FRANÇOIS J. BONNET ‘BANSHEE’
(21:38)

Banshee is an ear directed towards the edges of the old world, where these infinite fines terrae cut and fractalize into coasts, harbours, fjords, peninsulas and archipelagos. Drawing its raw material from recordings made in the Inner Hebrides, Banshee tightly weaves a fabric where the sonic avatars of fauna, flora and climate merge with the human presence, its tools and its culture. Thus, a small boat cleaving through a loch becomes the voice of the mountains and wilderness, and the howling of the wind on the moors becomes the lament of a Banshee, harbinger of death, messenger of the Other World.

The piece unfolds in seven interwoven moments:
I Subharmonics (An Uaimh Bhinn)
II Seabirds & fiddle (Rubha na h-Eist)
III Impacts & Melancholy (Bodach an Stòrr)
IV Spectre (Quiraing)
V Cailleachan / Corryvreckan
VI Distance (Loch Bracadail)
VII Banshees

SARAH DAVACHI ‘BASSE BREVIS’
(18:11)

Co-commissioned by Radio France and INA grm, Basse Brevis by Canadian composer Sarah Davachi was premiered at the Présences 2024 festival, which was dedicated to Steve Reich. Drawing on her own minimalist approach, Sarah Davachi explores, with extreme care, the weavings and complex relationships between the timbral, spatial and durational components of music. Using developments that can be appreciated over time, the composer manages to create music that is extremely precise, subtle and lively. But what is striking, and particularly evident in Basse Brevis, is that such an approach, both abstract and restrained, is nonetheless at times utterly poignant. The work combines moments of formal exploration with moments of pure emotion in a perfectly mastered fashion, creating a gentle tension as it swings between two modes of listening that navigate indecisively within both instrumental and concrete approaches, tracing, in parallel, a diagonal of sound that unfolds around perception, sensation and feeling.

TRACK LISTING

1. Francois J. Bonnet - Banshee
2 .Sarah Davachi - Brasse Brevis

The Doomsday Clock currently sits at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest the big hand and the little hand have come to signalling our total destruction since the conceptual chronograph was incepted back in 1947. If we’re dancing on the brink then we might as well make sure that the music is great. Step forward Daniel Brandt, of lauded German electroacoustic outfit Brandt Brauer Frick, who leads the apocalyptic rave with his third solo album 'Without Us'.

“The idea for this project began with a small but unsettling experience in South London,” he remembers. “I was looking to buy a single avocado, but every store I went into only seemed to offer them in plastic wrapping, packed in pairs with a little cardboard base. I remember thinking: ‘but the avocado already comes in its own perfect packaging? And I only want one.’ It struck me as absurd that, despite our awareness of the damage plastic causes, unnecessary packaging like this still persists.”

The scenario turned into a farrago - Brandt went from store to store discovering the same nightmare in every shop where every avocado was wrapped in superfluous packaging: “As a touring musician, maybe I have to admit my own carbon footprint is questionable,” he admits, “but it’s countries and corporations that need to quit with the half measures that avail the planet nothing, usually under pressure from powerful, short-termist lobbying groups.”

He continues: “Without Us is about the helplessness of the individual in the climate crisis and the apparent need to take radical global action to change the trajectory of the current threat of a climate disaster. It’s about the despair and inability to be able to properly contribute to change as an individual, even though the general idea is that everybody can play their part. But this part that each individual is supposed to take responsibility for is so small compared to the scale of what is needed. The responsibility must not be with the individual when we’re suffering from decisions by global corporations aiming to get rich quick.”

TRACK LISTING

1. Paradise O.D. Feat. Hatis Noit
2. Lucid
3. Addicted
4. Steady
5. Soft Rains
6. Resistance
7. PNK
8. Persistence
9. Nothing To Undo

Manchester’s Gnod and New York’s White Hills stand as titans of Psychedelic & Space Rock. Together they bend the very notions of what rock can do, seemingly suspending our sense of time. Their alchemical chemistry and a fateful session at the Dropout Studio in Camberwell gave rise to the legendary, ongoing series of records under the moniker 'Drop Out'. The records became an influential and sprawling series of extended pieces that remain touchstones of contemporary psychedelia. Having been called “absolutely essential,” “best I have heard – ever,” “A masterpiece,” the Drop Out series finally gets its definitive edition.

