15 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental, Jazz Fusion, Mixing, Post Rock
Mmm . . . fell asleep on the couch with an #Ambient mix on earbuds . . . [lights out!]
;- D
01 Saturday Sep 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental
Digging this . . . !
“ást” means Love in icelandic and this record has been composed and recorded after 1 year of domestic partnership with my lady and this is the 1st time for me going through this, cause I never had the chance to live together with the previous ladies of my life. So, I can say that “ást” tries to tell how this year has changed me as a person and as a man, trying to focus the attention on little things to which we generally do not pay attention to, because we take them for granted, but in my opinion (and this is usual to me, I don’t have the habit to take things for granted) they are absolutely important.
“ást” is everyday life and smiles, cries, fights at night. “ást” is heartbeating, “ást” is to breathe.
When I listen to “ást” it’s like to see myself through a mirror, it’s like to see a shy sunrise early at morning, it’s like to see raindrops on windows glasses, it’s like to smell the scent of night (just smoking a cigarette outdoor before going to bed) when you feel worried about your future.
I composed and recorded the album between October and December 2017 and I remember I used to feel serene during the recording sessions; maybe it was the first time in my life as a musician (composer and folksinger as well) in which I felt really serene while composing an album.. a very different one from what I’ve done with music up to 2017. So, I used to feel relaxed, I used to feel an inner peace in my heart, even though I was living (and still I am) a period of very great change.
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Mixed and Mastered by FALLEN in December 2017.
Thanks to Colin Herrick and Time Released Sound, Chiara (my Love),
all the foreign and the Italian press who have reviewed my releases up today, my family.
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31 Friday Aug 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental, Jazz Fusion, Mixing, Post Rock, Rock, Tech/Glitch
Honored to be included here . . . especially when I see who else was chosen!
24 Friday Aug 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Jazz Fusion, Mixing
This is a project that I’ve been compiling in my head since this past Spring; a Jazz, Ether/Euro-Jazz, Classical mashup . . . with a hard, Belgian finish – combining ECM artists w/the eclectic world of the Avant-Garde.
Inspired by the Thomas Strønen release, Lucas.
Happy listening! / 94:18
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01 Biosphere & Deathprod – Muses-C (edit)
02 A Winged Victory for the Sullen – Metro, Pt. 3
03 Nadia Sirota & Liam Byrne – Letter EE
04 Triosk – Lazyboat
05 Jan Jelinek – Moiré [Strings]
06 Thomas Strønen/Time is a Blind Guide – Fugitive Places
07 Miles Davis – L’Assassinat De Carala
08 Lynne Arriale – I Hear a Rhapsody
09 Jan Garbarek – Desolate Mountains II
10 Thomas Strønen/Time is a Blind Guide – Tension
11 Nadia Sirota & Liam Byrne – Letter RR
12 Andy Sheppard Quartet – They Came from the North
13 Bob Holroyd – Woven
14 Jan Jelinek – Do Dekor
15 Sun Ra – New Day
16 Brian Groder – Water Prayer
17 Wynton Marsalis – Think Of One
18 Machine Mass feat. Dave Liebman – Centipede
19 The Wrong Object – Saturn
22 Wednesday Aug 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental, Jazz Fusion, Mixing
18 Saturday Aug 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical
Ethereal voice + piano. Haunting & elegant – released April 27, 2018
28 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental
Remixed on a humid July evening by the Ambient Landscape engineering staff. We basically chopped up the original (with a digital Ginsu knife) & then re-sequenced/reassembled it . . . from slower/softer to faster/louder compositions.
With mixing, it remains our steadfast opinion that sequencing (the order of the tracks) can either make or break a mix project. One would never mix a Brahms lullaby into Bowie’s ‘Suffragette City‘ – that’s obvious; but there are subtle, not-so-obvious nuances, especially within the Ambient genre that must be taken into account when pushing out the final deliverable.
Artists include
Sergio Merce | Brian Eno/Jah Wobble | Ocoeur | Rafael Anton Irisarri | Svarte Greiner |The Caretaker | Joacim Nodwall | Croww | Ø | Pan Dailing | Robert Musci | SOTE | Paul Jebson | Akira Rabielas | Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe | BJ Nielson | Paul Jebson/Emptyset | J. G Biberkopf | Sandro Mussida & Claudio Rocchi
Running time: 63:02
04 Wednesday Jul 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical
The third album in the series that started with Slow Music for Rapid Eye Movement and continued with Graduals.
Released on ConSouling Sounds, February 2018.
28 Wednesday Mar 2018
Posted in Ambient, Classical/Neo-Classical, Experimental, Mixing
NP:
Meandering through & dissecting this astonishing & breathtaking retrospective of one of the true ambient masters of our time: vidnaObmana, a.k.a. Dirk Serries.
Dirk explores sound, spacing & the distance between darkness, light & the inevitable gray areas uncovered by those polar opposite & opposing forces.
Sonic waves ebb, flow & wash over the listener as they’re immersed in the beautiful, introspective sonance delivered up via Serries’ guitar-crafted ambient sound-work.
Out on double LP & CD on April 8th via Consouling Sounds.
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Dirk Serries on this album:
“EPITAPH is the swansong of music I like to name my vintage ambient. For more than 30 years I’ve been trying to seek perfection, from synthesizers to electric guitars, a bumpy ride for sure with lots of doubts, frustrations, extreme self-criticism and a few highs and lows but the call kept on strong. This is what I breathe, this is the heart of who I am. But that momentum has arrived to depart from this, not that I’ll abandon my ambient music completely and forever. I do see this expanding as an occasional live entity but in the studio setting I’m looking forward to discover other terrain.
