The album Nuvoloso is named in Italian for the place where the sounds it contains were once housed. The word means cloudy. The place is SoundCloud. Or was. Chris Herbert, who released Nuvoloso late last month, has abandoned the platform, and here collects material he once hosted there, from the fully charged guitar explorations of “Charles Bullen” (seemingly named for the This Heat band member), to the steam-powered industrial music of “Neues Zodiak Free Arts Lab,” to the atmospheric fragments that charactertize the two opening tracks, “Macrolanguage” and “Live Architecture (Submerged/Factured),” as well as the elegant unease of “Untitled Tape Sketch.”
SoundCloud is often at its best for sketches, a way by which musicians can quickly check in with their listeners and collaborators. Herbert summarizes the scenario well in his accompanying note, explaining he used the site “as an audio diary for pieces that contained germinal ideas or material that was below the threshold for release but nevertheless indicated some kind of development: there’s a range and scope that is quite different in nature to my usual output.”
Album originally posted at chrisherbert.bandcamp.com. More from Herbert, who is based in Birmingham, England, at chrisherbert.net.
Thanks for sharing, Marc, I’d missed this one and really like Chris Herbert’s stuff. So far I’m enjoying the wider scope – a good reminder that as a music-maker I might lean towards making an album or EP fit a narrower range than I enjoy as a listener!