Hello everyone. Here's my latest roundup of fantastic non-musical recommendations for you. It'll probably be my last one for a while, as I'm planning on taking a little winter break from creating and blogging...
As usual - if you like what you see/hear, please considering supporting these great artists & labels by buying their albums and following them on Bandcamp and/or social media.
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Alma Laprida - Pitch Dark and Trembling
(Outside Time, 2024)
Alma Laprida is an Argentinian multi-disciplinary artist (now living in the U.S) whose creative pursuits encompass composition, improvisation, performance, installation, and radiophonic pieces. She works with sound using an intimate, contemporary language and explores the territories among composition, improvisation, performance and installation.
'Pitch Dark and Trembling' is her new album, consisting of four compositions primarily based on Laprida's performances on the tromba marina - a two-stringed instrument which has origins in medieval Europe, and is played with a bow.
'A Thick Event' begins with a haunting shimmery drone, ripping frequencies, creaky vibrations, eerie rattles and trembling ambience. The dramatic drones created by the tromba marina, along with the atmospherics made by the accompanying effects pedals constantly ebb and flow and fluctuate in irregular patterns and rhythms, while swells of dissonant feedback and low-frequency rumbles help intensify and richen this strange ghostly soundscape...
'Trembling' begins with a series of bow scrapes and shivering drones, which make you feel like you're right there in the recording room with Laprida, creating a rather frightening and unnerving sensation. Then you will start to hear some ominous rhythmic percussion being banged in unison with a series of repetitive squeaks and squalls, which eventually erupts around the halfway point of the composition, filling the audio environment with a cacophony of fierce rattles, bangs, knocks and rapid vibrations. In the last few minutes of the piece, the racket dies down and you're left with a brooding sinister-sounding dronescape, with dissonant feedback loops drifting and swirling within it...
'Vibra' begins with a quiet and unsettling atmosphere filled with environmental sounds, background shuffling noises, soft crackling textures and rippling ambient tones, which eventually becomes a series of menacing growling drones, atmospheric vibrations and monstrous rumblings...
'Trust Me' is a (relatively) mellow and serene sound composition to bring the album to a close. You will hear muted plucks and squeaky tromba tones dancing along together in a playful yet slightly disturbing way. A great way to quietly end this bizarre sonic journey...
'Pitch Dark and Trembling' is a rich and mesmerizing album of ghostly drones, eerie noise experimentation, beautiful free improvisation and haunting sound phenomena. Laprida constantly impresses and astounds me with the spectacular control she has over of such an antiquated musical instrument, and way she's able to express such deep poignant emotion with it. A dark, exquisite and fascinating listening experience.
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Cody Shaffer - A Child's Tale of the Supernatural
(self-released, 2024)
Cody Shaffer is a Chicago-based experimental musician & sound artist interested in perpetual care, objects, intention and ghosts.
'A Child's Tale of the Supernatural' is his latest release - a horror-themed sound work inspired by the cult horror movie of the same title. It consists of three compositions.
'Sketch For Lemora' begins with a fuzzy soundscape of windy drones, crackling textures and eerie ambient noise. Then you will start to hear fragmented voice samples and distant melancholic melodies buried in multiple layers of ferocious noise. During the midsection ''lull'' - howling vocalizations, grainy video static and distorted soundtrack music emerges through the mix, before the whole thing becomes a chaotic noisescape of wild distorted textures and dark menacing tones.
'Road To Astaroth' starts with an ominous field recording of sinister rumbling, crunching footsteps and fragile audio hiss. According to Bandcamp, the original source material for this album came from field recordings of cemeteries, and it does sound like it. As the track progresses, you will hear more harsh noise and angry swells of distortion and feedback, peppered with samples of old-timey folksong, menacing dialogue, murderous screams, gruesome violence and wicked laughter from the movie itself. The track ends with an array of swirling ghostly drones and whispers...
'Sketch For Lila Lee' begins with soft crackling noises, unnerving stillness, wailing screams, maniacal laughter and environmental ambience. Then you will hear faint distant music drifting through the background, while the foreground fills with foreboding wind sounds, vocal fragments and some kind of ambiguous human rustling. In the final stretch of the album, the soundscape fills with frightening layers of rumbling noise, eerie breathing and warped female singing...
