Oceans Above And Skies Below, by the London-based musician who goes by the name still fades (lowercase), is well-titled. The tracks on the album are often oceanic in their scale and, when not, have a slowly billowing quality. And when oceanic, they emphasize the sublime: the surface below which much is happening. Heavy echoes here of Harold Budd’s music, in a good way. More from still fades at instagram.com/stillfades and youtube.com/@stillfades.
The musician also runs Sound Ghost, which makes synthesizer plug-ins, sound packs, virtual instruments, and other tools. Details at soundghost.net. I’m especially interested in musicians who make instruments and instrument makers who make music, because those parallel paths suggest a tight feedback loop in terms of utility, on that taps into the sense that anyone who makes things that helps musicians is a sort of meta-musician.
It’s hard to define in specific terms what distinguishes generic drones from interesting ones, as sometimes the difference can be a matter of context, but generally it’s because something is happening in the drone, perhaps a richness to the overtones, perhaps additional sonic elements. The quality can be fairly subtle and, yet, substantively transformative. Both those latter points — the overtones and the extraneous sounds — are central to The Roots of the Mountain Ash Embrace The Stone II by composer Natalia Beylis.
The sounds — thick as a chocolate shake — are made from a pump organ. Beylis’ interest is the way the simple act of the air making its way through the device creates microtonal variations. In addition, there is something almost alive in the creaking of the instrument. As she puts it in the accompanying liner note: “The clatters and groans heard within this recording are the sounds of my old pump organ leaning into its idiosyncratic self.”
This isn’t meditative music, per se, because at times the dense sine waves of the organ speed up, and then they quickly, even suddenly, subside. Such is not the stuff of a peaceful listen. However, it is fascinating as music to make peace with, to enter into a contract with to just listen for the half hour or so straight, and follow where the sounds take you. More from Beylis, who is based in Ireland, at nataliabeylis.com.
On Sundays I try to at least quickly note some of my favorite listening from the week prior — things I would later regret having not written about in more depth, so better to share here briefly than not at all.
▰ I’m still in the process of wrapping my head around the highly imaginative Estuario by Juliana Kaiser, who mixes tonal synthesizers, environmental field recordings, rickety percussive ticks, and slightly muffled voice recordings, among other elements. Intoxicating and transporting. It’s almost like a drama-less radio drama. Kaiser is from Patagonia, Argentina, and lives in Buenos Aires.
▰ I’m a sucker for that realm where the orchestral, the glacial, and the granular become virtually indistinguishable, and such is the case with Drift by LA EL, who is based in Houston, Texas:
▰ After the Wildfire is a fantastic album of Fourth World music from Jan Bang (“live sampling, electronics”) and Arve Henriksen (“trumpet, voice”), though despite the title credits, it’s actually a quartet, rounded out by Eivind Aarset (“guitar, electronics”) and Ingar Zach (“percussion”), and in fact more than that, as it also involves them playing “set within the orchestral textures shaped by” the FAMES Institute Orchestra and Macedonian voices, arranged and conducted by Džijan Emin. The quartet are all from Norway. The other musicians are based in the Republic of North Macedonia, where the sponsoring body for this work, the Skopje Jazz Festival, is based.
The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it.
/ By Marc Weidenbaum
Each Thursday in the Disquiet Junto music community, a new compositional challenge is set before the group’s members, who then have five days to record and upload a track in response to the project instructions.
Membership in the Junto is open: just join and participate. (A SoundCloud account is helpful but not required.) There’s no pressure to do every project. The Junto is weekly so that you know it’s there, every Thursday through Monday, when your time and interest align.
Disquiet Junto Project 0715: Err Apparent The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it.
Step 1: Play something wrong and record it. The sequence could be a fumble at a keyboard, or a series of bum notes on a guitar, or a erroneous beat.
Step 2: Emphasize the flaws from Step 1 through repetition and variation, and in the process record a piece of music.
Tasks Upon Completion:
Label: Include “disquiet0715” (no spaces/quotes) in the name of your track.
Upload: Post your track to a public account (SoundCloud preferred but by no means required). It’s best to focus on one track, but if you post more than one, clarify which is the “main” rendition.
License: It’s preferred (but not required) to set your track as downloadable and allowing for attributed remixing (i.e., an attribution Creative Commons license).
Please Include When Posting Your Track:
More on the 715th weekly Disquiet Junto project, Err Apparent — The Assignment: Make a mistake on purpose. Build something from it — at https://disquiet.com/0715/.
This past week or so, the musician who goes by the name nzfs, and who is based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, has posted a series of elegant ambient videos, often combining guitar with software. They are striking, how they merge a color wash and background footage to evoke a sense of place, while playing music that seems less than rooted in the everyday.
In this recent slate of pieces, a central tool for nzfs has been VCV Rack, which boats a richly featured free version, and is a great entry point into synthesizers. The “VCV Rack & Guitar | nzfs Ambient #126“ video is pleasing excursion into processed guitar, here taking on a quality a bit like a muffled sitar. There is also a soaring quality to the soloing that nzfs, welcomingly, pushes down in the mix, burying it in thickets of tones and patterns.
