The Bottle Loose In The Drawer - Noteherder & McCloud OUT NOW!!!

Brighton-based sax/electronics duo.  Very free; very cool.

Release date Monday 7th January 2013

"...experimental sax sounds, bits of electronics and something that may be regarded by some as sound poetry...refined build up, internal drama..."

- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

Gold Dust Promo Film

take a peek at Joseph Young's Super 8 promo film for our new Gold Dust compilation:

 https://vimeo.com/38031079

sok042 Gold Dust compilation OUT NOW!

sok042  Gold Dust
Paul Khimasia Morgan
Michalis Mavronas
Neil Luck
Jon Aveyard
Marcus Leadley
Joseph Young

"On the compilation we find six pieces by six different composers, who played their concerts in front of sixteen people attending 'an intimate headphone concert celebrating the domestic soundscape'. It's nice that every piece is introduced by a voice telling what is to come and a bit about the work carried out. I'm not sure if you would want to hear that always. None of the six I heard of before, but me thinks that opener Paul Khimasia Morgan is the owner of the label. We also find Michalis Mavronas, Neil Luck, Jon Aveyard, Marcus Leadley and Joseph Young. Each of them has about ten to fifteen minutes to present their piece and there is a variety of approaches here. The electro-acoustic rumbling of Morgan and Aveyard for instance, the odd radio play/spoken word by Neil Luck, the synthesizers of Mavronas, the field recordings of Leadley and the kitchen sink opera sounds of narrator Young. Maybe the introductional talk works a but against the release, because you may not want to hear them all the time, but otherwise this is a great release with some excellent music of an experimental yet varied nature."

- Frans de Waard, Vital Weekly

Active Crossover compilation on Cronica for free!

> NEW RELEASE: VARIOUS ARTISTS "CROSSOVERS"

> http://www.cronicaelectronica.org/?p=065

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Crónica is very happy to present the new release in the Unlimited Series of editions, “Crossovers”, a compilation documenting a series of encounters that happened in 2011 during the “Active Crossover” project.

“Active Crossover” is a project initiated by Simon Whetham during a residency at the Polymer Factory Culturehouse, Tallinn, Estonia in 2009. During the residency he met and worked with many artists who were all working with sound and music in different and interesting ways, prompting him to exhibit the work he composed alongside work created by those he met and worked with throughout his time in Estonia and Latvia.

Performing at events a number of times during the residency became an integral part of the project, so when Whetham came to exhibit the works in the UK, each exhibition began and ended with a live performance event, drawing on a pool of diverse local artists and musicians. The format for each performance was that artists were organised into pairs, with one artist beginning to play solo, would then be joined by the second for a short collaborative crossover section, and then the first would end their performance, leaving the second to play their own solo piece.

Gathered on this compilation are a number of the crossover sections, where artists who had not met or collaborated before are captured performing together for the first time.

The project was supported financially by the Arts Council England, I Love West Leeds Festival and PRS for Music Foundation. Thanks go to those organisations, plus all at South Hill Park, Bracknell; Wolstenholme Creative Space, Liverpool; Millspace, Armley; Soundfjord, London; Vicki Laurie and family; Nina and Camlo Edge; Hannah Kemp and all of the artists who got involved, both included here and not…

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You can download “Crossovers” as AIFF or MP3 files directly from Crónica and free of charge.
http://www.cronicaelectronica.org/?p=065

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Tracklist:

1. Andi Chapple + Dominic Lash
2. Simon Whetham + Colin Potter
3. Simon Whetham + Jonathan Coleclough
4. Felicity Ford + Mark Durgan
5. Martin Franklin + Cheapmachines
6. Rebecca Joy Sharp + Philip Jeck
7. Simon Whetham + Antony Hall
8. Rodrigo Constanzo + Mark Pilkington
9. Anton Hunter + Igor Hax
10. Simon Whetham + Richard Ormrod
11. Simon Whetham + Rhodri Davies
12. Markus Jones + Ollie Dover
13. Ben Gwilliam + Phill Harding
14. Simon Whetham + Iris Garrelfs
15. Lee Gamble + Scanner
16. Simon Whetham + John Grzinich
17. Martin Clarke + Jo Thomas
18. Simon Whetham + Bela Emerson
19. Duncan Harrison + Paul Khimasia Morgan
20. Alexander Wendt + Slow Listener
21. Simon Whetham + Skjølbrot
22. Ekopleks + Bugbrand
23. Kathy Hinde + SJ Esau

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A lot of hard work is invested in these releases and in Crónica’s operations. We do not believe in DRM and we certainly don’t want to create any barriers between you and our releases, so, all of the Unlimited Releases will be free to download, but if you can, please consider to leave us a small donation for the benefit of both artists and label. Don’t forget to leave us your address, so that we can send you a thank you postcard in return.

