A 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. I hope to write more about some of these in the future, but didn’t want to delay sharing them. (This weekly feature was previously titled Current Listens. The name’s been updated for clarity’s sake.)
▰ Matt Madden’s three-minute “Tme No Radar on Emit” is a mix of atmospheres, most of them misty and somber, artfully so. A repeated line hints at a foghorn’s signal, some white noise at rough weather. That it’s guitar and a ventilator, according to Madden’s own description, just adds to the sense of being transported.
▰ Listen as a dense drone emerges from Femi Fleming’s January 25 live tape performance. What begins as ringing and mottled grows turbulent and orchestral as time passes.
▰ Live Ateliers Claus captures a pair of rangy performances by Gaël Segalen. A French sound artist, Segalen, who also goes by IhearU, is heard here moving between hyperreal urban noise, Fourth World rhythms, and dramatically processed field recordings.
▰ A set of field recordings by Jeremy Hegge from a summer journey during 2019, one that took him from Chongqing, China, to Hong Kong, to Xinjiang, to Kazakhstan. The tracks are labeled by time of day (morning, afternoon, night), helping to set the context for insects, frogs, and street noise.
Thanks so much for sharing this, Marc. The “foghorn”-like pulse in the background is actually sampled from a TV documentary about Brian Eno from 1973 (!) that was briefly on youtube. In one interview sequence this tape loop is playing in the background. Its sounds vaguely like it could be a little background snippet from the very end of Here Come the Warm Jets (the song).
Nice! Thanks for that detail. I’d seen mention of the Eno-related sound in your note on SoundCloud, but hadn’t realized it was that sound. Cool. I love this piece.