Here's my latest roundup of fantastic non-musical recommendations for you all...
And as always - if you like what you see/hear, please considering supporting these tremendous artists & labels by buying their albums and following them on Bandcamp and/or social media.
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Lucie Vítková - Cave Acoustics
(Skupina, 2023)
Lucie Vítková is a composer, improviser, and performer (accordion, hichiriki, synthesizer, harmonica, voice, and dance) from the Czech Republic, living in New York.
'Cave Acoustics' is an album made of recordings in caves in the Czech Republic, and an abandoned Gothic church in Slovakia. It consists of four (mostly) longform sound compositions, combining a beguiling exploration of the physicality and acoustics of these unique locations with profoundly personal themes of family legacy and roots.
On Track 1 ('Trash Trio') you will hear the mesmerizing movements of the Vítková sisters inside Výpustek Cave, prepared and adorned with their individual ''sound costumes'', which consisted of metallic tins and coins. These choreographed movements make the noises dance, drift, swirl and echo throughout this cavernous soundscape, making a variety of steel rattles, shimmers, clanks, clatters, bangs and clangs... which builds towards an intense and visceral cacophony, accompanied by faint distant voices reverberating throughout the dark empty spaces of this environment.
On Track 2 ('Hair Score') you will hear the Vítková sisters raise their voices in meditative ambient howls and wails, which ebb and flow in haunting waves throughout the tunnel systems, while prepared cans rattle and vibrate frantically. This performance was a sonic attempt to process grief - their mother's death in particular. It was also a physical one - using swaying movements and mournful wails in ritualistic fashion. A wonderful piece of primal expression.
On Track 3 ('Stones') you will hear a group of performers using only stones to create exquisite sound art. All kinds of stones with different sizes and shapes were knocked, banged, rolled, rubbed, scraped and bounced in rapid succession around the cave to create a frantic cacophony of different textures, tones and rhythms. This piece was composed by Christian Wolff.
On Track 4 ('Inside The Ritual') you will hear insects chirriping and buzzing on a hot summer's evening. Gradually you will begin to hear subtle sounds and quiet textures of human shuffling. Then the iron sound of rattling cowbells emerges through the mix, creating a strange and gentle clamour. Eventually Lucie's improvised vocalizations and Japanese hichiriki flute fill the soundscape with a peaceful yet unsettling atmosphere. This piece feels more lonely and personal than the previous ones. An ideal ending to this strange cavernous sound journey.
'Cave Acoustics' is a cathartic and hypnotic album of physical performance art, delicate field recordings, haunted improvisations, cavernous echoes and bizarre acoustic phenomena. The story and circumstances surrounding these performances, along with the unique setting that it was recorded in makes for such an eerie, evocative and enticing listening experience.
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Cole Peters - Four Unbindings
(LINE Imprint, 2023)
Cole Peters is a sound & visual artist based in Winnipeg, Manitoba (Canada). His work in sound builds on the techniques of musique concrète, field recording, and reductive synthesis. His recordings examine texture, pressure, place and time as subjects unto themselves and as scaffolds in an evolving thematic framework drawing on the natural sciences and sensory experience.
'Four Unbindings' is his latest release. It's an album of minimally-processed field recordings, and a sonic exploration of the origin and identification of sounds found within these recordings. It consists of four longform compositions - three recorded in Central Canada, the fourth recorded in the ancestral lands of the O’Odham and Piipaash peoples, Southwest US.
I'd be lying if I said I could identify a lot of the individual environmental sounds captured in these recordings, but what I can say is that the overall atmospheres that Peters has created in this album are utterly mesmerizing and immersive. These soundscapes are filled with (what sound to me like) cold howling winds, rattling fences, squeaking gates, steel objects scraping together, tree branches swaying and crackling, grass rustling, the occasional twittering of birds, crickets chirruping, crunching footsteps, shuddering waves of atonal noise, airy stillnesses, electronic glitches, eerie drones and lonely environmental ambience. There's a lot of tension and pressure that runs through this work, and a lot of vague subtleties buried in the haunting layers of sound that begs for closer listening, and repeat visits...
