Hello again, and welcome to my second round of non-musical recommendations for you. I was really taken aback by the positive feedback and encouragement I received from my first post, so here's another one for you, in time for Bandcamp Friday!
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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Matilde Meireles - Life of a Potato
(Crónica, 2022)
Matilde Meireles is a Portugese field recordist, sound artist & research fellow whose work tends to focus on ecological site-oriented projects. Her work has a multi-sensorial and multi-perspective critical approach to site, where Matilde investigates the potential of listening across spectrums as ways to encounter and articulate a plural experience of the world — human and otherwise.
'Life of a Potato' is a sonic exploration of (as the title suggests) the life, story and identity of the wonderful potato - a hugely-popular, versatile, delicious and essential food staple in the UK, where Meireles currently resides.
This album is split into two 15-minute recordings. On Side A you will hear various gardening sounds and the muted underground vibrations of the soil, as if it's alive and breathing (which it certainly is) and trying to communicate something to us. You can hear the scratching and shuddering of a rake, the idyllic nature sounds and beautiful birdsong of an English garden and the common noises associated with digging up the lovely tubers from the ground, which eventually transitions into the peaceful and familiar sounds of peeling, washing and chopping the potatoes in preparation for roasting, while rain patters on a nearby window and an airplane flies by. You can hear a wide range of different birds chirping while Meireles massages and seasons the potatoes with olive oil, herbs and spices. I particularly love the sound of the pepper grinding!
Side B becomes more strange and abstract, and a bit darker in tone.You will hear internal oven sounds (the repetitive rumbles, vibrations and drones) while the potatoes are roasting away to delicious perfection. After a few minutes of ominous drones and subtle ambience, you will eventually hear the appetizing crackling sounds of the potatoes. What I really didn't expect was for the drums and electronica to come in! Very interesting...
The album ends with the potatoes coming out of the oven, and the tranquil sound of the garden at the end of potato season.
'Life of a Potato' is a beautiful, fascinating and strangely relaxing listening experience. Meireles's holistic approach and loving audio treatment of the tuber's journey from soil to plate makes for a brilliant sound art album, and a reminder of why I love potatoes so much.
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Martyna Basta - In Tension There Is A Bliss
(Superpang, 2022)
Martyna Basta is a Polish artist/composer whose diaristic sound shapes a delicate atmosphere that balances lush and haunting. This album was originally a sound installation presented in a Black Space with soundproofed walls and quadriphonic soundsystem in Gdańsk, Poland.
This one 18-minute long composition is comprised of a mixture of live performed elements and manipulated field recordings. You will hear cavernous gong-like bells ringing out and ricocheting enormously off the walls, the glistening tinkle of a triangle, the ominous and violent banging of a tambour, telephone tones, the voices of children playing, fluttering glitches of indistinguishable noise, shuffling body movements, the rustling of leaves, the rattling of keys, the ticking of a clock, sweet birdsong, the splashing of running water and the natural reverberations and acoustics of the performance space.
'In Tension There Is Bliss' is a wonderfully meditative abstract sonic exploration of the immediate space that surrounds an individual during a particular moment in time. Basta's dramatic sound design and unique audio collage techniques make for a tense, haunting and utterly alluring composition.
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Natalia Beylis - Prophecy of the Beetle
(Diatribe Records, 2022)
Natalia Beylis is a prolific Irish experimental musician & sound artist that has released a lot of albums under her own name, as well as being part of many various collaborations & bands. This album was released on Diatribe Records as part of their 'Landscape Series'.
The idea of 'Prophecy of the Beetle' came to Beylis when she was collecting firewood one evening and happened to notice the visual patterns a bark beetle had made in a piece of ash, and used these engravings to compose a graphic score for this project.
The result is a fascinating and intriguing sound collage made from field recordings of processing wood, along with a variety of other snippets of music and sound that the artist found along the way. You hear the splitting and sawing of wood mingled with subtle wavering drones, voices discussing the etchings, fragments of beautiful piano playing, fractured tape noises, distant birdsong, vocal texts, pump organ, footsteps and a variety of other miscellaneous debris that Beylis collected, recorded and skillfully collaged. This is a delightful avant-garde sound art album about the unexpected journey of a fascinating little earth creature.
