Hello everyone. This is my first blog post, and my first roundup of fantastic Non-Music albums & EPs that I've been enjoying lately and would highly recommend you check out.
If you like what you see/hear, please considering supporting these tremendous artists by buying their albums and following them on Bandcamp and/or social media.
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Masayuki Imanishi - Walk
(Dasa Tapes, 2023)
Masayuki Imanishi is a Japanese sound artist. He uses paper, microphone, radio, field recordings, various found objects and tape manipulation treatment to create subtle yet powerful avant-garde sound art.
'Walk' is album of minimalistic yet atmospheric soundscapes. The four long-form pieces that make up the album are constantly evolving, never becoming tiresome or predictable. Set to a backdrop of haunting yet soothing drones, Imanishi takes the listener to some strange and ambiguous places. These sound collages contain the ordinary and the bizarre - the rustling of paper, the scratching and scraping of (what I think are) steel objects, the blips of broken radio transmissions, bell noises, the distant whispers of nature, varying frequencies of tape hiss and atonal ambience. 'Walk' is a beautiful album to immersive yourself in.
Buy/Stream/Download :
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Joakim Blattmann - Stegla
(Dinzu Artefacts, 2022)
Joakim Blattmann is a sound/visual artist and musician based in Oslo, Norway. His sound works mostly consist of live performances and installations.
'Stegla' (originally presented as a sound installation) is an album of field recordings taken from within the trees themselves, to capture and monitor the movements of the small insects living inside them, controlled in real time by bioelectric signals from the trees themselves, and amplified through the trees by surface transducers.
This album is a subtle and beautiful listening experience, a fascinating sonic exploration of quiet earthy textures and shifting timbres. In these recordings you will hear the scratching and scuttling of insect locomotion, cavernous drips of water falling and trickling through creaking wood, crackling abdominal micro-movements, and the natural organic acoustics and ambience of this hidden world.
So sit back and allow yourself to get lost in the busy sounds of survival and striation within this dark insect environment, and fill your eardrums with the micro-happenings of creatures great and small. A wonderful and immersive album of exquisite sound art.
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Conducive - Modern Prophecy EP
(Veinte33 Records, 2023)
Conducive is an experimental sound artist and from the UK who uses field recordings, audio manipulation and sound collages to create interesting and immersive noise pieces, against a very subtle backdrop of minimalistic textural ambient music.
'Modern Prophecy' is the new 3-song EP from Conducive, consisting of three haunting sound collages of abstract noise, dark hypnotic drones, oblique frequencies and field recordings of humdrum human existence. The accumulated voice samples are utterly fascinating, and the brute force of all the manipulated noise along with Conducive's subtle yet tasteful use of textural dark ambience makes this EP a spellbinding slab of intoxicating sound art. I can't get enough!
Stream/Buy/Download :
https://veinte33records.bandcamp.com/album/modern-prophecy
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Katie Gerardine O'Neill - Message Green
(self-released, 2021)
Katie Gerardine O'Neill is a multidisciplinary musician and sound artist based in Dublin. She releases music and sound collage under her own name, and is also a member of the experimental band Alien She. O'Neill's work explores themes of alienation, psycho-geography, art-therapy, identity and agency, memory and ''medium as message''.
'Message Green' is an audio-visual poem. Composed and collaged from various field recordings, tape loops, voice fragments and organ - this album is an abstract and unsettling journey through strange soundscapes of ever-evolving textures and surreal atmospheres. The hissing of tape, the vibrant sounds of nature, the percussive banging of hollow objects, the eerie whispers and textural ambient music makes for a mystifying and wonderful listening experience.
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Matt Atkins - Imperfections
(Wabi-Sabi Tapes, 2022)
Matt Atkins is a prolific sound and visual artist based in London. He works with percussion and found objects, and uses tape manipulation techniques to create intriguing sound collages and his own unique brand of musique concrete. He is also the owner of the sound art label Minimal Resource Manipulation.
In this album, Atkins uses a variety of percussive instrumentation and found sounds to create rich and intricate tapestries of noise. The hollow ringing of bowls, the clicking and clacking of wooden objects, the rubbing/shaking/scraping noises that both complement and clash with one another, the resonant echo of the bells, the subtle drones, the dissonant electronic frequencies, the frantic shuffling of human movement and even some nature recordings make up these fascinating abstract soundscapes. Atkins' minimalistic yet complex artistic approach and sound design makes 'Imperfections' a gorgeous listening experience.