'Four Unbindings' is an album of minimalistic, beautifully textured and richly atmospheric soundscapes. The exquisite drones, vibrant ambience, mysterious sonic abstractions and environmental phenomena that Peters has captured makes for a spellbinding and evocative sensory experience.
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Lisa Lerkenfeldt - Shell Of A City
(Room40, 2023)
Lisa Lerkenfeldt is a multidisciplinary artist working in sound, gesture and performance living in Melbourne, Australia. Her multi-disciplinary work embraces musique concrète, environmentalism, noise and classical motifs in their composition and imagining. Concerned with disruptions in form and broader ecological crisis, she arranges with experimental ensembles, electronics and field recording.
'Shell Of A City' is her latest release. Recorded in Naarm, the album consists of one 40-minute long sound composition, pairing two channels of site-based improvisation into a time-altering minimal structure.
As the title suggests, the soundscape that Lerkenfeldt has created in this album is one of a vast, empty, hollowed-out city. It's filled with shimmering metallic drones, windy swells of abstract noise, long eerie reverberations, mysterious echoes, slow haunting rumbles, drifting fuzz, glistening shudders and desolate ambience. These resonant gong-like swells of metallic sound and lush sweeping drones are so hypnotic and dreamy in their slow, languid repititions...making you feel like you're floating ghost-like through the skeletal architecture of a strange uninhabited (possibly abandoned) city. This composition was made though contact recordings of a highway's substructure, and mutated and transformed into this wonderfully surreal environment.
'Shell Of A City' is an eerie yet contemplative audio excursion through a uniquely haunted and hollow soundscape. Whilst it's relatively simple and minimalistic sounding piece on the surface, there's a lot of gorgeous subtly and wonderful ambience to get lost within during these 40 minutes. A rich, captivating and utterly immersive listening experience.
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Steve Peters, Marco Scarassatti, Slavek Kwi - Drosera
(sirr-ecords, 2023)
Steve Peters is a sound artist whose work is often site-based, combining location sound with voices, instruments, electronics, and found or natural objects.
Marco Scarassatti is a sound artist and composer who undertakes research into musical education, and also researches and constructs sculptures, installations and sound emblems.
Slavek Kwi is a sound-artist, composer and researcher whose main interest lies in the phenomena of perception as the fundamental determinant of relations with Reality. He also writes and releases under the alias Artifical Memory Trace.
'Drosera' is a compilation album of three plant-themed sound works from these three sound artists.
'High Desert Florascape' by Steve Peters consists of various sounds made by different specimens of flora found along the High Desert of New Mexico. It's a hypnotic collage of thin dry crispy rustling, muted gurgles, delicate scratchings, tiny ploppings, raspy vibrations, granular squeaks and gentle crunching noises - all against the beautiful ambient backdrop of the soft desert winds....
'Mata' by Marco Scarassatti starts as a droning noisescape made from various audio scraps that signify the destruction and devastation of the tropical forest at the hands of human beings. Within this noisescape you will hear the grinding sounds of industry (electric chainsaws), fires crackling, ominous bursts of thunder, the distant hum of motorized vehicles, rattling machinery, howling winds of whooshing noise, human shuffling and the creaking sounds of underground tree roots. Towards the end of the piece, the noise dies down you will hear the gentle and tranquil environmental ambience of a field recording taken in a small village in Brazil. This calmness is punctuated by the sweet sound of birdsong.
'is Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula) dreaming about flies?' by Slavek Kwi begins with a series of fractured birdsong and buzzing insect sounds - some raw, some heavily manipulated. In the midst of this strange and surreal collage, you will also hear subtle atmospheric drones, electronic glitches, erratic scratching noises and layers of atonal ambience. As the piece developes, it becomes gradually more and more eerie and bizarre. Bird noises are reversed, pitch-shifted and caked with various effects, along with the sounds from other domestic pets, buzzing flies and other sonic abstractions. There is also a bit of musicality to this piece, adding some nice subtle colouring to this rather unnerving soundscape... and some interesting environmental sounds and weather noises.
