Polish artist Martyna Basta presents Making Eye Contact With Solitude, a suite of intimate, diaristic ambient pieces assembled over the past several months. Created using almost exclusively field recordings and her voice (alongside violin, zither and harpsichord), this collection meditates on domesticity, loneliness, repetitiveness, stubborn patterns of isolated minds and the sonic mysteries all around us. There’s a real gentleness to these spontaneous and confessional improvisations, despite that fact that making them was a way of “making peace with myself and the reality around me” for the Kraków-based artist. The artwork created by costume designer, sculptor and illustrator Julita Goździk and track titles also allude to an interest in rituality, repetitiveness and the cyclical nature of our existence.

Constant listening, instinct and intuition are key to Martyna Basta’s practice. Having studied classical guitar for many years as a child, Basta now focuses her energies on more abstract forms of art as a photographer, musician, member of the PROGREFONIK collective and Radio Kapitał resident. Making Eye Contact With Solitude follows a string of shorter self-releases and is her label debut, and a wonderful introduction to her back-catalogue for many. Slotting in somewhere between the vocal mantras of Cucina Povera, the emotional immediacy of Claire Rousay’s recordings and the carefully crafted sonic environs of Félicia Atkinson, Martyna Basta is carving out a unique corner of the ambient world for herself. 

Pre-order: https://martynabasta.bandcamp.com/album/making-eye-contact-with-solitude

Making Eye Contact With Solitude

Martyna Basta – Awakening

Sun Stands Still

"Youth Organ" by Brett Naucke from "The Mansion" album due out early spring 2018 on Spectrum Spools.

"Youth Organ" by Brett Naucke

'A Poem' cassette available @ www.strangerules.com

Emily Berregaard - A Poem [Excerpt]

Following the comprehensive introduction Le Raccourci, Julien Dechery delves further into Sebastian Gandera’s seemingly endless archive to present Contre-Sens. Culling from various cassette albums, rehearsal tapes, demos and answering machine recordings, the two part mix collages some of the French composer’s earliest work, when the sampler was a core component of his apparatus; tender passages disrupted by moments of lunacy. Returning the source material to it’s intended form, the physical release is limited to 100 metallic silver C60s, with sleeve design from Steele Bonus.

Exclusive to Efficient Space, Commend (New York), Balades Sonores (Paris) and Skydiver (Melbourne)

SEBASTIAN GANDERA - Contre Sens (Excerpt) (ES008.5) OUT NOW

Taken from Kallista Kult's self-titled debut release. Out August 26, 2019 on A Colourful Storm.

Pre-order vinyl and digital: https://acolourfulstorm.bandcamp.com/album/kallista-kult

Kallista Kult

Kallista Kult - The Earth Did A Line

info: https://radio.syg.ma/episodes/erotika-25-felisha-ledesma
https://www.instagram.com/felishaledesma
https://soundcloud.com/felishaledesma

Felisha Ledesma

EROTIKA 25 – Felisha Ledesma

Taken from Maxwell Sterling - Laced With Rumour: Loud-Speaker of Truth
LP/Download [ELP050] 
Ecstatic Recordings, 24/04/2020

Weaving an intricately detailed tapestry of meditative, spiritual jazz and dream electronics, Maxwell Sterling’s astonishing second album ‘Laced With Rumour: Loud-Speaker Of Truth’ blooms in the gaps between Don Cherry, Talk Talk and Kara-Lis Coverdale, gently coaxing us into a trance- like reverie where the real and artificial morph into one pulsing organism.

Originating as a multi-channel installation commissioned by Nottingham Contemporary in 2018, the four extended pieces here were recorded at home in Morecambe Bay and then subsequently placed in a room alongside works by Moki Cherry (spouse of Don, mother of Neneh and Eagle-Eye Cherry), Penny Slinger, and a collection of static musical instruments the piece was intended to complement. As a follow-up to Sterling’s 2017 cult hit ‘Hollywood Medieval’ for The Death of Rave, ‘Laced With Rumour’ works with notably more fluid and gently psychoactive structuring that takes in seemingly disparate influences - from Roman mythology to Nottingham’s Lace industry - that results in a sprawling but intimate world of sound, characterised by aetheric arrangements that effectively elide the disciplines of spiritual jazz, chamber music, and art installation into something altogether new.

Much like Kara-Lis Coverdale’s converging interests in traditional vs hyper-modern, acoustic vs artificial and synthetic modes of sound, Sterling’s work here is fluid and unorthodox, but rooted in a deep understanding of convention which he proceeds to bend and re-shape at will. The album opens with a slowly contemplative and almost solemn drift between ‘Laced’, which features samples of Don Cherry weft into its tingling fray of electro-acoustic timbres, alongside the breezy chamber strokes of ‘With Rumour’, the hallucinogenic qualities of ‘Loud-Speaker’, and the darker revelation ‘Of Truth’, which concludes with a transition from mired murk to tones that channel Maxwell’s refined cinematic nous.

