Taken from 'Fringe' LP/Download (E064, Ecstatic 03/09/2021)

A gorgeous swell of intimate soundscaping from Felisha Ledesma on this simmering stunner for Ecstatic, despatching two extended, richly absorbing pieces weft from everyday detritius; synths, strings, voicemail, found sounds - hitting a similar spot for us as Ulla’s diaristic 'inside means inside me’ but with a more defined play of sound-as-light that gently and memorably tugs at the earlobes and heartstrings. 

Exploring a music of presence and ultra subtle inference, ‘Fringe’ is the 2nd release by Ledesma, student of Berlin's estimable Universität der Künste, following from a debut for Enmossed x Psychic Liberation earlier this year. Using AMQR - a software synthesiser built by Ledesma together with Ess Mattisson - both pieces here shimmer with elusive timbres that occupy a realm that feels lost between worlds - neither electronic nor acoustic, but more a sort of observational sound that radiates togetherness and warmth. 

Operating at insightful levels of synaesthesia, Ledesma poetically turns ostensibly humdrum sources into clouds of smoke - emails, voicenotes, walking along the water, a poem attached to an email, walking alone in New York during lockdown, going for a swim at sunset in the desert - all turn into a smudge of memory. When ‘Beamsplitters’ opens with a tangible human presence - a voicemail from a friend - it startles with its earthly pull, eventually getting lost in a tangled spool of found sound leaving just a trace of iridescent, intimate reverie. 

On ‘Golden Mirror’ Felisha gently diffracts a lonesome guitar phrase into a humming thizz with a steeply uncanny ability to jog the memory in a similar way to how olfactory stimulus can conjure feelings of nostalgia. It’s a trick familiar from an emergent new realm of lower case composers creating something like submerged, small scale symphonies that work counter to notions of classical excess or anodyne ambient, instead focusing on microcosmic, highly peronalised sort of worldbuilding that’s impenetrable, yet somehow entirely open.

Felisha Ledesma - Golden Mirror [E064]

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

speak all voices

homeless AI

After 2022’s In Every Dream Home a Heartache, Romance and Dean Hurley return with River of Dreams; continuing their prismatic dissection of the daytime soap genre with an examination into the dark corners of fantasy-based escapism. 

Over the last 60+ years, serialized melodramas have played a critical role in shaping the way we think about, consume, and are affected by media. The daytime televised soap opera has without a doubt laid the fundamental architecture for contemporary dopamine capitalists’ dreams of harvested, monetized attention…and River of Dreams explores the psychological effects on the mind of its viewers. Whereas In Every Dream Home a Heartache spotlighted the external omnipresence of daytime tv’s persistent broadcasts, River of Dreams examines the interior havoc and mental unbalance sewn by obsessive viewership. The same waters that harvest and transport our buoyant dreams often funnel into nightmarish, tumultuous oceans… 

Once again, broadcast television samples by way of vintage, bit-crunched YouTube codecs form the source material here…all artfully inlaid and mosaicked to form tear-stained compositions of troubled romance gone astray.

Buy!

Romance & Dean Hurley - Eric Forrester

B1 from Tragic Chorus. 
Split Release with Bleak Environment.

Copper plate intaglio by R. Baldwin.

Kali Malone - Septimal Rite

From the LP "Velocity of Sleep" co-released with XKatedral 2017

Kali Malone "1113"

Clarinet Practice — 5/4 — 22/4/2020

Taken from Troth's 'Flaws In The Glass', available here:

https://alteredtapedstates.bandcamp.com/album/flaws-in-the-glass

Troth - Silva Plana

AIR Krew - 'Discuss and come back'
Format: Cassette, Digital
 Release Date: September 16, 2020
Artwork: Jesse Sappell

Hailing from Moscow and St. Petersburg respectively, Sergey Podluzhniy, Piper Spray and Lena Tzibizova come together as AIR Krew and share with us “Discuss and Come Back.” While floating broadly in Shoegaze’s orbit, the album charts a pretty unpredictable course from beginning to end, with an ornate sentimentality running as a constant from track to track. As in most cases, the words don’t do justice to the sound, the map really isn’t the terrain and you’re better off  taking the time to explore it all for yourself.

https://soundcloud.com/kabinw

MWT004: AIR Krew, 'Discuss and come back'

From ANM047 "Climat Avenir", by Simon Chioini — CD Digipack

Climat avenir ; portrait of unexploited lands, of deserted spaces, of a corrosive and venomous flora. Irked protagonists, roaming livestock, their acidic cries.
Beauty of the blue-green lakes, of the scintillating stars under clouds of bronze. The earth's foundational movement.
Crashing ice. Solar winds.
This work cycle is an imagined world voided of any human presence, or succeeding it. It is a prismatic composition: a vibrant landscape, a topographic map, an exploded geode.
Macro. Micro.

Music composition and mastering by Simon Chioini.
Photography by Violeta Mayoral. Sculptures by Lara Fluxà. Art Direction and concept by Violeta Mayoral and Lara Fluxà.

Kali Malone - Septimal Rite

XKatedral

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