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Francesco Fonassi & Marta Salogni - l'ebbrezza delle grandi profondità
(Canti Magnetici, 2022)
Franscesco Fonassi is an Italian sonic artist, researcher, musician & sound designer/producer working in the field of sound-based performances, transmission/transmedial art and experimental music.
Marta Sologni is an Italian award-winning producer, engineer and mixer that has worked with esteemed artists such as Björk, Holly Herndon, Circuit des Yeux and Mica Levi.
'l'ebbrezza delle grandi profondità' is their stunning collaboration album, which was recorded during a ''tape maze'' live performance in Brescia, Italy during lockdown 2021. It is an underwater concept album based on the oceanic forests explored and described in Jacques-Yves Cousteau's 'The Silent World'.
In these compositions, the listener is submerged into a strange and unfamiliar water world of unfathomable silence and depth. In the recordings you will hear frantic subsonic gurgling sounds, oblique frequencies, undulating liquidy vibrations, hypnotic percussive bangs and rattles, erratic voice sampling, stuttering white noise, unpredictable and unnerving pulses, eerie drones, glitchy ambience, psychedelic electronica, shuffling footsteps, muted tribal rhythms and a barrage of miscellaneous indistinguishable field recordings. There are even some melodic flourishes of various musical instruments thrown in there, which adds a bit of colour and vibrancy to these haunting abstract sound collages.
Fonassi & Salogni have created and crafted such an intriguing and unique vision in this album. Never predictable, never stale... it's an immersive and spellbinding work of watery avant-garde musique concrète.
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Francisco López - 1987
(Universaalkunst, 2023)
Francisco López is an avant-garde experimental musician and sound artist, and is internationally recognized as being one of the major figures in his field. His work has been released on more than 450 labels and publishers around the world.
'1987' is a delightfully immersive one-hour long abstract noise composition. In this recording you will be engulfed by fluttering tones and swirling white noise that sounds equally natural and industrial. The fluid transitions between these gentle sea-like waves of sound, quiet muted textures and ferocious squalls of industrial noise make for such an utterly hypnotic and captivating listening experience. I'm not sure what the source material of these field recordings were, but they've been masterfully manipulated into something beautiful and unrecognizable. An excellent and extremely immersive album.
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Raoul Van Herpen - Anchor Breath
(Minimal Resource Manipulation, 2022)
Raoul Van Herpen is a Dutch electro-acoustic composer & improviser who explores and experiments with new methods and techniques of playing with noise, textures, electronics, tape, pianos and synthesizers.
Inspired by psycho-acoustic works and early electronic composers, this album is all about exploring textures and natural acoustics in a surrounding space, and the physical effect the various sound waves, frequencies and vibrations has on the listener.
I was pretty shocked and impressed to read that Van Herpen used only electronic instruments in these recordings. It's incredible how organic and raw and ''roomy'' it all sounds. The brushing and scratching and scraping noises that dance and swirl within these abstract environments makes it sound so intimate and near, like something you could reach out and touch with your fingers.
'Anchor Breath' is a wonderfully minimalistic album of psycho-acoustic experimentation, immersive noise art, abstract atonal ambience, vibrating sine tones, hissing feedback and avant-garde audio manipulation.
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Rebecca Wilcox & Hannah Ellul - Seasonal Bodies
(Steep Gloss, 2022)
Rebecca Wilcox & Hannah Ellul are two Glasgow-based experimental artists/musicians. Together they have produced recordings and performances for BBC Tectonics Festival (2021), Takuroku (Cafe Oto, 2021), Radiophrenia (2020), and Tone Glow (2021). This album of theirs finds a very fitting home on Steep Gloss who are a UK experimental tape label specializing in abstract collaborative works.
'Seasonal Bodies' consists of two live performances using voice, synthesized sounds and manipulations of hearings in everyday places. In the forefront of these recordings you will hear fragments of spoken poetry - mingling, overlapping, clashing and distengrating...sometimes raw, sometimes heavily effected and manipulated. Words stuttered like snippets of an absurd broken conversation... accompanied by indistinguishable distant murmurings of (what I think are) field recordings taken from public places, the natural ambience and acoustics of the venue, random objects being shuffled, breath blown through hollow vessels, wooden clacks, whooshing sounds, glitchy electronica and abstract pulses... peppered with some minimalistic musical flourishes from various string and wind instruments.
