the vicinity of bLue

the vicinity of b L u e | ambient/glitch/noise/experimental | 80:44
(releases December 1st . . . but don’t tell anyone you got early access!)

An experimental outing of slicing, dicing, arranging & rearranging compositional segments of sound, until the audiological effect was . . .
“just right”!

It represents not so much the emotional/psychological state of “being” blue . . . but the empty sparseness the color can invoke (e.g. “Blue, blue, ‘lectric blue; that’s the color of my room — where I will live”*).

Glitch. Space. Drift. Some Ether-Jazz . . . and nuanced Ambient Drone
(with a new film composition from Brian Eno).

All shades . . . all hues . . . all bLue.

Listen via Mixcloud or Sync

01 Slow City, 2nd Stack: 3 tracks, simultaneously
……a. Fabio Perletta + Luigi Turra – Ma pt 3
……b. Fripp, Buck, Chalenor, Chamberlain, Rieflin & Zazou –
………..The Slow Music Project
……c. Richard Chartier – Second End
02 Serries, Verhoeven & Webster – Fissure
03 Lowered – Distance Flooded Us
04 Brian Eno – Decline and Fall [extended remix]
05 Christopher Bissonnette – Consequence
06 Focus on the Breath – Waves
07 Ethereal Ephemera – A Place Where Strangers Gather to Watch the Sunrise (excerpt)
08 Hollie Kenniff – Aubade
09 Scott Lawlor – Morning Calm (excerpt)
10 Gimmick – La peau de la femme (excerpt)
11 Keys for Eclipse – Social Amnesia
12 Cryptic Scenery – Hospitals 1 (edit)
13 Robert Fripp & Brian Eno – Terebellum
14 Motorpig – Tesla Coil
15 Jonas Meyer – Strömung

This Valley Of Old Mountains

This Valley Of Old Mountains quietly creates the folklore of an imaginary land. From a hemisphere apart, Taylor Deupree and Federico Durand share simple sounds with complex stories. Their music balances an edge between translucency and exploration, focusing on obscurity, repetition and a shared fascination of the mountains between them.

Released July 24, 2020

This Valley Of Old Mountains are Taylor Deupree and Federico Durand
Recorded in La Cumbre (Córdoba, Argentina) and Pound Ridge (New York, US) between July 2019 and April 2020.

Mixed and mastered by Taylor Deupree at 12k.
Photographs from Hudson Valley, New York and Patagonia, Argentina
by This Valley Of Old Mountains.

Published by 12k Music (ASCAP)

Armature, by Still Harbours

Cat.#: LONTANO-S-CD16
Release date: 27/11/2020
Format: CD, Digital

Still Harbours is a project by Bradley Deschamps (Anthéne) and Jamie Jones (Fossil Hunting Collective).

Releases November 27, 2020

Music by: Still Harbours
Mastered by: Andrea Porcu
Original photography by: Richelle Forsey
Record label: Lᴏɴᴛᴀɴᴏ Series
Publisher: ROHS! RECORDS

Crossmodulated, by Roel Meelkop

In the last years, I have been mainly concentrating on live work, especially in collaboration with other musical artists, such as Jos Smolders, Machinefabriek, Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, and visual artists such as Marco Douma and Esther Urlus. I have also been involved in sound design for film and video. My studio practice has been given a boost by the discovery of modular synthesis, much to the credit of Jos Smolders, who introduced me to it. In this release, I combine recordings of modular sessions with field recordings, either from my archive or newly made.

