Articles
2010 Ten Favourite Labels
Liam Singer

Albums
Akabu
Amorph
Keith Canisius
Carinthia
Cursor Miner
Dark Party
dOP
Evon
Ex-Wise Heads
Forever Delayed
The Fun Years
Dirk Geiger
The Green Kingdom
Chihei Hatakeyama
Hessien
Robin Holcomb
The Inventors of Aircraft
Peter Jørgensen
Loveliescrushing
My Dry Wet Mess
Silje Nes
Ontayso
Piiptsjilling
Pleq
Radioseed
relapxych.0
Sharp & Whetham
Liam Singer
Erik K Skodvin
Sarah Kirkland Snider
Squares On Both Sides
Strië
Sutekh
David Sylvian
Taiga II
Francesco Tristano
RJ Valeo
Victoire
Wreaths
Zelienople

Compilations / Mixes
Buzz.RO! 2010
Crónica L
Timo Maas
Movement Torino Festival
Sebastian Mullaert

EPs
Dday One / Glen Porter
Depth Affect
Enabl.ed
The Gentleman Losers
Gulls
Mimosa
Piece of Shh…
Shufflepunk
Teebs & Jackhigh
Telekaster
thisquietarmy + yellow6
Tom White

relapxych.0: City Nightlights
Ghost Sounds

Sound designer, engineer, and Ghost Sounds label head Anders Peterson issues material under a plethora of names—Skyscaper, Unknown Caller, Last Industrial Estate, and Elementaural Research Project among them—but it's the ‘reality altering psychoacoustics' (by his own description) he produces under the relapxych.0 guise and specifically the sounds captured on the fifty-minute City Nightlights that's of immediate concern. As relapxych.0, Peterson blends field recordings, acoustic and synthetic instruments, and voice into shimmering, meticulously sculpted soundscapes. In shaping this recording, Peterson collected field recordings from areas around Stockholm's Central Station, Stadhuskajen, Riddarholmen, and Tegelbacken, as well as abandoned areas outside the Central Station complex.

Though the title track is generally a droning mass of shimmering textures, deeply buried traces of techno nevertheless emerge, if only for a few fleeting moments. Even when that doesn't occur, an ominous bass throb establishes some modest semblance of rhythm throughout, an element that helps ground the constant swirl of processed industrial materials and billowing washes that also appears. That techno dimension—dub-techno, more like it—becomes more explicit when lashes of hi-hats and the booming thud of a bass drum take center stage during “Landmark II,” while the dub feel carries over into “City Nightlights III” in the form of a slow bass line that pulsates deeply within the surface textures. At such moments, the relapxych.0 sound reveals affinities with the Echospace-related projects associated with Stephen Hitchell, an affinity bolstered even more strongly when “City Nightlights (Beat Reduced)” ends the album with thirteen minutes of crystalline ambient. Interestingly, only two of the album's pieces position field recordings at the forefront as the primary focal point: “City Nightlights II” and “Interdimensional,” wherein traffic sounds and hydraulic noises figure prominently.

Presented as six separately indexed pieces, the recording unfolds uninterruptedly with each setting bleeding into the next. It's a smart move on Peterson's part as it helps make the tracks, each of them possessing some degree of differentiating character, feel connected. But what recommends City Nightlights most is the way in which Peterson transmutes the myriad source materials into musically satisfying settings where a careful balance is achieved between the conventional musical elements and the ‘non-musical' textures.

November 2010