Tag: United States

Posted on

Southeast of Rain (东南有雨) – 42 Days (四十二天)

Sophia Shen and Lemon Guo work together as Southeast of Rain (东南有雨), an electroacoustic/field recording project based in the United States, with one living in New York and the other living in the San Francisco Bay area.

The album is the result of 42 days of mixing avant-garde experimental music, natural sounds, traditional Chinese instruments and improvisational techniques and sublime vocal work into a gentle, though very experimental album.

I request this of everyone, but specifically of my former students in Beijing – take the time to listen to this.  It is a stunningly beautiful piece of work.

Posted on

Jeff Gburek – Diaphragmata

This release allows me to kill two birds with one stone.  First, it’s been a while since we’ve had a chance to review music by Jeff Gburek (one of the several venerable composers who always manage to find a welcome home on these pages), and this is a strikingly quiet and meditative album.  Second, I have sampled some of the wares of Muteant Sounds, a fine experimental label out of Florida in the United States, but I believe this might be the first album from that label I’ve had the change to listen to in full.

Jeff explains the concept of this album below:

Diaphragmata are seven vibratory sound portals for disappearance and imminence. The model for these portals is based loosely upon a Vedic concept called shushumah, an alleged space created inside the body of the yogi while chanting sacred seed syllables related to the chakras which activity reverses non-dualistically into a a channel subsuming or surrounding the adept. This is merely a manner of speaking about the how the sense of ego may vanish or appear pointless and no longer allows for the traditional inner and outer distinctions between body and action. The music is suitable for sleep, meditation, sitting, grounding, prayer, bathing. It is not recommended to listen while driving or operating heavy machinery. The sounds are a blend of synthesizer tones, low level speaker feedback, manipulated further by physically placing various objects on the open speaker diaphragms. The microphones are never stationary but instead wander and explore the sound texture. It can therefore be enjoyed both over house systems or with headphones.

I have a prayer rule I’ve stuck to for 11 years thanks to a Romanian priest who kept me focused during a difficult time in my life. As it turns out, this is quite comforting to have humming in the background of a repetition of Kyrie Eleison. Quite a feat.

Posted on

Celer – In Light Of Blues

Will Long is Celer, an ambient music composer living in Japan and therefore, a relatively close expatriate neighbor of mine.  He releases a lot of music, as is the fashion with some highly competent composers these days, but his work feels like a cut above.  Though this album has 12 tracks, they are rather short compared to some of his other albums, where one track can clock in at over an hour.  The material is dark, but not claustrophobic, and quite easy on the ears if you’re listening on headphones.  Really, consider following his Bandcamp site.  He’s constantly putting out something good.

Posted on

Kaelin Bougneit – Geograph

After a few dark albums, I thought I would share something that, while also a bit darker than normal, shows shades of the Berlin School and rather gentle Industrial soundscapes.  Kaelin Bougneit is a composer and label owner (Subviolet Records) based out of Portland, Oregon, and this particular album has elements of not only classic ambient music, but of tones I tie to old TV programs like “In Search Of…” with Leonard Nimoy.  This triggered some pleasant memories for me, indeed.

Posted on

Båul – Camel [شتر]

Båul have managed to release an album which travels the world while residing in the beautiful state of Colorado.  They mix Arabic, Russian, Hebrew and other music together into a cohesive, energetic album.  Really fun listening.

Posted on

Schloss Tegal – Musick From Madness

Schloss Tegal have a storied history in post-Industrial, ritualistic and experimental music.  The duo of Richard Schneider (based in Prague) and MWBurch (based in New York) developed a body of work on their own, drawing from some extremely dark places, as well as collaborating with musicians like Aube from Japan and the American experimental music composer John Duncan.

Our friend and colleague Raffaele Pezzella is releasing and has remastered these cassette recordings and unreleased tracks into a very coherent album.  To learn more about the history of the band, and how this collaboration came to be, consider going to the Schloss Tegal Bandcamp site.  The story Raffaele spins is quite brilliant.

Posted on

Jeff Gburek – Three New Albums

We have the tremendous pleasure of announcing three new albums by composer Jeff Gburek.

The first album is in collaboration with his partner Karolina Ossowska, who plays violin, ocarina and kalimba on this release.  Gburek performs on zither, mandolin, miniature bandura and something called a blue-sky instrument, something new to me.  The music is quiet, thoughtful, and meditative.  It was a relaxing experience hearing Jeff’s and Karolina’s interplay.

The next release deals with shortwave radio sounds.  This is in keeping with the best of experimental music, where one lets the noises speak for themselves.  Jeff states:

Flux and Permittivity is a short presentation of my enduring enthusiasm for the shortwave radio as a medium not only for sound-art but as a philosophy of induction. Ezra Pound’s statement that the artist must be an antenna for “the race” comes to mind. And I hope that when he said “the race” he actually meant “the species” and I personally take this to mean “all the life on this planet”– and furthermore, all that lives within us and without us which we with our bios-bias take to be non-living– for I feel, and use the shortwave radio to sense, the cosmos is indeed alive with strange and inexorable energies.

It’s an organic experience letting these sounds grow on you.

Finally, we have a release from Bulgarian label Mahorka. This one, out of the bunch, is my favorite. It’s the sort of experimental music that works well with nature. The rub against the genre is that it can be cold and clinical – not so with Jeff’s compositional style. It’s inviting, allowing you to make yourself comfortable and envelop yourself into the sonic habitat he creates.  It’s modern musique-concrète without the occasionally boring academic trappings.

These releases are all worthy and worthwhile listening.