'Drop Out III' is a wholly new iteration of Gnod & White Hills’ collaboration, the “director’s cut,” if you will. 'Drop Out III' is replete with sounds recorded in the “Drop Out era” that have never been heard before. The double LP features a cornucopia of expanded versions of essential songs complete with new arrangements, mixes, and instrumentation. Classics like 'Run-A-Round' and the eponymous 'Drop Out' maintain their motorik drive and fizzing melodies with a new shine. The set also features a full LP of pieces never before included on vinyl, including the beautifully serene 'Air Streams' in its original droning arc. The album comes with a download of a full album’s worth of bonus material, all crafted around the 'Drop Out' era. White Hills’ “Decorating Time” showcases the depth of the band’s subtlety, rich with minute turns and a twist of psychedelic ambience. “Nothing NEU! Under the Sky” captures the invigorating pulse and dynamics of Gnod’s live performances. Together, this expansive body of work epitomizes the sense of possibility each band exudes, and the potency of their expertly crafted brand of Transatlantic psychedelia.

15 years after the series began, 'Drop Out III' is an essential album for lovers of contemporary psychedelic rock, a testament to the power of this collaboration.

TRACK LISTING

1. Drop Out
2. Run-A-Round
3. Wellhang
4. Spaced Man
5. Elka
6. Undressing Time
7. Air Streams
8. Unify

'Siamo Tutti In Pericolo' is the third album by Golem Mecanique, the nom de plume of French multi-instrumentalist composer Karen Jebane, to be released on Ideologic Organ. Jebane works within the fringes of contemporary folk (aka La Novea community), microtonal and early modern spheres, as well as touching upon the ashes and fibres of back metal and the DNA of gothic music, literature, sorcery and most of all - poetry. Jebane’s work with the «drone box» (a mechanised hurdy-gurdy) and zither as a smooth and rippling surface for her singing is immediately evident in a nearly ceremonial way, inviting into a space of clear-dark creativity-beauty.

On 'Siamo Tutti In Pericolo', Jebane works with her forms of composition in new ways, poetic and spare execution of her techniques, through her homage/hymns/meditations on the highly irregular circumstances and questions/mysteries of the passing of the soul of master artist Pier Paolo Pasolini. A perfect pairing with collage artist Julien Langendorff’s cover art, 'Siamo Tutti In Pericolo, presents a pure presentation of Jebane’s Golem Mecanique.

TRACK LISTING

1. La Notte
2. Il Giorno Prima
3. Teorema
4. Il Giorno
5. La Tua Ultima Serata
6. Le Lacrime Di Maria

There are poets like the great Mary Oliver, who might suggest that one’s primary function when moving through the world, for as long as they have life and the ability to move through the world, is to play close attention to that which others may foolishly call small, or quotidian. The brain and heart are both containers, with as much space as you wish for them to have, and to live is to create collections of found affections. Sounds from your beloved and familiar blocks, movements of the trees and the people beneath them, the way someone you adore may hold you for a few lingering seconds before releasing from a hug and vanishing into a crowded crosswalk. To think of our living, our making, and our loving in this way means that, at least for some of us, we may be propelled forward by the prospect of what’s next. What moment we can hold and place in our overflowing pockets. The work of Lonnie Holley is, for me, a work of this kind of accumulation and close attention. The delight of finding a sound and pressing it up against another found sound and another until, before a listener knows it, they are awash in a symphony of sound that feels like it stitches together as it is washing over you.

'Tonky' is an album that takes its name from a childhood nickname that was affixed to Holley when he lived a portion of his childhood life in a honky tonk. Lonnie Holley’s life of survival and endurance is one that required – and no doubt still requires – a kind of invention. An invention that is also rich and present in Holley’s songs, which are full and immersive on 'Tonky', an album that begins with its longest song, a nine minute, exhaustive marathon of a tune called 'Seeds', which begins with a single sparse sound and then expands. Chants, faint keys, strings, and atop it all, Holley’s voice, not singing, but speaking plainly about working the earth when he was young, the violence he endured in the process of it all, going to bed bloodied and in pain from beatings. The song expands into a metaphor about place, about the failures of home, or anywhere meant to protect you not living up to what it sells itself to be, even if you tirelessly work at it, work on it, work to make something worthwhile of it. 'Seeds' not only sets the tone for an album that revolves around rebirth, renewal, and the limits of hope and faith, but it highlights what Holley’s greatest strength as a musician is, to me, which is a commitment to abundance, and generosity. He is an incredibly gifted storyteller with a commitment to the oral tradition, such that many listeners (myself among them,) would be entirely content sitting at the feet of a Lonnie Holley record and turning an ear to his robust, expansive storytelling. But 'Tonky' is an album as expansive in sound as it is in making a place for a wide range of featured artists to come through the door of the record and feel at home, no matter how they spend the time they get on a song

STAFF COMMENTS

Barry says: A fascinating and deeply evocative collection that touches on pieces of pretty much every genre you can think of, and while it initially sounds like a soup of rhythms and melody, the more you listen the more reveals itself. Avant composition and sound source selection wrapped around a deeply cinematic, cumulatively melodic core. A fascinating, transformative journey.