'A Child's Tale of the Supernatural' is a haunting and mysterious aural journey of warped field recordings, tortured horror sounds, brooding ambience and dark atmospheric noise experimentation. An eerie and unnerving listening experience, and a great noise record to soundtrack the spooky season.
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crys cole - Making Conversation
(Black Truffle, 2024)
crys cole is a Canadian sound artist based in Berlin, Germany who works in composition, performance, sound sculpture and installation. Taking a conceptual approach, she generates subtle and imperfect sounds through haptic gestures and seemingly mundane materials to create texturally nuanced electro-acoustic works that continuously retune the ear.
'Making Conversation' is her latest album, consisting of ''three rigorously conceptualised commissioned pieces, each of which extend her signature approach to highly amplified small sounds into new directions.''
The title track begins with a quiet nocturnal soundscape, punctuated by warped and manipulated sounds of buzzing flies, chirruping crickets, twittering birds, croaking reptiles, barking dogs and a plethora of other fluttering insect and distant night creature sounds - all reverberating, echoing and resonating throughout this unique environmental that the artist has created. You will also hear various crunching noises, woody rattles, stuttering glitches, pulsing drones, ambiguous thuds, ominous rumbles and eerie vocalizations. These organic, electronic and concrete sound sources all strangely weave in and out of each other, resulting in a rich and entrancing audio collage that's peaceful, spatial and vaguely creepy.
The second track begins with a series of sounds created by an object being rolled from side to side of an empty desolate space. Within this seemingly simple sounds, you will hear an array of varying tones and frequencies, papery frictional noises, muted rumbles and layer upon layer of hypnotic sonic textures.
The third track consists of a transcription for a MIDI percussion ensemble. You will hear a series of frantic metallic shimmers, stuttery shakes, windy whistles, broody hollow thuds and eruptive bangs - all executed in unpredictable rhythmic patterns and erratic timings.
'Making Conversation' is a very spatial and meditative album of vibrant field recordings, minimalistic sound composition, non-musical ambience and abstract sonic experimentation. cole's signature amplification methods and complex manipulation techniques make for a strangely serene and utterly mesmerizing listening experience.
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https://cryscole.bandcamp.com/album/making-conversation
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Free Tala - Underwater Sounds to Lure the Fishes
(SATATUHATTA, 2024)
Free Tala is a project by Finnish sound artist & experimental musician Juho Toivonen. He has released various works under his own name, and he also runs the Finnish record label AKTI.
'Underwater Sounds to Lure the Fishes' is his second release under the Free Tala moniker. It's an album consisting of three sound compositions (two longform and one shortform) that explore deep sea drones and noise...
'Specimen I' begins with a deep underwater dronescape. The ambience of this dronescape is deceivingly complex and intricate in tone, frequency and texture - much like the sound of the sea itself. You will hear densely-layered noises fill the atmosphere - gurgling, shimmering, hissing, groaning and wavering away, alternately dipping and rising with intensity. There are definitely segments that resemble sheer noisescapes, as opposed to anything musical or melodic. You will hear fleeting moments of dissonant frequencies and swells of distortion, on top of the constant deep oceanic rumble. And towards the end of the track (if you listen closely) you will hear some beautiful lo-fi ambience emerge through the mix...
'Specimen II' is the shortest track of the album, sandwiched between the two long ones. It begins with woozy ascending and descending waves of ambient sound before eventually dipping into momentary silence, which is then followed by powerful whooshing oceanic noise...
'Specimen III' begins with a wonky undulating drone, and some subtle distortions around the edges. As the piece progresses, the repetitive drone gathers strength, power and momentum. There are wonderful atmospheric resonances and harmonics occurring within this intricate soundscape. And as the album nears its end, everything becomes more mellow and almost melancholic in its feel...
'Underwater Sounds to Lure the Fishes' is a hauntingly beautiful album full of deep underwater drones, watery ambience, gurgling lo-fi distortions and atmospheric noise experimentation. An immersive and trace-inducing listening experience.
