“Still Lives” is the third solo full length by the Finnish composer Marja Ahti, following a pair of releases on the Hallow Ground imprint. As a collection, it may be seen as a series of studies on the liminality of the listening act and an investigation into the physicality of sound. Ahti forges vivid electroacoustic environments from field recordings, analog synthesizers, acoustic feedback, magnetic tape and digital processing, resulting in a set of articulate, prickly, and surprising compositions. In the artist’s words, “These pieces could be conceived of as vanitas paintings of a kind – selections of mundane or archetypal objects, sounds that have their own distinct qualities, but exist only by virtue of being temporary events. From another angle, one could think of them as shrines – objects assembled and set in a particular relationship to each other, charging each other in their given constellations.” Marja Ahti (b. 1981) is a musician and composer based in Turku, Finland. Originally from Sweden, Ahti has been a part of the Finnish experimental music scene for more than ten years in different constellations. She is currently active in the duo Ahti & Ahti with her partner and as a member of the Himera artist/organizer collective.

LP/Digital available 10/7/21

In Ictu Oculi

“hi leaves” is the new full-length record from soft tissue, the duo of Glasgow-based artists Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins. Following their self-titled debut for Penultimate Press in 2019, this collection examines microsound by way of extended amplification technique, bone conduction, domestic recordings, and digital feedback. Tracks like “plant pot” and “kettle” appear to disclose their source material, presenting wonderfully tactile environments of highly articulate sound. Wennborg and Weins prove themselves to be masterful arrangers of discrete, organic material, weaving together knotty and immersive compositions from these sharp, prickly sounds. Ultimately, soft tissue inhabits an intoxicating soundworld somewhere in between the patient abstractions of composerly eai music, the haptic indulgences of ASMR, and the diffuse digital pastorals of the 90’s a-musik/Cologne scene.

Written and produced by Feronia Wennborg and Simon Weins
Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates Mastering

LP/Digital available via studentsofdecay.com and studentsofdecay.bandcamp.com on 3/4/22

misc 2

After the Bend is the second album from Louisville based Flanger Magazine, and the follow up to FM’s 2018 debut, Breslin. Whereas Breslin was the solo creation of Christopher Bush, an album noted for “an astute synthesis of ‘library music’ and solo acoustic guitar,” and “a seamless blend into the uncluttered and airier side of classic 1970’s giallo,” After the Bend is an ensemble affair. An ecosystem, a perfect mutualism bodies forth—of strings, outdoor recordings, electronics, reeds, and percussion—featuring new FM players Anna Krippenstapel (Frekons (Freakwater + Mekons), The Other Years), Jim Marlowe (Equipment Pointed Ankh, Tropical Trash, Sapat), Eric Lanham and Benjamin Zoeller (both from Caboladies). The various combos perform with both a distinguished efficacy and unhurried Sunday drift—charged and beautiful, pulsating and pleasing. The production is subtle and tasteful. Mutating past the old saws of bounded individualism, a strange form of tentacular life accrues, cyborgian-fungral-tangles of the more-than-human variety. 

Robert Beatty’s cover art of otherworldly and interconnected river-scape gradients, coupled with song titles like “Reservoir,” “Falls Fountain Removed,” and “Sympathies for the River,” cue and clue the listener toward a river as a singular multitude analogue for the album. Interstitial gaps, clearings and openings give rise and merge into an accumulated flow from the tributaries of spirited improvisational performance, palimpsestic song cycles, and high fidelity studio production. The composite sound-image of After the Bend refuses to put both oars down into any one of the eddies of the folk, sound, chamber, electronic, or jazz idioms, and instead glides along the currents found within the slipstreams between.

Gathering samples, a River Doctor Limnologist inspecting the properties of After the Bend might note the specter of Leroy Jenkin’s free-violin heat-light deepin the water’s thermal stratification. Or mortgage the late-Maestro’s time with Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza to pay down the growing river heat budget. Or take one’s dirty buckets to the banks of the 19th laundromat where Walt Dickerson plays his vibraphone parts from Divine Gemini with dowsing rods. Or excavate the bedrock in the drainage basin, noting skeletal remains of a Shostakovich string quartet attempting to tune up a Kentucky Fiddle’s subsequent influence on the chemical composition of the water. Or consult the historical revisionist reenactment troupe’s episode of Fishing with John (Fahey) in which Codona, The Sea Ensemble and Nuno Canavarro guest host as their fleet of paddle boats churn river water into a regal lager, and all the fish get drunk in their quest for the leaner enamel Hosianna Mantra GPS coordinates of the Fattened Herb.

