (Scientists have yet to discern why the rocks ring, but believe it may have to do with the freeze-thaw cycle that produced them.) The other site visited by Maier—the fairly remote Kaʻena Point on the coast of O’ahu, Hawaii—was believed to be the departure point for souls leaving this world.

The unstable rhythmic patterns from these spaces, as well as Maier’s tappings, scrapes, and footsteps throughout the two sites, are paired with lullabilic progressions and ghostly effects. Instead of the artist’s personal expressions, the tracks on Indefinite Lattices are envisioned as lithic formations in their own right, as things grown rather than produced. They seem to have peaceful but complex lives of their own. Guided by notions of deep ecology—and an anti-colonialism that recognizes the bloody histories of these two sites—Maier refashions the instrumental utility of electronic music so that the agency of environments is emphasized.

Like watching rocks fall down a cliffside and splashing into a stream, or the humbling calm of a thunderstorm, one is left wondering whether this record is the result of human intention or a combination of natural forces. Treading the line between traditional and experimental approaches to ambient music, Maier edits the contingency of his gear’s electrical signals and the recorded environments into tightly conceived compositions. Indefinite Lattices is documentation of moments in the geological process, but also illustrates the geologic nature of art itself.

---

Glyn Maier is a sound & field recordist and conservationist living in the Unorganized Territory of South Oxford, Maine. He previously released music under the alias Lack. "

Indefinite Lattices

Glyn Maier - An Indefinite Lattice (ENM08)

Artist: Nikolaienko
Album: Rings
Label#: faitiche23
Format: LP/DL
Release: April 16th 2021

Fortunately for us, Dmytro Nikolaienko agreed to open up the jewellery boxes of his tape-loop archive for his debut album on Faitiche. What came to light was a collection of dreamy glittering gems, masterfully presented using the compositional possibilities of analogue tape machines. Some may consider a tape machine to be limited as a musical instrument, but Rings makes a convincing case with its sure-handed use of the available parameters – moving tape over the tape head mechanically and manually, cutting loops, manipulating timbre and creating noise by means of saturation. The results are eleven blurred, repetitive, rhythmic patterns that can be understood as an intervention against digital precision, as mechanical irregularities and background noise become musical events.

For those familiar with Nikolaienko’s work, his nostalgic approach here will come as no surprise: born in Ukraine and now based in Estonia, he has chosen a historical medium (that has been enjoying a renaissance for some years now) to record historical-sounding sequences. The way he manages his own back catalogue is similarly archival, documenting the chronology of his tape loops in such a way as to leave no doubt as to their advanced age. And then there are his two wonderful labels Muscut and Shukai, the latter being an archival project releasing electroacoustic obscurities from the Soviet past. Which brings us back full circle …

Nikolaienko: Ambianta I

*S O U N D S C A P I N G*
Contact: Shimmeringmoodsrecords@gmail.com

Other projects:
Slow Tone Collages 
https://soundcloud.com/analogue-chat

*Monthly Radioshow @ Resonance Extra: First Wednesday at 8pm / 21:00-23:00 CET www.extra.resonance.fm

Knivtid - Undergrowth Rest

Shimmering Moods Records

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