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Daniela Huerta - Soplo
(Elevator Bath, 2024)
Daniela Huerta is a Berlin-based Mexican multimedia artist, sound designer, and DJ. Huerta places an interest in mythology at the center of her practice, using it as a springboard to explore the origins of consciousness, archetypes, rituals, and collective memory.
'Soplo' is her debut solo album. It begins with a beautiful forest-like soundscape of sloshing, gurgling water that's being softly sucked and drained from some kind of pool, along with sweet cacophonous birdsong and airy environmental ambience. Then you will start to hear some gentle, dreamy, muted melodies emerge through the mix, performed by some kind of hollowed-out percussive instrument. As the track comes to an end, the intensity of the environmental sounds ramp up, and they gradually become more prominent and loud, as the musical aspect diminishes and eventually dies down...
Throughout the rest of the album, you will hear a vast array of atmospheric drones, ghostly vocalizations, shimmering dissonance, swirling ambient noise, resonant bells, intimate watery gurgles, eerie reverberations, haunting echoes, distant explosions, puttering distortions, strange vibrations, rippling synth melodies and a plethora of sonic anomalies.
'Soplo' is a wonderful album of abstract noisescapes, hypnotic drones, intriguing field recordings and hallucinatory sound experimentation - a dark, atmospheric, textural journey through a series of strange and ambiguous environments. A rich, fascinating and otherworldly listening experience.
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Robert Stokowy - Lake Eerie
(self-released, 2023)
Robert Stokowy is a German-born sound artist whose work consists of conceptual sound art, text-based interventions, performances and installations, mainly focusing on the inner structural characteristics of both found and created sonic environments.
'Lake Eerie' is a longform sound composition (comprised of outdoor recordings and split into two parts) which was made for the exhibition "The Horror in Printmaking”
at KGW, Cologne, Germany in
August 4th - September 1st, 2023.
The piece was created as a conceptual extension based on the exhibition's themes and artworks. You can read more about the details of this exhibition at the Bandcamp link below...
'Part I' begins with a slightly-menacing shimmery drone, slowly gathering volume and intensity, while you hear an array of environmental noises in the background - the whoosh of passing traffic, trilling birdsong and something that almost sounds like a squeaky hinge, while different layers of spectral ambience and ominous drones weave in and out each other, creating an atmosphere of thick brooding dissonance and tension. Throughout the rest of the composition you will hear resonant bell-like tones, crackling textures of noise, shuddering layers of fuzz, howling wails, sinister echoes, eerie bangs, creepy rumbles, room sounds, doors opening and closing and other ghostly abstractions. In the last few minutes of the piece, the noise quietens down and you will hear soft dreamy bell tones playing out a soothing yet unsettling melody.
'Part II' begins with a swell of dark atonal noise, accompanied by some rippling drones. Like the previous track, you will hear various environmental sounds emerging out of the mix, but from the way they've been processed and manipulated - it's really hard to distinguish what they are, or where they came from...but as the artist says himself - the origin of these sounds is unimportant. Throughout this track you will hear suspenseful ambient tones mixing and merging in the air, whooshing roaring noises, sinister drones, lonely reverberations, subtle creepy melodies and airy layers of noise. The more I listened to this piece, the more I realized that the structure and the movements of it were very similar to the first part - almost like it was trying to mirror it, or bounce off it... which makes the whole composition even more cohesive and hypnotic.
'Lake Eerie' is a surreal and haunting sound piece, filled with tense atmospheres, ghostly ambience, menacing drones and mysterious environmental noises. Stokowy's intriguing field recordings, and his ominous sound manipulation techniques makes for a eerie and immersive listening experience.
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nula.cc - every forever is written in rust
(self-released, 2024)
nula.cc is the brainchild of intermedia artist Lloyd Dunn. It comprises sound works, photographs, travelogue essays and similar digital artifacts, which often reflect the artist’s frequent travels and esthetic thinking.
'every forever is written in rust' is an album consisting of four sound compositions - four parts of an audio travelogue...
'bus station' begins with a vibrant soundscape of whooshing winds, distant birdsong, flowing water, industrial rumblings and other environmental sound phenomena - swirling and drifting around in such a mesmerizing way. As the track slowly and gradually unfolds, you will hear the ebb and flow of various crackling textures, atonal drones, soothing vibrations, metallic shimmers and eerie minimalistic ambience... ending with a field recording of some kind of foreign folk song performance that merges wonderfully with the haunting atmosphere that Dunn has created...