One of those albums that seems impossible to fully absorb in one sitting, listening to ‘Laced With Rumour...’ takes you from a swirl of brushed cymbals into harpsichord shimmers, passages of solo piano brushing up against the deepest subs - like a more bruised and flipped Sakamoto + Alva Noto collab, to Arthur Russell’s ‘World Of Echo’ slowly descending into synthesised madness. It’s a rich and stunning meditation for our time.

Maxwell Sterling - Laced [ELP050]

It makes less sense to say that Maths Balance Volumes formed in 2002 than to say that, since that year, they have been collapsing into something, again and again. Just as the three members fell together with no plan or allegiance to any style or genre, each track falls together as the broken pieces of songs and sounds meet to make a temporary and frightening whole. Things make their way into a Maths Balance Volumes song when they don’t or won’t work anymore, when they have escaped their owner, or hidden away where nobody is supposed to find them. When things fall together—when the wooden creaks and radio hisses gather for a minute alongside bass lines and melancholy voice—there is a beauty that sounds like it was made by nobody and for nobody.

The city of Mankato, Minnesota has been the steady gathering point for the band since its beginnings. Mankato had always provided an ominous backdrop: built on stolen Dakota land, the city was the site of the largest mass execution in US history, when 38 Dakota prisoners were hanged on in 1862 in a straightforward act of genocide. But in their music of the past twelve years, Maths Balance Volumes has made music in and of a hometown overshadowed and unsettled by its history, music for a world in which things have never been okay. Traditional American folk genres seep in at times, but never as the incarnation of a living popular culture—only as ghosts or unliving effigies.

A Year Closer tells us already in its title what its theme is: approaching death, time ticking away and getting closer with each track of the record. We are told in the first song that our protective mask isn’t working, warned by the storm clouds and a ticking bedroom clock in “Dark Skies.” We hear fears of death approaching in the sad words exchanged by lovers who see they will run out of time, or already have, as in “We Had Time” or the romantic lament of “When I Drink.” In “Work Last Monday,” all of life passes with cold automatism in an “office apartment,” as a narrator broods over early onset dementia, remembers the details of rituals for respecting the dead, and thinks of how a hole is opening up in reality itself. The singer of “Over the Hill” isn’t apparently afraid of growing older and becoming a “man,” but only leaks a few disjointed details of his plans for disappearing, collapsing, turning into a tree, and finding a home. “Angel of Mercy” tries to resurrect the Christian promise of a life after death, anxiously asking if anyone is up there waiting for us after the oblivion of this world. 

But these are just the moments when A Year Closer speaks in words clear and audible enough to be understood. The giddy, agitated voice of “The Price” speaks only to itself in a private language, hidden away in a tin can somewhere. Musically, A Year Closer is a series of pieces that make symphonies out of separate processes of decay and disappearance: unidentified cracking and creaking objects, broken equipment, and lost melodies that seem to have escaped other songs and wandered into the room looking for a place to hide. These are the moments that the listener of Maths Balance Volumes always knows are coming, waits for, and settles in temporarily for a moment of repose. Maybe this is the meaning of A Year Closer: while waiting for the worst, things come together, a “we” with no name but with a rhythm, a tenuous but definite harmony to share as the clock ticks. Even if, when the lights are turned on, it turns out nobody was there. - Paul Buchholz

Taken from PP48 A Year Closer LP coming soon

A Year Closer

Purchase

Maths Balance Volumes - Dark Sky

Wędrowiec 
Wędrują nuk Nieuzywają / They wander, don't use the feet
Sloow Tapes - CS 50

Wędrowiec blends traditional ritual folk music from central Poland with contemporary minimal music often with a slight acidic touch and haunted vocals. Featuring members of Ksiezyc, Bractwo Ubogich, Kapela Domu Tanca, Kolowrót and Pies Szczeka. Edition of 80 copies.

Wędrowiec

Just before 2020 comes to an end, Berlin-based artist @leozylberberg graces this crazy (!) year  with an oddball of a track: “Sheshells” is a total earworm and at the same time a bit off, maybe. It’s chill, it’s haunted, and it might be the most appropriate end to 2020 one can imagine. “Despite its imperfections, it feels like some sort of antidote to something,” as the Australian artist puts it herself.

Sheshells is published as a digital single. It features an artwork from Paris-based graphic designer and art director Olga Prader’s Ftantasy series. The track is Präsens Editionen’s fourth audio release in 2020, following music by Remo Helfenstein, @samuelreinhard , and @damexlove , that is ranging from gospel and dark ambient-informed lullabies to proper sad-boy-reggaeton-heat.

Zylberberg is a mainstay at @sameheads , Berlin’s most infamous pub / fashion store / club / art space / what not. In 2017, she came to attention with a split tape realized with the wonderful Belia Winnewisser. Earlier this year, the Australian artist published Greatestings on @noisekoelln , a label that came back to life just for this highly limited 10” after a four-year period of inactivity. Zylberberg is part of Balance Crew alongside partner in crime @dane-close .

Sheshells

Buy the Track

L.Zylberberg - Sheshells (PE-022)

Sloow Tapes cassette label

sloowtapes.blogspot.com

Wędrowiec

sloowtapes

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