TRACK LISTING

1. Seeds
2. Life (with Mary Lattimore)
3. Protest With Love
4. The Burden (I Turned Nothing Into Something) (with Angel Bat Dawid)
5. The Same Stars (with Joe Minter And Open Mike Eagle)
6. Kings In The Jungle, Slaves In The Field
7. Strength Of A Song (with Alabaster De Plume)
8. What’s Going On? (with Isaac Brock)
9. Fear The Machine
10. I Looked Over My Shoulder (with Billy Woods)
11. Did I Do Enough? (with Jesca Hoop
12. That’s Not Art, That’s Not Music
13. Those Stars Are Still Shining (with Saul Williams)
14. A Change Is Gonna Come

More Eaze and Claire Rousay’s collaborations are effortlessly joyful, their music evoking the warmth and respect they have for each other. Their bond goes back to their youthful hometown of San Antonio, Texas where they played in country outfits and noise rock bands respectively, and each pushed their music to extend beyond the traditions and conventions of genre. More Eaze (the moniker of violinist/multi-instrumentalist mari maurice) and Rousay have spent the past decade pushing boundaries, standing together at the vanguard of genre-shattering music that thrills and surprises with its vulnerability and creativity. no floor weds their prowess as sound designers and masterful skills as composers with their skills as acoustic instrumentalists. Eschewing the auto-tune inflected pop-psychedelia and found sounds of their previous collaborations, no floor is collage music as pastoral melancholia, a lush tour into their own version of Americana.

The duo’s ever-widening sonic scope is centered in their mastery of collage. Known for their extensive use of found sound and hyper pop escapades, maurice and rousay employ a more traditional compositional approach. On 'No Floor' the pair created their own elaborate sound world rather than manipulating field recordings. “It was a conscious choice to spend a lot of time making fucked up sounds and then figuring out how they could be beautiful in another context,” notes maurice. “With this record I had no idea what claire would do on each track, and we were both trying to match each other’s ‘freak’ in terms of sound design.” Movements across each piece uncover the ecstatic in nuance. The album’s gentle arc explores feeling with minute gestures and textural swells, carried by maurice and rousay’s enmeshed sonics. rousay’s ostinato guitar patterns and acoustic strums swim through tides of maurice’s pedal steel. Glitching electronics burble in dynamic fits as dramatic strings add waves of tension and release. no floor’s pieces are atmospheric, living biomes that breathe and grow with each passage, rewarding close listens with the revelation of its emotional core.

The five tracks that make up 'No Floor' were named for seminal bars in the pair’s shared history, or as the duo humorously refer to them, “Pillars of our debauchery.” 'No Floor' is an introspective reflection on the emotional turmoil of youth as much as it is a celebration of a camaraderie forged in that turmoil. Freneticism dances atop the placid textures of pieces like 'Kinda Tropical' and 'Limelight, Illegally', embodying the playfulness that comes with reveling in kinship at a shared safe space. The more reserved 'Hopfields' and 'The Applebees Outside Kalamazoo, Michigan” reflect the less familiar locales of their namesakes, the former a sumptuous special occasion that glimmers with soft light and the latter a slow roil of the uncertainty and strangeness that comes with touring as experimental artists in one’s youth. “As we moved from being very close together to living further away and being involved in different scenes, we had more serious conversations,” notes rousay. “In the past it was more plug and play, where with this record we talked about every aspect before and while working on it.”

The pieces of 'No Floor' are born of the deep connection between more eaze and claire rousay, built from strands of familiarity and surprise, the two buttressing one another as they push themselves as instrumentalists, composers, and artists to unexplored boundaries. The wordless timbral compositions retain the duo’s lyrical approach to their craft. Infused with melody, the pieces are collages of sound and emotion. no floor exemplifies the duo’s shared skills in unearthing new and exciting sound arrangements, evoking the warmth and affection of their friendship and musical fearlessness. 

TRACK LISTING

1. Hopfields
2. Kinda Tropical
3. The Applebees Outside Kalamazoo, Michigan
4. Limelight, Illegally
5. Lowcountry