'driving rain' starts off with the singular tone of (what I think could be) some kind of industrial mechanism. Accompanying this is a series of deep rumbles, weather noises, locomotive sounds and layers of wavering distortions, in various tones and frequencies. This track is intense...
'electric wind and ocean' begins with the sound of crackling static, broken transmissions, howling ambience and unnerving steel shimmers. As the track progresses you will hear the emergence of murmured voices, fractured audio hiss and ominous drones... ending in a super slow meandering fade out.
'valence' begins with a series of distant echoes and cavernous reverberations, while eerie dissonant tones slowly emerge out of the background, creating a dark hollow industrial soundscape. Eventually you will hear undulating drones, creepy knocking sounds, shuffling movements and some slightly sinister mechanical noises. Towards the end of the piece, when the intensity starts to die down - you will hear a variety of unsettling reversed sounds and ambiguous room noises.
'every forever is written in rust' is an album of captivating field recordings, hypnotic noise, ghostly drones and mysterious environmental sound phenomena. It's a fascinating and fleeting audio excursion into uniquely atmospheric territories, and makes for such a strange and compelling listening experience.
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Matt Atkins - Disrupted Paths
(Histamine Tapes, 2024)
Matt Atkins is a London based sound and visual artist whose principle interests are reductionism, chance, repetition and texture. He uses objects, percussion instruments, occasionally a laptop and cassette recorders to create sound collages in both the recorded medium and live, often in collaborative performances.
'Disrupted Paths' is an album made from "...explorations of internal feedback from a small mixing desk, with tremolo and phaser pedals...".
It begins with a soft crackling texture, puttering away in a repetitive looping pattern...while in the background you can hear faint steel-like tinkling sounds. Then you will start to hear a series of noise bursts, along with some subtle atmospheric drones and dissonant tones.
Throughout the rest of the album you will hear rhythmic stuttering, atonal audio hiss, fragmented frequencies, trembling tones, whooshing drones, warped bells and some quiet ghostly ambience - resonating and ricocheting throughout this confined barren soundscape.
'Disrupted Paths' is an alluring album of abstract sound experimentation, textured loops and glitchy ambient noise. Atkins' style of noise sculpting and his minimalistic sound design in these pieces make for a meditative and slightly eerie listening experience.
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Aki Onda - Transmissions From The Radio Midnight
(Dinzu Artefacts, 2023)
Aki Onda is an artist and composer. His musical and visual works are often catalyzed by and structured around memories—personal, collective, historical—such as his widely-known project "Cassette Memories", drawn from three decades of field recordings (or, as Onda refers to them, ‘sound diaries’). After residing in New York for many years, he currently lives and works in Mito, Japan.
'Transmissions From The Radio Midnight' is an album consisting of two longform sound compositions, based on radio transmissions, tones, textures and overlapping frequencies recorded from various hotel rooms that the artist stayed in.
It begins with an ambient crackling bed of wavering radio static, as the radio dial searches for a station. Once found, you will start to hear overlapping voices in two different languages - one female, one male. The fragile radio hiss constantly fluctuates, cracks and pops. You will also hear brief fleeting fragments of music and singing drifting in and out of the mix....
Throughout the rest of these two compositions, you will hear a series of flurries of gathering distortion, warbling ambient noise, ghostly wailing tones, fuzzy atonal drones, haunting rumbles, burbling static, hissing pulsations, news broadcasts, interviews and political commentaries in English, French and various Latin, Scandinavian and Middle Eastern languages. At various sections of both pieces, multiple layers of voices start overlapping and interweaving with each other in a hallucinatory cacophony of indistinguishable words.
'Transmissions From The Radio Midnight' is an intriguing album of fragmented radio transmissions, crackling textures, fluctuating frequencies and a bizarre maelstrom of voices, bleeding into each other from various parts of the globe. A wonderful mix of avant-garde sound experimentation and mesmerizing noise art, which makes for a haunting and atmospheric yet strangely relaxing listening experience.
