DOWNLOAD: The Caretaker - Bonus After Sebald tracks

The Caretaker has put up 9 bonus tracks which co-exist alongside his eerily wonderful Patience (After Sebald) album, for free download for a limited time.  Not sure when his going to close this down, so hurry over to his Bandcamp to get them.

"Extra tracks taken from the soundtrack of the Grant Gee film "Patience (After Sebald). The source material for 'Patience' was sourced from Franz Schubert's 1827 piece 'Winterreise' and subjected to his perplexing processes, smudging and rubbing isolated fragments into a dust-caked haze of plangent keys, strangely resolved loops and de-pitched vocals which recede from view as eerily as they appear."

ALBUM PREVIEW: Gimu - Crestfallen (Children Play Records)

Gimu
Crestfallen
(Children Play Records)

I wrote about Brazillian drone artist Gimu in June when he released The Sacred and heaped praise upon the marbled shades of its granite drone.  This new album is no different; Crestfallen is three fantastic pieces of piano bathed in mithril ambience.  Stream the full album via Gimu's Soundcloud and order from ChildrenPlay Records now.

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Part 3:

DOWNLOAD: Sparkling Wide Pressure - Fragments of a Sound I Can Not Erase

Sparkling Wide Pressure
Fragments of a Sound I Can Not Erase
DOWNLOAD

Frank Baugh has uploaded all his recordings under his Sparkling Wide Pressure guise to Bandcamp.  That's a helluva lot of abstract drone to sink your frontal lobe into.  Nothing he produces may ever quite better the ethereally magnificent Tearing Rippling from 2008's Touching Pasture on Students of Decay...:



...but Baugh has a very evocative way with conjuring drone that always hooks into somewhere deep inside you. From the opening bars of The Time That Is Right - complete with buried vocal and suddering background rumble - there's a resonance at work that can only envelop the listener (prediliction for Drone not withstanding). The intro is concluded with an even noiser version at the end, titled When The Time Is Right; it;s a thicker, gnarlier fuzzier sister piece the the start and close sout the album nicely offering a real finish that doesn't always happen with ambient works such as this that kind of just disappear off - but this one leaves its mak and echoes its start which is a nicely considered flourish. 

The tracks are between 4 and 17 minutes long; meaning some drop straight into their peak soundspace, work it briefly then depart whilst others gently nudge at ideas before locking onto a definite course and picking out the ensuing details - if there was any one word to describe his sound it could easily be Pretty. Heard Through Window's drifting central tone is embellished by cleaner guitar lines sparking into life, whirling out in eddies of notes offset by glittering piano: The effect is efferfescent, like the neon shimmer in tropical seas.  Opposite to the gentility of that, the penultimate track Journey of Forgiveness involves an almost chugging tumultuous turn on the bass end of the guitar, slashing tones and sharp licks of the headstock strings piercing through the dense channel of sound churning along, many moments of which bob up with a splendour that doesn't contradict the claim to Prettiness, but does provide a glimpse into the darker, uglier underbelly of which Prettiness requires to exist in contrast to.

He's a pretty prolific artist which a trip to his Bandcamp will quickly enlighten you. Start here though and you will only want to dig deeper.

DOWNLOAD: Mother Network - χτέναφέρω

Mother Network
χτέναφέρω
DOWNLOAD

Another new album for you from Texan one-man ambient psychedelic maestro Mother Network. This one is, in his own words, built of "moogy and depressing/regressing/encouraging seascapes", sounding quite succesfully like it a a bonus. The Soviet styled heiroglyph χτέναφέρω reads teno-fora, though that doesn't clue me in any more as to what it might mean - whether meaning is important with music that is all about feling is a moot point.  Mother Network is becoming increasingly adept at conveying the transcendent through his minimal synth evocations and this album adds an even greater depth and extra layers to his previous releases.

The download comes with a video for Colloblasts created by Alex Mitchell of Heavy Brainfall.

PREVIEW: Outer Church May Edition - Old Apparatus / Embla Quickbeam / Kemper Norton

This month's Outer Church event is coming up on Wednesday. Another incredible selection of artists to open a portal through your mind and out to the other side.  Not sure who will be styling visuals for our ocular fixation but past events have provided approriately hypnotic accompaniment, so I'd expect nothing less this time round.  See you at Komdia on Wednesday.

Kemper Norton; "Cornwall’s foremost slurtronic collective" have recently begun playing live and will unpack the contents of their pagan soundboards to initiate proceedings. Dusty dreams downloaded from the Heavens, woven from the trees and moulded from the Earth before your very ears. Download several albums, eps and tracks from their website to get your synapses primed:  HERE




Second up is magickal mystery sound collage from Brighton's Embla Quickbeam; haunting, surreal experimental drone looped out of language and out-of-body.


 


A headline set from Old Apparatus looks like it might match the physically imposing set from Raime a couple of months ago. they both share a similar sense of crumbling civilisation to their sound, Raime conjuring the turbulent spectral imprint of a recently destroyed metropolis, Old Apparatus occupy a space slinking between the shadows, between streets, posessing the soul of the darkest recesses and corners.

DOWNLOAD: Portraits of American Firing Squads - The Eternal Fear / Family in the Armed Forces

Portraits of American Firing Squads

The Eternal Fear
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Family In The Armed Forces
DOWNLOAD

Two albums released last year as free downloads from Portraits of American Firing Squads, eight tracks in total, of densly coruscating wordless political invective from the Brooklyn based Austyn Sullivan. There's a deep metallic clanging to the core of these pieces, like a steel skeleton onto which the movement of the pieces are thrown over, billowing fuzz and chattering static. Similar sounds to those in the white-out pale-noise records of Belong, Loscil and Kevin Drumm,the sense of placid violence in the flow of tortured noise reminds me of the Monsters Build Mean Robots album of a few years ago that was similarly themed - an almost wordless electronic/post-rock album burning with composed rage, that offered sober yet emboldening music dealing with global politics.  Sullivan's work is far more specifically American-centric, and with him originally hailing from New Orleans there is ample fuel for his ire at the aggressive neglect his nation's military operates, without valuing its own people as well as the rest of the world.

Despite the themes of violence there is no sadism in this noise it is often beautiful and luxurious sounding, instead of twisted blasted-Earth carnage to illustrate the themes it goes the opposite direction offering an ethereal, almost intangible counterpoint; the opening Our Attempts to Exist an aquatic sounding piece that ripples and distorts like shafts of light refracting through water, rising and falling on a heaving sigh of melody.  There are drums buried into The Eternal Fear and they start to appear on the radiant highlight For Undiplomatic Firing Squads, amorphous and indistinct like the approaching march of some gathering force somewhere off the horizon, their distant threat still enough to stir a greater sense of tension.

Two vey excellent albums of involving spatial ambience that should be making there wasy to you d/l folder now.