Article
Brady / Driscoll / Gregorius

Albums
3/4 Peace
36
Atrium Carceri
Marvin Ayres
Peter Baumann
Beledo
Tim Brady
Christoph Bruhn
Calder
Csillagköd
Dal Niente / Deerhoof
Rebekah Driscoll
Eighth Blackbird
frostlake
Friedrich Goldmann
John Gregorius
Hammock
Chihei Hatakeyama
Masayuki Imanishi
ICE
Ionophore
braeyden jae
KAI
Kevin Kastning
Martin Kay
Kireyev & Javors
Millimetrik
Jon Mueller
Christine Ott
Piano Interrupted
Noah Preminger
Gavin Prior
Rapoon
Lasse-Marc Riek
Roach & Logan
Bruno Sanfilippo
Cyril Secq / Orla Wren
Sgt. Fuzzy
Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith
Stick Men+ David Cross
Stratosphere
Syncopix
Tetherdown
Charlie Ulyatt
Wieman

Compilation
Facticity

EPs / Cassettes / Mini-Albums / Singles
Glacis
Dibson T. Hoffweiler
Akira Kosemura
Daniel Lippel
Christine Tavolacci

Martin Kay: Courtyards
Herbal Records

Can't afford a trip to Paris? For an extremely modest sum, you can at least visit many of its courtyards via the latest work by Australian phonographer Martin Kay, which presents an hour's worth of field recordings captured at shared spaces in the city. Recorded during the summer of 2013, Courtyards' sounds will resonate immediately with those who've walked Paris's streets, breathed its air, and absorbed the speech interactions of adults and children alike. In these settings, sounds of kids running and playing and domestic activity abound, each piece a mini-portrait of a particular space within the city; Kay's even used actual addresses as titles, just in case you feel inclined to visit the place yourself.

Don't think that one courtyard's the same as another, by the way. As Kay's recording shows, some are noisy and boisterous (“40 Rue des Amandiers, 75020”), others sedate and subdued (“83 Rue de Bagnolet, 75020 Paris”), and a pretty strong impression of the social dynamics within the different neighbourhoods emerges as the release progresses. By Kay's own description, his sound works are “constructed primarily from un-mixed and un-edited environmental sound recordings,” so the field recordings are generally presented in a raw and untainted form. Kay, in other words, doesn't treat the field recording as an element to be added to with an instrument or transformed in some radical manner. For him, the details that emerge within the field recording—traffic noise, a siren, a baby burbling, a flute-player practicing, people talking and laughing—are, it seems, enough.

May 2016