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Nicholas Maloney - ±
(Modern Tapes, 2024)
Nicholas Maloney is a prolific sound artist currently based in Nashville, Tennessee. Working across a variety of aesthetics, Maloney’s work seeks to engage an expansion of perception through focused interaction and communion with medium.
'±' is an album consisting of two longform sound compositions, created from field recordings, live recordings and minimal synth.
'±088 (fossil)' begins with a subtle soundscape of delicate field recordings, manipulated and transmuted into breezy waves of soothing noise. There are hidden intricacies and phenomena to be discovered within this sound, while you gradually hear the subtle emergence of an airy synth drone, becoming part of the beautiful ambience of the piece. This gradually builds in intensity until everything suddenly dies down and becomes extremely quiet, gentle and dreamy. Wavering tones hover and resonate gently around this empty audio environment, before eventually getting noisier again, while other field recordings (e.g crunching footsteps) become part of the ambience.
In the final stretch of the piece, you will hear ambiguous gurgling, crackling and hissing sounds, quietening way down as the last soothing tones nicely ring out...
'4304 (oganesson)' begins with a low crackling wind-like drone, slowly swirling and pulsing away in this eerie barren audio environment. As the track progresses, you can hear subtle fluctuations and variations in the muted tones and sleepy frequencies that makes up this blanket of tranquil noise, gradually getting louder and slightly more forceful.
In the latter half of the piece, the ambience dies away and you will hear a series of shuffling sounds, watery gurgles, weird blips, noisy drones, sine tones, and electronic experimentation... which takes us near the end of the piece, where you will once again be aurally soothed by the mellow drift of some kind of manipulated field recording...
'±' is a beautiful album of peaceful drones, exquisite field recordings, minimal synth ambience and mesmerizing noise. A delightfully engrossing listening experience.
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Andrew Burge - A Pressure Point in Time
(Human Geography Recordings, 2024)
Andrew Burge exports minimal compositions, lo-fi noise drones, textures - both under his own name, and also through the moniker Bacfora.
He is also the owner of Human Geography Recordings. He collaborates in ‘Jaycock/Burge’ and in ‘Nunton Experimental Complex.
'A Pressure Point in Time' is an EP consisting of two dronescapes of equal length.
It begins with slow undulating waves of ambient noise, along with a series of dark atmospheric rumblings. As the piece progresses and the intensity ramps up, you will notice subtle fluctuations with the electronic textures, and squalling bursts of feedback that swirl around the haunting soundscape...
The second track follows a similar trajectory to the first... kind of like an alternative version, or a separate take of the same idea. Listening closely, you'll be able to tell certain differences in frequency and tone which sets these two compositions apart. I found that in the second piece the ambient noise glistens and shimmers more... but the overall effect of both tracks is a mesmeric one.
'A Pressure Point in Time' is a short but powerful EP of haunting noisescapes, menacing drones, brooding atmospheres and mysterious textures. An unsettling yet hypnotic listening experience.
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harte echtzeit - ji kū kan
(Call It Anything Records, 2024)
harte echtzeit (HE) is a scientist whose mind is bent in a strange sort of emotional way which allows for inspiration to flow. HE works with algorithms, data, live coding and music since 2022, with a series of gravitational wave field recordings as HEs first album-length performance.
'ji kū kan' is his first full-length album, and was created using tidal waves and samples of gravitational wave detections.
It begins with a series of strange rhythmic percussive sounds against a background of airy atonal ambience. You will also hear erratic swells of ambiguous noise, crackling textures, stuttering drones, descending tones, warped frequencies and demented techno beats... all repeating themselves over and over in bizarre, unpredictable and unsettling polyrhythms in this bare abstract audio environment.
Throughout the rest of the album you will hear ominous pulsations, swirling flutters, menacing beats, glitchy electronics, eerie reverberations, warbling tones, rapid frequency fluctuations, soft watery gurgles and a plethora of fragile fractured rhythms, which all merge and combine into these surreal otherworldly atmospheres that completely suck you in and don't let go...
'ji kū kan' is an atmospheric album of cosmic soundscapes - filled with demented "dance" rhythms, erratic pulsations, minimal techno, mesmerizing drones and experimental musique concrète. I can't claim to understand the technicalities of live coding, or how these compositions were created... but I can definitely appreciate the uniqueness of it, and enjoy this abstract aural adventure! An unnerving yet trance-inducing listening experience.