Roel Meelkop (1963) studied visual arts and art theory at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. During a post-graduate course at the same academy, he decided to dedicate his work to sound and music. His musical activities date back to the early eighties when he started THU20, together with Jac van Bussel, Peter Duimelinks, Jos Smolders and Guido Doesborg. THU20 have released several tapes and CDs and performed regularly in Europe. The working method of THU20 included many discussions about how to compose and why. This period was crucial in forming Meelkop’s ideas and concepts about sound and how to organise it, but it was not until the mid-nineties that he was able to fully realise these ideas. The purchase of a sampler and later a computer radically changed his possibilities of working with sound, offering infinitely more control and freedom. Since then he has worked steadily on a body of work, most of which was received enthusiastically in the small but dedicated world of sound art. His other activities include working with Kapotte Muziek, Wieman (both with Frans de Waard) and Pierdrie (with Machinefabriek and video artist Marco Douma). Recently he has worked with filmmakers Esther Urlus and André Schreuders and long-time friend and collaborator Jos Smolders (MeSm). He has also been digging into the universe of modular synthesis, the results of which are still under close scrutiny. 

Released November 3, 2020
Mastered by Jos Smolders at Earlabs.
Cover art Drawing Machine Drawing #72 by Rosemary Lee.
Thanks to Jos Smolders and Miguel Carvalhais.

white noise room

white noise room | Experimental Ambient/Ambient/Minimal/Noise | 80:48

“You know I hear a lot of talk
So I’m headed for the stereo store
To get a white noise maker and turn it up to ten!”
…………………………………………………………..~Frank Black

Pale fog juxtaposed against a faded backdrop with nondescript, texturized sound emanations . . . like an isolation tank for your ears.

You could nap to this . . . literally.
It’s glitchy, droney, drifty (a little ambient for you purists out there!) with a smidge of caustic undertone (original play-list was penned on the back of a cancelled postage stamp with a #2, bonded Ticonderoga pencil).

#Yum!

01 Motorpig – Glue Doesn’t Stick To Everything (edit)
02 Evelina Domnitch + Dmitry Gelfand – Xenon Wind (edit)
03 Richard Chartier + Yann Novak – Undefined (edit)
04 Susan Drone/Kris Force – Sinusoidal Dance/Auric Blade #3
(dual tracks, stacked & blended)
05 Jared Sugar – Ininda
06 The Star Pillow – Molize Forest
07 Neuro… No Neuro – They’re Always There
08 Jonas Meyer – Sekundenschlaf
09 arbee – moutons sur le lac
10 Keys for Eclipse – Two Part
11 Ümlaut – To Leave it As it Is (edit)
12 Cryptic Scenery – Hospitals III (edit)
13 Rafael Anton Irisarri – Lutecia
14 AUME – Hypnopompia (edit)
15 Jeff Greinke – Urban Pasture
16 Tsone – BeetsOVseq
17 Strië – Test For Ability

D & F*

. . . or *Decline & Fall; a new, ambient, film piece by Brian Eno.

Being too short (3:24) for our liking, we remixed it with a slightly new intro (integrated from the same file) to 6:40. This e-x-t-e-n-d-e-d version will appear, next month, on our December Studio mix/podcast.

The original track is available to purchase, here.

Transit (15th Anniversary Edition), by Lawrence English

Transit was my first full length solo recording. When I say solo, I’m in no way reducing the contributions of friends like Mike Cooper, Tam Patton, Cat Hope, DJ Olive, Ben Frost, Gail Priest, Scanner, Philip Samartzis, John Chantler and Heinz Riegler who all helped to realise this work. Frankly, without them the record would have been a whole lot less interesting.

As the title suggests, this is categorically a record about motion, about transitions and about the ways of recognising the lived-in world that is so acutely felt in the earliest years of travelling. During this time, my world view expanded considerably and I was struck by the complexities of the world, the interpersonal relationships people experienced each day, the political intensities that haunted cities (perhaps most clearly captured in the transformed recordings of ultra nationalist speakers on the streets of Tokyo), the dynamic shifts of season (something rather foreign to us antipodeans) and the experiential list goes on.