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Rubbish Music - Upcycling
(Flaming Pines, 2022)
Rubbish Music is the collaborative duo of renown experimental sound artists Kate Carr and Iain Chambers, and this is their debut album. Together as Rubbish Music they use sound to investigate the journeys, transformations and impacts of our discarded objects and waste. Armed with a toolkit of disposable food waste, used kitchen utensils, plastic containers and a variety of empty vessels and household objects, Carr and Chambers set forth to do what they do best - to create an album of intriguing and atmospheric musique concrete.
'Upcycling' consists of three long-form soundscapes, which are somehow simultaneously complex and minimalistic, unsettling and alluring... Never has the sound of garbage been so immersive and hypnotic!
While foreboding drones set an undeniably dark sound foundation for this album, fragments of bright whistling, squeaky toys and obscene gurgling noises add a delightfully playful, oddly humorous and sickly twisted aspect to it...and makes for interesting juxtapositions. This is great avant-garde sound art.
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Sam Valle - Mantle
(Uneternal Sleep, 2022)
Sam Valle is a musician/photographer from Brooklyn, New York. She creates intricate and abstract sound art using a variety of field recordings, music samples, noise and electronic manipulation. This album of hers was released on the French tape label Uneternal Sleep.
'Mantle' is a fascinating amalgamation of percussive bells, broken shards of musical composition, partial fragments of conversational voices, indistinguishable scratching and rustling sounds, sinister drones, plucked strings, hollow chimes, cavernous echoes, fuzzy lo-fi ambience, rustling body movements, tape hiss and various other clicks and clacks. It is a wonderfully compelling and thoroughly enjoyable album.
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Phil Maguire - Neuk and Nab
(Falt, 2022)
Phil Maguire is a musician & sound artist from Scotland (currently residing in Ireland) whose minimalistic sound work explores emptiness and emergence, of self and of machine. This is his first album on the French tape label Falt.
'Neuk' and 'Nab' are Scottish slang words for 'a nook,a corner' and 'a peg which to hang things on' which is strangely fitting for the vibe of this release. This album consists of two quiet and immersive ''sound collages of tape recordings and treatments, 2017-20''.
Driven by the sound of ambient tape hiss, low frequency rumblings and fragile audio glitch, these two long-form tracks are delicate, enticing, meditative, serene, sometimes eerie yet beautifully hypnotic.
Within the crackling tape hiss you will hear the sound of distant voices, faint body movements, the quiet murmuring of crowded places, engines chugging, weather rattling, fragmented radio transmissions and possibly a theremin...or some theremin-like instrument.
This album requires close listening and a calm still mind to fully appreciate the mesmerizing quality of these bizarre and captivating sound collages.
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Robert Stokowy - Concrete I
(Veinte 33 Records, 2022)
Robert Stokowy is a German-born sound artist whose work consists of conceptual sound art, text-based interventions, performances and installations. He mainly focuses on the inner structural characteristics of both found and created sonic environments, which is very evident on 'Concrete I' which was released on Veinte33 Records - both digitally and on limited edition cassette tape.
I don't know have any information or backstory to this album, but I find it to be a really fascinating and immersive listening experience. It is built up from fragments and pieces of physical sounds - scraping, rustling, rumbling and vibrating...reverberating and ricocheting throughout (what to my ears sounds like) some kind of empty concrete environment. Perhaps the title alone put that idea in my head, but that's how I perceived it. However you choose to aurally interpret the sound, it is a haunting and beautiful album that requires deep analytic listening and an open heart. I'd highly recommend this to any fans of minimalistic musique concrete.
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Coagulant - Abstraction in Three Dimensions
(Now DATs What I Call Music, 2022)
Coagulant is a conceptual sound art project devised by Fabio Kubic. Since 1998 he has been creating experimental sounds using a variety of electronic manipulation techniques and audio-feedback editing. He has released a range of albums, both independently and through labels that specialize in experimental noise art.
'Abstraction in Three Dimensions' is an album that (in its entirety) only exists in physical format - specifically cassette tape from Dutch label Now DATS What I Call Music... but you can listen to a 25-minute long excerpt from it on Bandcamp, which is a rather satisfying sound journey unto itself.
This is an composition of mesmeric sonic abstraction. In the first half of the piece you will hear swirling flutters of atonal ambience, deep sinister drones, the faint buzzing of high frequency static, fractured voice samples and panning crackle that builds up towards an intense crescendo.
The intensity and loudness dies down a bit in the second half, but the mood becomes eerier. It sounds like you're in some kind of hollow echo chamber, with some heavily reverberated knocking, swelling low rumbles and subtle feedback...giving the impression that the atmosphere is breathing. There are also what sounds to me like indistinguishable rustling movements down dark alleyways. A brilliant album that I look forward to listen to in its entirety.
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