Articles
2009 Top 10s and 20s
King Midas Sound
Starke

Albums
36
Aardvarck
Matias Aguayo
Anaphoria
Anduin
Arbol + Fibla
Aufgang
Beneva vs. Clark Nova
Black to Comm
Bvdub
Cornstar
Dinky
Enola
Fieldhead
FOURM / Shinkei / Turra
Billy Gomberg
The Green Kingdom
Chihei Hatakeyama
Ian Hawgood
Marek Hemmann
Khate
King Midas Sound
Marcel Knopf
Robot Koch
Lambent
Shinobu Nemoto
Olekranon
Laurent Perrier
Piano Magic
Porzellan
Pylône
Ryonkt
Shadyzane
Slow
Small Color
Solomun
The Sound of Lucrecia
Stray Ghost
The Use of Ashes
Sylvie Walder

Compilations / Mixes
Sebo K
Will Saul
Tama Sumo
VOLTT Amsterdam Vol. 1

EPs
Blindhæð
Roberto Bosco
Franco Cangelli
Dieb
dub KULT
Abe Duque/Blake Baxter
Gemmy
Christopher Hobbs
Duncan Ó Ceallaigh
Christopher Roberts
The Sight Below
Two Fourteen
Van Der Papen
Andy Vaz
Vetrix
Eddie Zarook

DVD
Optofonica

Fieldhead: They Shook Hands For Hours
Home Assembly

Fieldhead (Leeds resident Paul Elam, who's also a full-time member of The Declining Winter and a member of Glissando's Fleeting Glimpse Ensemble) may identify tape hiss as his number one influence, but They Shook Hands for Hours is anything but a navel-gazing exercise in obsessive obscurantism. In some respects, it's a straightforward collection of ten rhythm-based instrumentals—‘instrumental rock,' some would say—that merges minimal guitar melodies with skeletal beat structures (the opener “This Train is a Rainbow” a good exemplar of the style); at the same time, the forty-minute album's also an exercise in textural sound-sculpting, as Elam smothers and smears his ponderous set-pieces with generous swathes of grainy textures. Labradford's name comes up in the press release, and the connection isn't off-the-mark; certainly They Shook Hands for Hours partakes at times of the murky, low-end gloomscaping that was so much a part of the Labradford sound.

Concision is one of the album's strong suits, with Elam accomplishing much in cut-to-the-chase pieces of three- and four-minute duration (“Songs Well Known,” a lulling marriage of oboe and sawing strings, one such example). Rippling noise splinters guitar and piano motifs into particles during “Of October,” while “He'd Found The Sea” expands on the basic palette by adding vibraphone and violins to the track's brooding atmosphere. In the title track, piano melodies from decades past seem to echo down the corridors of a decrepit mansion. If all this sounds appealing, those interested would be wise to act fast in order to obtain the limited edition of the release, which includes the regular disc plus an accompanying CD of remixes by Machinefabriek, Jasper TX, Seaworthy, Glissando, Northerner, and Library Tapes, among others.

December 2009