Bush and Marlowe recorded and produced the album at End of an Ear Studios, located in the Portland neighborhood, in the west end of the city of Louisville, bordering the Ohio River, between Kentucky’s Upper South and the Indiana’s Midwest, during the first year of the global pandemic, amidst the planet’s sixth great extinction event. As good a time to be alive as any other -Kris Abplanalp

Vinyl/Digital available 05/12/22 on Students of Decay

Sympathies to the River

"Singe" is the new record by Angelo Harmsworth, a musician who hails from the American Southwest and is operating now out of Berlin. Harmsworth’s work deals resolutely in extremes, but this music is not concerned with presenting binary or dichotomous relationships so much as it is with reconciling disparate sensibilities and sounds. Layers of meticulously edited and sculpted tones swirl around one another, creating kaleidoscopic patterns and hallucinated choral motifs that seem to thrive on amplitude or the position of the listener’s head. There is a visceral physicality to this music that aligns it with some of the core tenets of harsh noise, even while its tonal and timbral choices recall those of ambient music. This record follows excellent releases on enmossed/Psychic Liberation, Angoisse, Opal Tapes, and Harmsworth’s own Lime Lodge imprint and may be the high water mark of his published output thus far. There is drama and implied narrative in these seven compositions that seethes and hums as if reveling in a sort of violent gracefulness. LP/Digital available on 9/30/22.

Aporia (feat. Felisha Ledesma)

from the album "Trust" available 06/09/2023

https://theodoreschafer.bandcamp.com/album/trust

Theodore Cale Schafer - "Best Friend"

Originally released in 2011 on cassette by the Canadian micro imprint Nice-Up International, “The Silent March” is the precursor to 2013’s “Movements of Night” and can be seen as something of a mission statement for Amir Abbey’s skyriding Secret Pyramid project. Critics have compared the Secret Pyramid sound to the more blasted entries in the Popul Vuh catalog and to Flying Saucer Attack’s cherished fuzz devotionals, and indeed Abbey’s reverb-drenched songforms and titanic edifices of drone do feel at times as though they’ve been cut from the same cloth. Opener “Outside” might be best understood as the soundtrack to slow-motion video footage of a first-person plunge over some impossibly grand waterfall on an endless loop, as tumbling overtones fight for air amongst turbid plumes of distortion. “Still Return” finds acoustic guitar figures struggling to escape a blinding mist, their resolution finally arriving in the form of the sublime tranquility of the titular track which follows. Abbey masterfully weaves themes of birth, death, nostalgia, and existential dread into an album which is as cohesive as it is all-consuming, a spell which seeks to simultaneously welcome and protect against darkness in its many forms. This edition of “The Silent March” features an improved mixdown by Abbey and a remaster by James Plotkin to insure maximum transport. LP/Digital available 11/11/14 via studentsofdecay.com


Come Down Gently

The trajectory of Alex Cobb’s music over the course of the last decade could be viewed as a distillation of tone and atmosphere to arrive at Chantepleure, his most optimistic and sanguine musical statement to date. The album, however, was created at a time of heartache, isolation and emotional upheaval and acts as a balm of tender tones where abstract guitar lines circle and suspend in a kind of refined elegance. Noise, once a hallmark of Cobb’s music, has not been entirely removed, but manifests here in a different form. A delicate dissonance shades the edges of the these four tracks, providing textural color and gorgeously offsetting the lush nature of the music. Even in short spans, this approach yields substantial results. At three and a half minutes, “Disporting with a Shadow” pulls back the curtain just enough to let flecks of natural guitar notes and traces of alluring melody seep into the mix. The album closes with the side-long “Path of Appearance,” a cathartic composition that is best described as a poem of overtones which, like the rest of the album, is sourced from electric guitar and minimal effects but feels more akin to the sun stretching to fill all corners of a darkened room. A testament to sonic refinement, a way of coping, an exciting step forward for an established artist—the minimalist Chantepleure is all of these things. LP releases on 4/28/15. Available to preorder via studentsofdecay.com

Disporting with a Shadow

Bewildered by its Blue

Blue Chemise documents the hermetic soundworld of Australia’s Mark Gomes. “Daughters of Time” follows 2017’s brilliant full-length “Influence on Dusk,” released in micro-edition on Gomes’ own Greedy Ventilator imprint. It is an elegiac set of vignettes recorded straight to dictaphone with minimal post-production. For me these pieces function in a manner akin to Loren Connor’s evocative “airs,” conjuring poignant, intangible senses of longing and nostalgia then disappearing well before overstaying their welcome. Regarding their genesis, Gomes points to a quote from Australian artist Robert Hunter: "It's like I'm external to them. They develop their own assertion and character; their becoming finished is a thing they decide themselves. It's unexplainable." LP/Digital available 9/7/2018 via studentsofdecay.com

Daughters of Time

Melody

Isla

Patience is the debut full-length album by Sante Fe-based artist Theodore Cale Schafer. Alternately murky and narcoleptic and bristling with grit and light, this collection of eight pieces is a delicate play of contrasts. Impressionistic settings unfurl with an unhurried gait, opening with the dreamlike disorientation of “Gold Chain” in which a degraded location recording gives way to a soft web of treated piano motifs. Schafer’s compositions are sumptuous yet unfussy, recalling perhaps the concise, vignette-oriented tape works of Andrew Chalk, which seem to prioritize spontaneity and ephemerality over preciousness and decorum. This approach yields substantive results, as on “It's Late,” which marries a dolorous, clanging guitar sketch to the sound of change jostling in the pocket of a walker and the laughter of friends or passersby. This is diaristic music— rough-hewn, confessional, and teeming with possibility. Artwork by Andrea Bjurström. Mastered by Kassian Troyer at D&M. LP/Digital available 10/11/2019. https://studentsofdecay.com/post/187440375149/theodore-cale-schafer-patience