This album is a bizarre and intriguing collage of raw spontaneous human expression. A glorious mess of conflicting yet mesmerizing sounds.
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Terry Fox - Labyrinth of the Inner Ear
(aufabwegen, 2022)
Terry Fox (born in 1943, Seattle : died in 2008, Cologne) was one of the leading pioneers in American Body Art & Conceptual Art. He became famous in the 70s with performances in which he used his own body as a medium for exploring often extreme physical and psychological experiences. He remains one of the seminal figures in Contemporary Sound Art.
'Labyrinth of the Inner Ear' is basically an experimental SoundWalk album, sonically told from the perspective of a sightless person walking through an urban environment and eventually returning back to their place of origin.
In this 2-part recording you will first and foremost hear the consistent and repetitive sound of a cane tapping on the ground throughout its entire duration, as the blind individual makes their way through (what I gather to be) the city streets of Berlin, over a two-day period in 2006.
Listening closely (which this type of music demands you to do) you will be able to ascertain and distinguish the different areas of the city the person is walking through by the sound that their cane makes on the ground. The central tapping and sweeping of the cane is heard against the aural backdrop of bustling street noises, the beeping and whooshing of daytime traffic congestion, the voices of consumers in the shopping district, the cavernous reverberation of some dark tunnel/alleyway, the ambience of the quieter backstreets, the birdsong and gushing water fountain in the park, and other miscellaneous (and undeniably familiar) city noises. At times the cane sounds stop completely when the narrator steps onto public transport, or when he/she seems to rest and/or find some interesting audio environment along the way.
This composition is a fascinating sonic exploration of the elemental forms that make up human existence, and a wonderful sound document of a particular time and place.
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Bjarni Gunnarsson - Upics
(Flag Day Recordings, 2023)
Bjarni Gunnarsson is an Icelandic composer and software engineer, based in The Netherlands, whose work is involved with computer music and algorithmic composition. It specifically concerns process-based ideas. He composes music focused on internal activity, fluid sound-structures of forms.
'UPICS' is his latest album, released on Flag Day Recordings. It is the outcome of Gunnarsson's research into database-driven reconstructions based on sound analysis, created with the UPIC system, which you can read about on the Bandcamp page.
These compositions are cold and unnerving eruptions of fuzzy synthetic noise patterns, erratic blips, glitchy ambience, laser-like frequencies, sinister rumblings, stuttering static, and a plethora of other unsettling and unpredictable sonic abstractions. They contain a dark inner world of rapidly fluctuating sound patterns, shapes, modulations and waveforms.
At times quiet and ominous, at other times violent and jarring...this album is a chaotic hive of bizarre artificial internal activity. This music is both frightening and dazzling. And undeniably unique listening experience.
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Philippe Neau - A Quiet Place
(Mahorka, 2022)
Philippe Neau is a prolific sound & visual artist whose aim is to create imaginary places and mental landscapes, and has released many impressive works on many different record labels.
'A Quiet Place' is a collection of abstract and unnerving soundscapes, designed and sculpted from field recordings, drones and noise manipulation. This album is an aural story told from the point of view of a motionless traveller, where natural sounds overlap and mingle and become these non-existent ''non-places''. This is where the listener finds themselves when hearing this album.
In these recordings you will hear ominous thumping, twisted birdsong, enormous sustained reverberations, atonal ambience, glistening metallic textures, vocal fragments, running water and various other nature sounds and disturbing noises - all collaged together in an eerie and intriguing way.
I'd highly recommend this album to any fans of experimental noise and abstract sound art.
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Ben Link Collins - Midtown
(self-released, 2022)
Ben Link Collins is an Alabama-based field recordist, architect and sound artist. 'Midtown' is an album of recordings that Collins took while riding buses and trains in Atlanta, Georgia's public transit system between 2013 and 2015 while commuting to and from work. As the artist himself states, revisiting these recordings years later gave him a nice respite from the urban claustrophobia he was experiencing at the time.
In these compositions you will hear a variety of familiar transportation noises, mechanical clanking, snippets of speaker music, P.A announcements, voices of commuters, abstract scratching and rumbling, humming drones, street noises and electromagnetic sounds. It is a mesmerizing and alluring two-part audio exploration of the everyday, and the strange and subtle beauty that exists within these familiar sound environments. 'Midtown' is a unique and wondefully immersive album to completely lose yourself in.
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