'Drosera' is an album of wonderful nature sounds, strange atmospherics, environmental ambience, haunting drones and dreamy field recordings. It's such an inspired and beautiful sonic love letter to the plant world, and an exquisite and mesmerizing listening experience.
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Natasha Barrett - Reconfiguring the Landscape
(Persistence of Sound, 2023)
Natasha Barrett is a British-born composer, performer and researcher in the field of contemporary electroacoustic art music that currently lives in Norway. As a composer, her work encompasses acousmatic and electroacoustic concert composition, sound installations, theatre music, large-scale outdoor media productions, sound-architectural works and interactive art. She regularly collaborates with designers and scientists, as well as musicians and visual artists.
'Reconfiguring the Landscape' is her latest album, released through Persistence of Sound - an artistic research project investigating how 3-D electroacoustic composition and sound-art can evoke and provoke a new awareness of our outdoor sound environment.
The album opens with recordings of (what I presume to be) the hustle and bustle of Venice. In this busy urban soundscape you will hear the familiar street sounds of human chatter, children playing and screaming, bicycle spokes, barking dogs, gulls squawking, water flowing through canals and all kinds of frantic activity... but it doesn't take long before this audio environment shifts and evolves into areas of the imagined, and the surreal. What you may perceive initially as the natural gong-like sound of cathedral bells (heard in most major cities around the world) gradually emerges out of the mix and completely takes over the foreground. These tolling church bells shimmer, echo and resonate through the landscape, against a backdrop of gurgling watery textures, murmury choral singing and echoed voices. From this point onwards, the albums becomes more and more wacky and otherworldly...
I don't have the technical know-how or musical knowledge to explain how Barrett creates these intricate audio collages and mysterious sonic spaces, but they're full of intriguing abstractions, woozy noises, strange anomalies and psychedelic sound phenomena. Every time you latch onto a recognizable sound, Barrett seems to twist and manipulate it into something challenging and bizarre. The mundane blends with the surreal, and transforms into all kinds of pulsating shapes, rippling forms and eruptive noise. These swirling echoes, fluttering timbres, trippy tones, liquidy textures, glistening bells, vocal fragments and powerful sound design make for such a strange and captivating sound journey...
'Reconfiguring The Landscape' is a fascinating album of unsettling atmospheres, haunting textures, woozy audio manipulation and abstract noise. A bizarre and hypnotic listening experience.
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Tom White - Medina Vibrations
(BrachLiegen Tapes, 2023)
Tom White is an English artist focusing predominantly on sound-based practices such as live performance, installation, recordings, composition for dance and film. He is interested in the physicality and phenomena of sound; how it can be felt by the body and experienced in architectural space.
'Medina Vibrations' is an album consisting of four long-form electroacoustic works that span installation work, studio composition, and live recordings.
On Track 1 ('Medina Vibrations') you will hear environmental sounds (both indoor and outdoor), human shuffling, hard labor, distant birdsong, tape hiss, cavernous echoes, mechanical grinding, looped electromagnetic vibrations and fragmented bursts of abstract industrial noise. These everyday sounds mingling with all the atmospheric sonic abstractions makes for a rather unsettling soundscape...
On Track 2 ('Energiser') you will hear a series of soft, shimmering, dissonant tones, dull muted percussive thuds, gentle babbling water, crowing pheasants, haunting reverberations, ominous rumbles, some object making a twisted glissando effect, and other bizarre noise experimentations on a blanket of ambient audio hiss.
On Track 3 ('Hooligan') you will hear bursts of freaky manipulated voice fragments, subtle muted ambience, eerie shuffling sounds, objects being moved around, broken radio transmissions and electromagnetic waves, pulsating tones, mysterious drones, ominous howling noises, swells of feedback, granular textures and lots of stuttering abstractions drifting in and out of the mix in varying rhythms and intensities.