[Me: that “other terrain” has, as of late, been within the realm of eclectic, avant-garde Jazz in collaboration with several different lineups of musicians]
EPITAPH is therefore my finest collection of ambient pieces to date. One, as all were, quite personal and attached as they are performed in solitude with only the imaginative mirror to hold in front of me. Melancholic impressions improvised on the spot with just a guitar and a handful effects recorded directly onto computer. Will for sure continue to emphasize with ambient music but my frame of mind is currently focused on moving forward and applying my techniques and inspiration towards new sonic alliances.
For now I do hope you’ll join me on this closing chapter and embrace this space.”
Tracklist:
1. spectral grey walls
2. shining form constellation
3. alternation and return
4. eaves in dusk
5. the profusion of daze
6. torrential aether shadows
7. formations of grace
8. the nebulous chords
9. brittle air elegy
10. and all the murmur fell
Dirk Serries – Epitaph. Design by Le 7e Oeil, photography by Martina Verhoeven.
26 Monday Mar 2018
Posted in Classical/Neo-Classical, Jazz Fusion, Mixing
Nik Bärtsch has been busy on the production side of things as of late (with Kali’s Riot) & now Hely – great ritualistic groove jazz (primarily piano & drums). I grabbed both these releases on the day they became available.
Nice work, fellas!
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Imagine a Rothko, from the Color Field Painting era: luminous, full of contrasts; layered, extremely saturated, yet all the while, deliberately restrained. An object which was designed to elicit a type of internal, compositional tension that is not only capable of triggering your latent emotions, but that can also invoke that, which can only be described as an expression of the sublime. Now, imagine this in musical form!
Borderland, the sophomore release from the Swiss piano and drums duo (with Lucca Fries, also known from the band Ikarus and Jonas Ruther) called HELY, is a collection of emotionally spiked compositions that sound like a series of intense, vivid, pictographic abstractions. A true feast for synaesthetics! It’s a record that reimagines the relationship between the piano and a set of drums and proposes a unique musical vernacular, one that fuses these two distinctly percussive instruments into an expansive, droning, polyrhythmic tapestry. The sound presented here could just as well be the bastard child of trance-inducing West African drumming traditions and the minimalistic, contemporary, European, post-classical and experimental sensibilities –if the two were to ever cross-pollinate and were presented in the form of an immersive soundtrack.
All the songs found on this album were recorded in just two days, as a series of single and double takes. The session took place under the auspices of producer Nik Bärtsch and sound engineer Willy Strehler, at HELY’s rehearsal space, in a Cold War fallout shelter. The key objective for the duo was to get an honest, context-specific sound, and not worry about anything but the actual performance. Plus, the fellas knew that no concert grand would ever be able to reproduce the magic of their beaten up 1920s Welmar short, with its beautifully uneven reverb and idiosyncratic resonances and overtones. Here, it’s important to note that all of the sound-design-like “special effects” that are scattered about Borderland (if you listen to this record on headphones you will find plenty) were made with the actual instruments.
Borderland is the product of a decade spent honing a singular sound and defining an operational modus which can sustain it in the long term. Novel contingencies between the piano and the drums were thoroughly explored. In the two years leading up to this recording session, sketches of songs were not only collected, but also repeatedly tested, both in a live context and during rehearsals. These thematic blueprints eventually became the core material for this record and were recorded as a serious of live improvisations. This should explain the extremely dynamic performances and raw emotional affect of this body of work.
Thematically, Borderland is a polychromatic sprawl, with each composition presented as a complete universe in its own right. The hidden architecture of every song is wholly an outcome of an emotional tension and the result of two extremely seasoned musicians mining the present moment for it. Hyoga and Opio, for example, explore the hypnotic affects of the drone, with each going about it in its own, singular way. Hyoga relies on a sequence of overlapping, intensifying currents of staccato piano, interspersed with glistening shards of percussion; which eventually explodes into a cinematic crescendo. Opio, by contrast, abandons all of these shimmering, icy qualities and crafts a taut, insular space out of seemingly repetitive combinations of dampened percussion and muted piano strings. Cluster cyclically revisits a cluster of notes, relying on a 10/4 time signature, making it sound completely new and simultaneously familiar with every returning cycle. Chopin SpaceStation revels in a melodic type of poetry, and despite what its title infers, was actually inspired by Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Trance, on the other hand opens a field of limitless possibilities around a single note and a pulsating, shuffling breakbeat. It’s one of those songs that feels like it could play on forever. Borderland, the title track of the LP, is what the fellas half jokingly sometimes refer to as “the hit.” The reason for this is not only its simple harmonic backbone, but that it had connected with the audience every single time they played it out. Perhaps the fact that it was born out of personal turmoil is also not coincidental here. And it’s just a ravishing moment on the record. In sum total, all of these songs add up to one rich, highly gratifying, yet unpredictable soundtrack of a journey, through an imaginary space called Borderland.
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In pursuit of excellence
Digressions & musings on Ambient, Electronica, Mixing & the Ether
Jazz is the Teacher - Funk is the Preacher
lead from the front
Finding Out the Truth of Things
Christian inspiration and encouragement to give a jolt of caffeine to your soul.
We started and we will finish