For more information on Crónica's releases and events, go to http://www.cronicaelectronica.org

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Top 10 of 2011

1. Adam Lygo’s Club Silencio with Kakopyge Quartet, Mass, Ever Orchid, Twofold and Duncan Harrison at Coachwerks Brighton in March.

2. First ever exhibition of paintings by Syd Barrett at The Idea Generation Gallery in London, April.

3. Staying three nights near the banks of Lake Naivasha, Kenya.

4. Daniel Spicer solo at Slightly Off Kilter atThe Caroline of Brunswick, Brighton in May.

5. July – Weasel Walter, Alex Ward and James Sedwards’ electrifying set at The Cowley Club, Brighton.

6. Hong Chulki & Choi Joonyong testing the structural integrity of the Upper Salon of The Caroline of Brunswick at aural detritus in Brighton in August.

7. Deepkiss 720 solo on saxophone, then self-built electric guitar at The Cowley Club, September.

8. Twin thrills of greenhouse acquisition at home and Diatribes at The Green Door Store, Brighton, November.

9. Participating in another of Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover events; also November.

10. Paris. See video above.

Active Crossover / Practical Electronica

Taking place in two adjacent rooms at Brighton’s Phoenix Gallery, free events Active Crossover / Practical Electronica showcased two complementary yet disparate sound/visual artforms to a capacity audience.
Due to my practical involvement with Simon Whetham’s Active Crossover component of the evening, I unfortunately missed out on both programmes of Ian Helliwell’s Practical Electronica film screenings. I gather the first programme consisted of films by pioneering film-makers including Fred Judd, while the second was a collection of Ian Helliwell’s recent film work. I recommend you take a look at http://www.ianhelliwell.co.uk/ for more information. Plus you can still catch Ian’s gallery exhibition Practical Electronica which runs at The Phoenix Gallery until the 18th of December 2011.
The idea of Active Crossover concerts is to pair up musicians who have not played together before to perform “crossover” duets where one player begins; plays for about ten minutes; then the second player joins in; they improvise for ten minutes and then the first player drops out to allow the second to complete the performance playing solo.
The first of the Crossover performances was by Simon Whetham and Bela Emerson. Simon opened his laptop in the darkened room and began with a selection of placid field recordings. I’ve always been impressed by Simon’s unorthodox presentation of his own recorded material. Where other field recordists can perhaps rely on a purist, unmolested realtime document of events or phenomena, Whetham is unafraid of the jarring jump-cut, unusual juxtapositions, layering, surround-sound manipulation, (occasionally his day-job), and presenting the unrecognisable and surprising convergences. I didn’t recognise a lot of the sounds he used but could have listened to them eyes closed for a lot longer than this Crossover performance allowed. When cellist Bela Emerson joined in, she presented an unusually delicate palette of extended technique for the majority of their improvisation. Gradually, her more recognisable melodic bow work looped out from her electronics but in quiet, gossamer strands rather than the bold, wide brushstrokes she employed during a recent solo set I caught at the Green Door Store. By the time Simon Whetham finished his contribution, Bela was firmly in the familiar territory of her solo improvisations but still grasping a fragility of sound not usual in her solo work. A deeply immersive collaboration by a surprising yet rewarding combination of musicians.
While the first instalment of the Practical Electronica screenings began with the audience relocated to the next door red room, the white room was prepared for Duncan Harrison and Paul Khimasia Morgan’s performance. Harrison is no stranger to improvised groupings as he regularly tours with drone outfit Plurals, and in a duo with Ian Murphy, plus he has performed in Brighton with acts as diverse as The A Band, HUH 5PIN and Adam Lygo. Paul Khimasia Morgan has performed at a previous Active Crossover with Simon Whetham, (this leading on to their releases on con-v), and is similarly interested in improvising opportunities. Recently, he has participated in groupings including Ryu Hankil, Seijiro Murayama, Jez riley French, Patrick Farmer, Daichi Ishikawa and Daniel Jones.
Both musicians had prepared weird assemblages of objects, devices and instruments; Paul on a tabletop and Duncan on the floor. Duncan began this performance, kneeling amid his equipment, starting by amplifying his jittery utterances into a long duration loop device while scraping and striking various parts of his array of sonic objects. I noticed about a dozen cassette tapes ready for use in his pair of portable machines, and quite a few small metal objects in his arsenal. What’s more interesting than Duncan’s unusual choice of equipment though, is the way he seems to genuinely and quickly attain a trance state in which to perform. It’s a fidgety, shakey physical trance which I’ve sometimes witnessed and been mildly disturbed by. In this state, Harrison seems to be genuinely troubled and using performance as a way of venting...something. I’m not sure this is definitely his motivation though – you’d have to ask him yourselves. As Paul Khimasia Morgan crawled under his table to commence the collaborative section of the performance, Harrison proceeded to crawl away into the audience clutching one of his portable infernal cassette machines.
Khimasia Morgan then presented a lurid and angry set of loud, scraped stones and gritty sand sounds, rattling, mains hum, buzzing motors, incipient voltage clicking with flashing lights while occasionally throwing insubordinate or unsatisfactory objects from the performance area in a claustrophobic demonstration of ill humour. More than once, almost-silences were rudely punctuated by extremely loud and gritty outbursts or preprepared samples of his previous experiments digitally rendered into harsh distortion. Perhaps the psychological fallout of Duncan Harrison’s approach rendered Khimasia Morgan’s usually restrained output down into its constituent rancorous parts. More please.
As the audience dutifully upped and bombarded themselves with Ian Helliwell’s final selection of avant-film for half an hour, then good naturedly hauled themselves back into their seats for Alexander Wendt and Slow Listener, an almost tangible air of expectation filled the white room. During the films, Alexander Wendt had busily constructed a soundart installation of small speakers set upon the room’s stage riser, amplified by two microphones suspended from the ceiling, swinging in small arcs across each speaker. Wendt augmented the resulting pulses of Alvin Lucier-ish feedback with clean, digital chatter from his laptop. Minimal but effective lighting rendered some interesting silhouettes of the movements of the equipment and Wendt onto the walls as he set about his work of making (what seemed to be) tiny subtle adjustments to his sounds.
Slow Listener countered with terse analogue crackling and dark monosynth grumblings that evolved over quite long durations compared to the evening’s previous musicians and suited Alexander Wendt’s somewhat austere material extremely well. Solo, Slow Listener’s drones kicked up into a more brusque and eager gear until he abandoned all his electronics completely and finished his performance by coming out from behind his table armed only with an unamplified bowed cymbal.