On Track 4 ('Pebbledash Piece') you will hear a lone rippling tone and tiny rattling sounds pulsating in unison in an empty soundscape. Then you will start to hear shuddering noises, lo-fi crackles, percussive wooden knocks, scintillating steel vibrations, swirling fractured winds, humming motors, eerie sine tones and springy thuds of plastic objects rolling and bouncing off surfaces...
'Medina Vibrations' is an album of abstract soundscapes and strangely haunting concréte assemblage that constantly evolves, evokes and challenges the listener, and makes for a uniquely atmospheric and utterly immersive sound journey.
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Manja Ristić - for what they saw would hit them like a bolt
(self-released, 2023)
Manja Ristić is a violinist, sound artist, field recordist, published poet, curator and researcher from Belgrade, Serbia. She is mostly active in the field of electro-acoustics, instrumental improvisation & experimental sound related arts, and has released many albums - both independently and on reputable record labels.
'for what they saw would hit them like a bolt' is her latest release. It's a 21-minute long composition, and part of an ongoing sound art series based on a poetry collection called 'Stories Untold'.
It begins with a gentle, minimal, slowly-rippling drone. After a few minutes you will hear a series of intimate crackling noises, almost like a fire burning in the wild. This is accompanied by beautiful environmental ambience - the faint distant twittering of birds, the buzzing of insects, flowing water and airy reverberations, as the main drone evolves into deeper and more haunting tones. Then you'll eventually hear some very familiar Ristić sounds - water trickling, babbling and gurgling softly over rocks. Different liquidy tones and watery textures overlap and intermingle with eachother while eerie howling noises swirl through the soundscape. In the final few minutes of the pieces, the field recordings gradually disappear and we're left with nothing but a mesmerizing drone...
'for what they saw would hit them like a bolt' is a haunting yet wonderfully serene composition of beautiful nature sounds and hypnotic drones. To fully appreciate this piece, you should really listen to it through good quality earphones. A dreamy, meditative and captivating listening experience.
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Roberto Vodanović Čopor - Submurged Memories
(Sono Space, 2023)
Roberto Vodanović Čopor is an experimental musician & multimedial artist from Zadar, Croatia. In his music he often incorporates the sounds of nature, the sounds of cities and everyday found objects as part of the atmospheres he creates.
'Submurged Memories' is one 54-minute long sound composition exploring the contrast between the peace and quiet of nature by the sea and the crowded and lively city environment in Dubrovnik. This project uses field recordings from different parts of Dubrovnik to create a unique sound experience that will take listeners on a journey through different aspects of the city.
The composition begins with the sound of beautiful churning sea waves, accompanied by sparse tinkling notes of poignant classical piano music. The notes have a slight delay effect on them, which creates a kind of subtle and vague unease...
Then the music fades away and you will hear the different tranquil tones and soothing watery frequencies of the natural sea. After a while, you will start to hear some slightly sinister drones and dissonant ambience in the background of this gentle image, until you're eventually listening to the sounds of murmured conversation and familiar city noises of the crowded city of Dubrovnik. You will hear footsteps, church bells, distant motors, music through speakers, lively conversation and all the other typical sounds of the hustle and bustle. About halfway through the piece, Čopor does some minimal acoustic guitar experimentations, which is interwoven with the voices of the city. In the latter section of the song, you will hear eerie ambient textures drifting in and out, whilst the field recordings take on a bit more of a surreal aspect. The atmosphere becomes darker, the voices become more ghostly and distant, and haunting echos spread through the soundscape...
Whether this was done during the production of the album, or whether it naturally occurred in the environment/location it was recorded in - I don't know. The piece ends with (what I think is) the sound of running water from a city fountain, which is a very fitting way to complete this project.
