Articles
2011 Artists' Picks
Spotlight 5
Albums
1982
Marvin Ayres
Big Quarters
Birds Of Passage
Brunborg / Huke
bvdub
Charlatan
City of Satellites
Cokiyu
CYNE
Dakota Suite / Sirjacq
Tomoyoshi Date
Dday One
Vladislav Delay
Ensemble Economique
Esperanza
Frost & Bjarnason
Integral
Lullatone
Mario & Vidis
Dean McPhee
Mint Julep
Muhr
James Murray
Muta
Nicholas: Nu Groove
pacificUV
Papir
Andrew Pekler
Pimmon
Simon Scott
Quentin Sirjacq
Stormloop
Swod
szilárd
Tapage
Carl Taylor
Willamette
Boo Williams
Reissue
Pink Floyd
Compilations / Mixes
Marcel Dettmann
Fabriksampler V4
Inertia: Resisting Routine
Tech My House 5
Visionquest
EPs
0311
A Sun-Amissa
Jacksonville
Arev Konn
Neon Cloud
Phasen
Photonz
Rivers Home
A Sun-Amissa:
Beneath the Heavy Tides
Hibernate
Arev Konn: Norbotten
Hibernate
Hibernate continues its Postcard Series with its next pair of three-inch releases (the thirteenth and fourteenth, for those keeping score), with each of them prepared in a numbered and limited edition run of 100 copies (sold out already, apparently).
If the name Arev Konn isn't immediately familiar, the name of the London-based musician behind it, Antony Harrison, might be, given that he's previously issued material under the Konntinent and Paco Sala aliases on labels such as Home Normal, Digitalis, and Sonic Pieces. The seventeen-minute Norbotten presents three, low-key exercises in electro-acoustic experimentation that have a relaxed and homemade feel about them, as if the listener is sitting alongside Harrison while he goes about his explorative business. The heavily processed meditation “Starets” immerses piano treatments and chords within a molasses-like bath of hiss and vinyl crackle, while a wavering electronic drone hovers and warbles nearby. “Third & Inches,” on the other hand, begins to sound like an Arev Konn-Philip Jeck collaboration when woozy vinyl samples of strings rubs shoulders with piano playing and electronic fuzz and sputter.
A Sun-Amissa likewise might be a name new to listeners, but the pair involved in the project, Richard Knox and Angela Chan, bring impressive sets of credentials to their nineteen-minute Beneath the Heavy Tides. Knox is one-half of Glissando, an occasional live member of Sleepingdog, and a recent collaborator with FareWell Poetry's Frederic D. Oberland on The Rustle of the Stars; also Leeds, UK-based, Chan has been a live and recording member of Glissando for the past year. Of the two pieces on the EP, it's “Hexe” that's the dominant one. Over the course of fourteen minutes, the piece brings into being a clandestine sound-world of scrapes and creaks that plays like a sonic transcription of an Edgar Allen Poe or H.P. Lovecraft story at its creepiest. Though brief by comparison, the also-unsettling “Promise of the Loss of Self” identifies itself as the more conventionally musical of the two pieces due to the ghostly cello playing that emerges alongside the piece's atmospheric colourations. Oppressive and disturbing, the EP material plunges deeply into its torture chamber, sounding more like the kind of unearthly gloomscaping we tend to associate with Miasmah rather than Hibernate.
January 2012