photograph of Duncan Harrison's equipment by Paul Khimasia Morgan.

sok040 GIMLET EYED MARINERS - Dark Secret Love

Gimlet-Eyed Mariners hail from Wiveliscombe, Somerset. The duo was conceived in early 2009, but various other projects involving its members delayed its birth until the late summer of that year, when the first official recorded session, Leopard Slugs, was cut. This session produced “In the Howling Storm” and the title track of their release, Dark Secret Love, on The Slightly Off Kilter Label.

The band was formed to create the kind of music and soundscapes that its members wanted to hear, but seldom could. The Mariners’ music can be categorised as electro-acoustic, acousmatic total-Improv, concerned primarily with colour, texture and dynamics, spontaneous interaction, and the organic, unpredictable evolution of each performance. Their improvisations start from scratch: the players never rehearse in the sense of working on a piece until it evolves into something “presentable”. In the studio they reject editing, over-dubbing and re-mixing: if a performance is not working, it will be abandoned, and the duo will move on to a new improvisation. Accidents are part of the adventure: they do not consider this approach as foisting unfinished “product” on the audience, but as an invitation to their listeners to join them on a journey of discovery.

An improvisation by the duo may incorporate hypnotic, densely-textured, multi-layered constructs, evanescent drifts of colour and insubstantial texture, mysterious and ambiguous sonorities, eruptions of viscera-endangering industrial noise, compulsive dance beats evoking music from the remotest reaches of the globe, or, often, all of these simultaneously.

Although they arrived at it from somewhat different directions, the two Mariners share a vision, and have a common admiration for musique concrete & electronic music pioneers like Pierre Schaeffer, Luc Ferrari, Pierre Henry, Delia Derbyshire, Daphne Oram and the great Tonmeister, Stockhausen.

Michael Fairfax is a sculptor and designer who studied under the tutelage of his grandfather, Ernest Berk, a pioneer of musique concrete, cutting and splicing recorded tape, toying with oscillators and generally playing around with sound. During his career as a public artist he created a number of sound-works using computer technology, before embarking on adventures in music in its own right, firstly with Tapes+Ashes and now with Gimlet-Eyed Mariners. The exploitation of sound as an improvised unit gives him the space and expansiveness that is the antithesis of public art.

Barry Witherden was also a member of Tapes+Ashes, and began tinkering with low-tech, tape-based collages when, in his late teens, he discovered Schaeffer and Henri. He is a freelance music journalist currently writing for The Wire, Jazz Journal and BBC Music, and has been a regular contributor to Jazz Review, The Gramophone and Classic CD. His writing has also been included in The Wire Primers: A Guide to Modern Music, The Rough Guide to Classical Music and The Guinness Who’s Who of Jazz. His inspirations include Morton Feldman, the early process/systems pieces of Steve Reich and the work of Chicago’s Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians.

© Barry Witherden, July 2011