It's Late

"Beside Myself" is the second full-length release from Canadian sound artist crys cole. Known to many through her extensive collaborative practice with artists such as Oren Ambarchi, Leif Elggren, and James Rushford, in her solo work cole uses contact microphones, voice, simple electronics, and field recordings to create sonic environments that linger uneasily at the threshold of perception. Demonstrating how cole's work has developed and deepened since the relative austerity of her first solo LP "Sand/Layna," Beside Myself offers two lushly immersive side-long pieces that explore ideas of compositional drift. 'The Nonsuch' is inspired by the aural hallucinations experienced in the hypnagogic state during the onset of sleep. Opening with scratching contact mic textures and unintelligible vocal murmurs, the piece threads together live and studio performances with field recordings of urban environments to create a texture that is at once seemingly consistent and marked by constant transitions. Individual elements rise up from the background thrum only to disappear just as we become conscious of them; heterogenous sounds and spaces succeed one another with the unassailable logic of dreams. 'In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)' also focuses on drift and transition, but in a much more single-minded way. Over a rich, slowly-evolving organ drone, cole reads a passage from the French sinologist François Julien's book In Praise of Blandness (1991) exploring the concept of 'blandness' in the Taoist aesthetics of sound. Beginning crisp and clear, cole's voice becomes gradually less distinct over the course of the piece, the spoken words blurred by resonant frequencies à la Lucier's I Am Sitting in a Room until we are left with only the rhythm of incomprehensible speech. The text that cole reads acts a perfect description of her aesthetic project: 'We hear it still, but just barely, and as it diminishes it makes all the more audible that soundless beyond into which it is about to extinguish itself. We are listening then, to its extinction, to its return to that great undifferentiated matrix'." --Francis Plagne (November, 2019). LP/Digital available 02/21/20 via studentsofdecay.com

In Praise of Blandness (Chapter IX)

Operating out of Istanbul, Ekin Fil is the solo project of Turkish musician Ekin Üzeltüzenci. Her music first came to the ears of many by way of “Language,” a 2011 cassette release on the Root Strata label. “Language” presented listeners with a fractured, hazy soundworld in which half-remembered melodies and wraith-like vocals cohered into dark and hypnotic masses. On this self-titled album, Ekin opens the curtains a bit, letting in some light and offering up an even more refined album. This is a haunting collection of songs that wouldn’t sound out of place on Drunken Fish Records in 1995, effectively channeling the ghosts of Roy Montgomery and the Bristol shoegaze scene, while occupying similar sonic climes as those traversed by Grouper and Jessica Bailiff. “Anything Anywhere” opens the album and articulates its central concerns, with obscured, rhythmic guitar shapes coiling around Ekin’s ethereal voice. Later, field recordings bring us into the blackened night of “Two Stars,” one of the album’s most stark and exhilarating movements. Ultimately “Ekin Fil” is a remarkably cohesive statement, an album of devotional pieces that function together to form a beautiful, faraway whole. 

Anything Anywhere

“Mine is the Heron” is the new Tom James Scott record, the first document of his solo work since 2017. Over the past decade, the UK-based composer has released a diverse body of recordings via labels such as Bo’Weavil, Carnivals, Where To Now?, and his own impeccably curated Skire imprint.

This album finds Scott in half-remembered, sanguine moods, some of which are likely to remind listeners of his collaborative work with Andrew Chalk. Fragile acoustic piano runs are meted out with painterly finger strokes, buoyed by subtle, idiosyncratic FM sound design, chimes, and guitar. Culled from recordings composed and put to tape over the past several years, the collection has the feel of a poet's selected works, or perhaps more appropriately, a compendium of letters - exquisite vignettes that feel simultaneously private and important to disseminate into world. The hermetic nature of this quietly stunning music is evocative of abandoned shingle beaches and misty marshes, and of the Virginia Woolfe novel from which the album takes its title: “Mine is the heron that stretches its vast wings lazily; and the cow that creaks as it pushes one foot before another munching; and the wild, swooping swallow; and the faint red in the sky, and the green when the red fades; the silence and the bell; the call of the man fetching cart-horses from the fields - all are mine.”

Recorded by Tom James Scott on Walney Island, 2016 - 2019
Mastered by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates & Mastering

LP/Digital available 06/05/20 via studentsofdecay.com

Another Twilight

Record label operating out of Cincinnati, OH. Active since 2005, Students of Decay publishes drone, ambient, musique concrete, and minimalist musics. Distributed by Morr.

Students of Decay

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