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Simon Whetham - Channelling
(Flag Day Recordings, 2024)
Simon Whetham is a British sound artist who repurposes environmental sound, space, found objects and salvaged devices, resulting in sonic collages that are both meditative and thought provoking.
'Channelling' is his latest release - a kinetic sound performance (in twelve segments) that utilizes various components salvaged from discarded and obsolete consumer technology, and reanimating them by piping amplified sound through them...
The album begins with a jarring burst of intricate broken sound, like an old mechanism collapsing in on itself. Then you will hear a series of intense frictional rattling, scraping, chugging, crackling, banging and pulsing noises - ebbing and flowing in wild creaky dissonances. I don't know what these devices look like, but the way the different components interact and respond to each other is incredibly erratic and complex. Throughout these pieces you will become immersed in the sound of old motors chugging and dying, structural rattling, frantic puttering, rapid metallic vibrations, subtle creaks, low rumbles, tortured scrapes, dragged objects, squeaking mechanisms, churning rotary sounds and muted warbling... punctuated by moments of serene stillness, and sometimes dead silence.
'Channelling' is a powerful album of physical sound art and abstract noise experimentation. In these riveting performances, Whetham manages to aurally capture the tiny complex interactions between various small objects using unique recording techniques and close micing... resulting in layer upon layer of friction, decay and dissonance. A strangely meditative and fascinating listening experience.
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E Millar - artificial field recording
(Mystery & Wonder, 2023)
E Millar (Elizabeth Millar) is a sound and multi-disciplinary artist, experimental musician and composer. She works primarily with acoustic and electronic sound, texture, repetition, duration and structure. She creates sound sculptures from small electronic components and found materials, composes and performs text and video scores, and collaborates across the disciplines of installation, choreography and videography.
'artificial field recording' is an album of seven sound compositions ''made by layering recordings of kinetic sound sculptures with excerpts of auditory urban environments of the Notre-Dame-de-Grace neighbourhood of Montreal.''
It begins with a series of steel tingling sounds from tiny objects dangling from (judging from the track title) a clothes horse, which I imagine was either manually moved by the artist, or the natural elements, or perhaps it's on some kind of rotary device?... whatever the case - the various frequencies, tones, clicks and polyrhythms produced by these moving objects dance and intermingle in such a mesmerizing way... while the background is filled with whooshing environmental noises.
After that we're transported to a completely different location and sound environmental. You will hear a metal bangle being knocked about gently and percussively, against a backdrop of whooshing traffic, revving motors, twittering birdsong and urban ambience.
Throughout the rest of the album, you will hear a series of rapidly vibrating steel chains, wailing police sirens, passing vehicles, clinking keys, yelling children, snippets of passing conversations, shimmering cymbals, barking dogs, grinding mechanisms, soft woolly felt scrapes, weather noises, airy ambience and atonal drones.
'artificial field recording' is a beautiful and meditative album of tiny repetitive sounds, rich environmental field recordings and subtle audio experimentation. Millar's intriguing sound sculpting techniques, ambiguous atmospherics and minimalistic compositional approach makes for a hypnotic and captivating listening experience.
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Vorval - Reaching Through
(self-released, 2024)
Vorval (a.k.a Andy Fray) is a British sound artist that transforms field recordings of everyday noises into stark atmospheric compositions of abstract minimalism.
'Reaching Through' is his latest release, consisting of one 25-minute long dronescape. The whole composition is comprised of a few different layers of distorted noise that weave in and out of this strange barren musical landscape, ebbing and flowing, gaining more and more intensity and wavering dissonance as the track progresses.
In the background you can hear the faint warbling sounds of objects being rattled, scraped, shaken and banged...creating a series of atmospheric thuds and shimmery auditory phenomena. The vibe and feel of the piece remains pretty much the same throughout the entire 25 minutes, but it's a wonderfully dark and immersive 25 minutes. I actually wish this was even longer!
'Reaching Through' is a haunting brilliant sound composition, full of rippling drones, mysterious atonal ambience and powerful layers of dark beautiful noise. A brooding, immersive and spellbinding listening experience.
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