At the time of making this record, I was quite focused on the idea of creating sound works that were detached from emotion. This wasn’t to say I wanted to create a cold music, but rather one that was utterly focused on the sensory qualities of the experiences that informed it. Phenomenology instead of affect theory I guess you could say. Returning to this record a decade and a half on, it’s funny how powerfully nostalgic and intensely emotional the memories carried in these pieces have become. My intensions, at least from my own listenership, have completely failed and I can say I do (deeply) feel this music (and thankfully sense its places and spaces too).

Each of the pieces on Transit were born out of field recording. During these years, I was recording literally all the time. I found it a powerful device for memory and also for imagination. Revisiting the recordings months or years after making them, I found different qualities of those times were revealed and those shifts often shaped the way the pieces were composed. It’s with pleasure I share this work again, freshly remastered and with a few little bits and pieces cleaned up. 

Releases November 27, 2020

Escape hatch . . .

Listening tonight . . .

. . . via Jay-Birds . . .

. . . #ambient & #etherjazz . . .

. . . to escape the #noise of the

world 🌎.

🎧

— Ambient Landscape (@AmbientLndscape) November 7, 2020

Serus, by Siavash Amini

“Every night is two nights”, according to Maurice Blanchot. “The night the body spends in sleep is not the same as the night the dreamer spends in dreams. The sleeping body may lie under the stars, and the dreamer may dream of the stars—even of a journey to the stars—but the night of the dream is a night without stars.”

From Siavash
The Idea of this album, when I first started drafting it, was to continue what struck me as very interesting yet simple idea; night. I became interested in different definitions of what night is, our perception of it and what night means physically to us as well as symbolically.

I came across the idea of ‘other night’ described by Maurice Blanchot, during my research. It started me recognising night as something we experience as ‘the night of sleep’; it is night that we resist in sleep, by way of dreaming.

Things became more interesting for me during many nights of not sleeping and intoxication, and an eventual nervous breakdown. This experience, culminating in me spending three days in ICU, gave me pause to think about Blanchot’s words.

Slipping in and out of consciousness my mind, which had already experienced a blurring of what one might call the ‘other night’ and the night itself, by being in half sleep most of the time. I felt myself far way from all my surroundings and at the same time being very attentive to some details in the objects around me. It was as if my body and mind where in an in-between state. I can only describe this as being distant or more precisely being in the dark. Objects and people showed themselves out of proportion and mostly dim.

A feeling to describe this sensation, the word for which I only came across later, is ‘Serus’. There was a sense of repetition and familiarity in some feelings and emotions that I had towards some objects like sensing I knew them but not exactly from where or when. It was as if my body was resisting sleep and my sleepy mind was resisting being awake, only to dream of another type of the world that I could be awake in. 

Released August 2, 2019

u r b a n

u r b a n | Minimal Techno/Noise/Techno | 81:49

Extraneous aural lamentations from an isolated, undisclosed, non-rural municipality.

. . . and (more to the point) gritty turbulence & granular causticity, constantly grating across the listener’s ear so as to create a state of sonacular trance.
(earbuds will prove most helpful on this auditory excursion!)

UPDATE: 6/2022 – added track 16 (not included on the Mixcloud version)

Listen via Mixcloud or Sync

01 Aes Dana – Beneath
02 Simon Šerc – Greybody Fit (excerpt)
03 Tonaliens – Vesta part 1 (excerpt)
04 Miktek – Serene
05 Rag Dun – The Echo that Swings
06 Ebauche – Umbilical Transfer
07 Nine Inch Nails – Temp Fix
08 J Peter Schwalm – Gangesthal
……(w/ Eivind Aarset & Tim Harries)
09 Lingua Lustra – Return
10 Ümlaut – If the Eye Never Sleeps
11 David Torn – Outsider (excerpt)
12 Neuro…No Neuro – Showers
13 Martin Nonstatic – Distance C
……(extended edit)
14 Eskostatic – Shadow
15 Vcam – Coreceptor_Env
16 J.Peter Schwalm & Stephan Thelen w. Eivind Aarset, Tim Harries & Manuel Pasquinelli – MakeMake