'Submurged Memories' is a delicate, mesmerizing and slightly eerie sound art composition, full of intriguing field recordings and subtle atmospherics. A satisfying and immersive listening experience.
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Brandon Auger - OS : IS
(Tool Use Imprint, 2023)
Brandon Auger is a sound artist, improviser and structural builder based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His minimalistic work promotes the amplification of sonic idiosyncrasies in both acoustic and synthetic environments.
'OS: IS' (outer sounds:inner systems) is an album ''composed of mercurial street finds and construction site treasures''.
In these recordings you will hear metallic grinding and banging, mechanical clanking, steel shudderings, tiny drillings, frantic rattling, rapid vibrations, sonorous rumbles, rhythmic clanging, tinkling bells and various kinds of whirring machinery, repetitive drones and industrial noises... all made with raw organic materials that Auger collected, salvaged, built and constructed into his own bizarre devices, which he then brought to life and recorded for this captivating collection of abstract sound art pieces.
'OS: IS' is a unique and fascinating album of bricolages of found objects, sonorous mechanical noises, intense grinding and mesmerizing atmospheres. The elaborate sound sculpting, intricate audio collages and intermingling of noises makes for a rich, immersive and enthralling listening experience.
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nd dentico - hydration / development
(Histamine Tapes, 2023)
nd dentico is an experimental artist based in East Montpelier, Vermont. His music tends to incorporate (and drift between) non-musical sound art, electro-acoustic drone and noisy ambient. He also runs the lo-fi experimental tape label Histamine Tapes.
'hydration / development' is a 2-song release of prepared bass loops and drones. Both of these recordings (of exactly equal length) are minimalistic, raw and organic.
'hydration' begins with the eerie, trembling rattle of steel bass strings, accompanied by a low droning gong-like resonance. The muted plucks, the steel shimmerings and the quiet broodiness of this performance creates a tense atmosphere of foreboding that constantly varies in its intensity. A dark, fragile, immersive drone piece.
'development' begins with a mesmerizing rattling loop, chugging away in mechanical repetition. As the piece progresses, the power and intensity of this frantic sound gradually increases, creating an organic pulsating drone effect. It's even more stripped down and bare than the previous track. There is no musical accompaniment, or background noises... just a singular alluring sound to get lost within.
'hydration / development' is a short and hypnotic release of bare minimalistic sound art, haunting drones, rhythmic rattles, percussive loops and unsettling atmospheres. An immersive, intimate and creepy listening experience.
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Concrète Bending Vol. III - Independence Day
(Veinte33 Records, 2023)
Concrète Bending is a Uruguayan field recordist. This release is Vol.III in an ongoing series of non-musical recordings captured throughout various parts of Montevideo, at various points in time.
'Independence Day' is one 30-minute long field recording of the daily candombe parade in the Palermo neighborhood - one of the main places of Afro-Uruguayan culture - on two separate dates.
Candombe is a style of music and dance that originated in Uruguay among the descendants of liberated African slaves. This music is played during carnival times in Montevideo, and is performed on various percussive drums.
This recording begins with the sound of busy crowds gathered in the streets, getting ready for the festivities. The atmosphere is lively, energetic and jubilant. You will hear people talking and laughing, vehicles beeping, dogs barking and percussive instruments being tuned up and prepared. You will hear various bangs, rattles and rumbles along the way...
Eventually the music kicks in and the soundscape comes alive with cacophonous handclapping, rhythmic drumming and energetic movements. These syncopated rhythms are so wild, powerful and infectious - you can't help swaying as you listen. Around the midway point in the song, it sounds as if the microphone is much closer to the drums than earlier. You can hear and feel the rattles, vibrations, tones and timbres of these hollow wooded instruments, while birds chirp loudly and freely...
Towards the end of the recording, the volume and intensity slowly but gradually decreases, and the boisterous racket fades, until you're just left with an ambient room tone, some human movements, faint voices, distant traffic and dog barking, and a lone cat miaowing. Such an intriguing and engaging listening experience.
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