This is my weekly(ish) answer to the question “What have you been listening to lately?” It’s lightly annotated because I don’t like re-posting material without providing some context. In the interest of conversation, let me know what you’re listening to in the comments below. Just please don’t promote your own work (or that of your label/client). This isn’t the right venue. (Just use email.)
▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ ▰ NEW: Recent(ish) arrivals and pre-releases
▰ The Castle of Our Skins ensemble has been running a challenge to black composers to create miniature compositions. The latest is a piece for viola and voice, composed by Yaz Lancaster, and performed by Ashleigh Gordon. It’s less than a minute long, and every second has been taken into consideration. (Thanks again, Tom May, of memeteria.com, for having introduced me to Castle of Our Skins.)
▰ This album of various Norah Lorway tracks from the past decade is a powerful collection of music made in the audio-coding language SuperCollider and employing field recordings. And Then You Win ranges from light glitchy atmospheres (“Crackly Sky”) to pulsing techno (“Clatter”), nine tracks in all.
▰ The Japanese musician Michiru Aoyama, who runs the small Bullflat3.8 record label, uploads an enormous amount of ambient music to his SoundCloud account, often multiple tracks today. “Recording 20200606060100” is a lush, shoegazy trip with a sedate but promiment pulse.
These recommendations look excellent, Marc – I’ll definitely check them out this week! From my end, I’ve been mesmerised by a recent work by Alvin Lucier called Ricochet Lady (2016). The release on Black Truffle collects four performances of the same work – for solo performer and glockenspiel. The key to the work – much like virtually all of Lucier’s work – is in the acoustic properties of the performance space. The performance itself consists of rapid pulses, exploring the range and interval relations of the instrument. Amidst the flurry of notes, the resonant properties of the space are articulated and respond in kind. In this respect, each of the four performances are totally unique, but there’s so much to get drawn into within a single performance. What blew me away in particular was the spatial dimension of the pulses (you can discern/parse the impulse, fundamental, overtones) and the way timbral and resonant elipses float, hover and spin around. A great headphone experience. Astounding work, and all the more astounding for a guy who’s nearly 90!
https://blacktruffle.bandcamp.com/album/ricochet-lady
Thanks so much for this, Tristan. I didn’t know of this label, or this work, previously. Headphones on!
Great! Yeah, Black Truffle is Oren Ambarchi/Crys Cole’s label and I believe they’ve only just migrated the catalogue to Bandcamp with lossless digital as an optional format. Oren’s been doing an amazing job of profiling Lucier’s work in recent years, insofar that Black Truffle is basically Alvin’s label and it’s providing an excellent platform for heaps of his work. Once I’d caught wind that digital editions were available (having previously been restricted to vinyl and CD) I’ve been all over it!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DzxlMfUzqIM