Tag: Field Recordings

Categories
Music

Jeff Gburek – Still Life with a Question Mark

No wishes, no hopes for the year, just a pleasant way to gently slide into 2024.  We launch with Jeff Gburek’s latest release, of which he provides notes on his Bandcamp site:

“Still Life with a Question Mark came together as an album rather quickly after I discovered loops unused from an older project fit very well with the latest work I’d done in seclusion at Dom Sztuk, Kęszyca. Captures of VLF radio (ionospheric geomagnetic crackling impulses), hydrophone recordings from Solacz pond, frame drums, zither played with ebow, looped guitar and string passages, synthesizer, shortwave radio, textures of leaves, wood, ash and pitches calibrated as overtones based on Schumann Resonance (the variable background vibration frequency of the planet that has served as backdrop for life’s evolution here). Gathered mainly in mid-October and composed in November. An early winter ambient album to inspire reflection and peace.”

Categories
Music

Jeff Gburek – The Radio & The Sea

Jeff Gburek’s latest album is not a departure from his carefully crafter work, but a continuation of his honing sounds together, weaving them in a way that the early musique-concrète composers could not have imagined.  Drones, pulses and the sounds of Burgas, Bulgaria, are blended to produce an immersive soundscape.  Yet another fine work.

Categories
Music

Mirt – More Tarutao Recordings

Mirt, a Polish experimental artists, offers up sound recordings from Thailand.  From his Bandcamp site:

“This is another part of an ongoing series of recordings made on Tarutao island. This time, the entire album focuses on the overall soundscape of the island and is a collection of random recordings I made during last trip to Tarutao National Park. Tracks 1 and 3 are recorded from a drop rig with no human presence on site and seem particularly interesting.

Although these are not binaural recordings, I recommend listening with headphones.”
Categories
Music

Igor Yalivec – Etudes

Igor Yalevic has produced some of the most gentle and relaxing field recordings and ‘ambient’ music to come out of Ukraine in recent memory in his latest album, Etudes.  From his Bandcamp site:

“Etudes is Yalivec’s sophomore album. His 2021 album Still Life came out on Polar Seas Recordings and has long since been sold out. Yalivec’s more esoteric electroacoustic project with guitarist Sergey Yagoda is called Gamardah Fungus and exorcizes a more cosmic and heavier consciousness. Etudes is remarkable in it’s ability to walk a middle path between the overtly melodic and arpeggiated Still Life and the heavy duty experimentalism of Gamardah Fungus.

An etude, in musical language, is generally a short exercise designed to improve the player’s skill. The skill, it seems, that Yalivec is improving here is his ability to see clearly. Not ahead into some unknown future, but to see clearly into the present – a present, that on good days, is full of the chirping birds and prairies alive in some kind of eternal autumn afternoon that are full of life. And perhaps, no matter what happens, there will be artists like Igor Yalivec – capturing those moments and stretching them into eternity.“

Categories
Music

SALA – Jurmala Revisited​/​Breath

Audrius Simkunas operates as SALA, a Latvian composer whose work straddles ambient and nature recordings.  From the release’s Bandcamp site:

“Jurmala Revisited/Breath documents SALA’s return to the shores of Latvia, as a sort of audio postcard. The cover photography was taken during the trip and has been treated to look like a fading memory. There are two images, one for each piece. The first is hazier and more feint, suggesting a distant recollection of events, whilst the second image is slightly clearer, as if the memory has been jogged during a listen to this EP.”

Categories
Music

Jeff Gburek – The Art of Prepared Guitar Volume Two

‘Beautifully lo-fi’ is perhaps the best way I can describe Jeff Gburek’s latest release on Muteant Records, a company you will be hearing plenty about on this blog..  The tracks have the rawness of the early Dunedin sound (think Roy Montgomery, Alastair Galbraith and labels like XPressway and Flying Nun Records. It’s still grounded in Jeff’s trademark guitar work, but with some elements that feel like they would be home on an ethnographic record of some culture in a hidden-away island in the Indonesian archipelago. Don’t ask why, just listen, especially to Undead 8.  You can see more of Jeff’s releases on this website here.

Categories
Music

Philip Jeck & Chris Watson – Oxmardyke

There’s little I can say to introduce you to the work of Philip Jeck, the turntablist who passed away in March of 2022, nor would I with Chris Watson, the maestro of field recordings and one-time member of Cabaret Voltaire.  This release is a project that the gentlemen were working on before Jeck’s untimely passing.  From the Touch Records release Bandcamp site:

“In 2017 I was recording along the north bank of the Humber estuary and one morning driving back from Faxfleet I was stopped at the Oxmardyke rail crossing. The gates were down. After setting up a microphone array by the tracks for a passing freight train the signalman shouted an invitation to climb up into the gate box to make some more recordings.

Over the following weeks I made several return trips to Oxmardyke and gathered a broad palette of recordings. I discussed the sounds, stories and history of the site with Philip after a show and we were both excited by the potential of making a work together.

Philip was drawn to the ancient history of the area from 6th century Anglo Saxon times to the Knights Templar and how the sounds, rhythms and textures from those periods may still inhabit the contemporary landscape. My thoughts took inspiration from ‘The Signalman’ by Charles Dickens and the painting ‘Rain, Steam and Speed’ by Joseph Turner. We agreed to share ideas and exchange tracks.

Oxmardyke gate box has now passed into history

It was only when Mike Harding at Touch informed me of Philip’s condition that we began a final exchange of pieces and I sincerely hope that my contributions may frame Philip’s exceptional work.

Chris Watson August 2022“

Categories
Music

Fallen – The Floating World

I’ve been a fan of ROHS! Records out of Italy (HT: Ivo Petrov – thanks!) for some time.  They put out consistently good ambient music and organic electronica every month, it seems, and this release from Lorenzo Bracaloni, who goes by the monicker Fallen, is a delight to listen to.  It’s not a normal album for ROHS! – rather, it shifts a lot.  The music starts with what sound like processed field recordings and blend their way into more structured electronic music soundscapes, then drift back into a spacious bit of guitar playing.  There’s a slightly rough edge to the recording – it’s not saccharine or too ‘new age-y’.  Nor is it haunting or depressing.  It’s a rather uplifting album, and it was nice to feel a sense of calmness after finishing the listening session.

Categories
Music

Jeff Gburek – Ramifications

Though this album is a decade old now, it’s so incredibly well-done that I thought it worth sharing if you like experimental music melded together with field recordings.  Jeff Gburek’s sound art is organic and engaging, the recording was handled so masterfully that one gets the feeling of sitting in the locations listed on the liner notes as Jeff’s Bandcamp site.

Categories
Music

Chihei Hatakeyama – The Ancient Forest V

I can’t say I’ve ever had the pleasure of introducing Chihei Hatakeyama to my readers before, but he is a master of elegant sound design. These three compositions are based on his travel to Amami Oshima, north of Okinawa.