Laura Cannell and Kate Ellis in Mutual Exile

The latest in a year-long, long-distance collaboration

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Laura Cannell, from England, and Kate Ellis, from Ireland, are a pair of musicians collaborating at a distance on a year-long project in mutual isolation. Each month they release a new collection that pairs the former’s violin with the latter’s cello, along with other elements, notably Cannell’s angelic voice and light production techniques, such as a deep, unresolved echo. In combination, the dozen months of this work-in-progress are titled *These Feral Lands – A Year Documented in Sound and Art*. The final track of the March edition of *Feral Lands* came with a mention that it was the first time the duo had recorded simultaneously, and that they did so over the phone, which circumstances suggest that all of January and February, as well as the lion’s share of March, were accomplished with overdubbing: one musician supplying the other with material to subsequently complement. The April set is another batch of charactertistically verdant wonder, with Ellis adding double bass to the kit and Cannell’s voice taking on a shoegaze-like ethereality.

Album originally posted at [brawlrecords.bandcamp.com](https://brawlrecords.bandcamp.com/album/april-sounds). More from Cannell at [lauracannell.co.uk](http://www.lauracannell.co.uk/) and Ellis at [kateelliscello.com](http://kateelliscello.com/).

Current Favorites: Raw Material, Black Samurai, Deft Esoterica

Heavy rotation, lightly annotated

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

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.

▰ Raw material is often some of my favorite listening, and so while these short loops (collected as [*Field Notes 02*](https://sjfmusic.bandcamp.com/album/field-notes-02-sample-pack)) by Simon James French are intended as source audio for music-making, in fact the ambient tones, field recordings, and general droning-goodness are fine just unto themselves.

▰ Flying Lotus (Steven Ellison) scored the new Netflix anime series *Yasuke*, about an African-born samurai, and while the [soundtrack album](https://flyinglotus.bandcamp.com/album/yasuke) has plenty of cinematic instrumental hip-hop (“Using What You Got” is a particular fave), it also has chill for days (check out “Shoreline Sus” and “Enchanted”).

▰ Claude and Ola Aldous publish the zine *Deft Esoterica*, and they also make their own deftly esoteric music, on display on [*vol*](https://tqn-aut.bandcamp.com/album/vol), nine tracks of rangy experimentalism, with an emphasis on noisy field recordings, fragile piano, and old-school scifi synthesizer.

▰ As I mentioned [yesterday](https://disquiet.com/2021/05/01/twitter-com-disquiet-voice-recognition-robot-dreams/), I’ve never actually played *Cyberpunk 2077*, but I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with YouTube videos of its ambient street noise playing on loop. [This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsbalTIJQEg) is a good example, though the title is a bit ambiguous, so possibly not all the sound is from the game itself:

twitter.com/disquiet: Voice Recognition, Robot Dreams

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each week, collating tweets I made at [twitter.com/disquiet](https://twitter.com/disquiet/), my public notebook. Some tweets pop up (in expanded form) on Disquiet.com sooner. It’s personally informative to revisit the previous week of thinking out loud.

▰ I didn’t tweet that much this week, but I did ride my bike for the first time in a long time, so I may live longer and tweet less per week, yielding the same number of tweets in the end as if I’d lived shorter and tweeted more. Or something like that.

▰ Turning my phone’s alarm off isn’t easy, yet once in a while I manage to do it with no memory of having done it. Today I woke a half hour late when a robot called to renew some insurance policy I don’t actually have, which in the past would itself have been a dream narrative.

▰ These not uncommon words seem to be black diamond ski slopes for voice-recognition systems:

“midst”
“amidst”

After I mentioned this, a friend asked why didn’t I just say “amid.” It’s a valid question.

▰ I’ve never actually played *Cyberpunk 2077*, but I’ve spent an enormous amount of time with YouTube videos of its ambient street noise playing on loop.

▰ These are among the quotidian sounds being turned into music so far in the week’s Disquiet Junto project ([disquiet.com/0487](http://disquiet.com/0487)). The project was inspired by the carillon, which some 500 years back “instrumentalized” the common bell by letting you plan them, each bell with a different tune.

– staircase creaking

– elevator recording “ruined” by RF interference

– coffee grinder

– spring peepers (frogs)

– door leading to a small room

▰ And on that note, have a great weekend.

Creak

A mesostic

/ By Marc Weidenbaum 
                   BeCause this old building  
               is neaRly a 
                    cEntury into its existence
it's developed quite A vocabulary
            with its Knotty wood floors

Update: And [again](https://disquiet.com/2021/04/29/mesostic-bark/), shortly after I posted this to Twitter, I was rewarded with [a remix](https://twitter.com/GuyBirkin/status/1388183795157905411) by Guy Birkin:

Because this old buildinG
       is nearly a centuRy into its existence
              it's develOped quite 
                   a vocAbulary with its 
                       kNotty wood floors