SV Digression 316: Muttley's Deli 1st July 2018 - A Frashen Ambient Reresher

Muttley's Deli - 01/07/2018 - A Frashen Ambient Refresher

Originally all published by Daniel Crossley editor on www.fluid-radio.co.uk.

Mark Templeton - Distorted Tourist

If you're familiar with the work of Mark Templeton, you'll know he likes to miniaturise and extemporise a context on top. In terms of musical chops, he chooses sounds that fit the rustic ambient palette, and uses contextual signposts to impression something deeper out of the material. This is what academics mean by extemporising, as far as this layman knows - what I do know is that "Distorted Tourist", a fifteen-minute travelogue into the realms of Herzogian theoretics, is a mighty fine artefact to have, here presented as a book stroke disc operation, and without all the philosophical asides, stands without inebriation.

On its own steam the music could dissolve into the aether too quickly, but this is Templeton's knack: he manages to surfeit the purpose of a worthy riff to continue and bubble-build throughout each recording, so that by the end of each phase, we're left with a general happiness about how things have been going, hearing, et cetera and so on. The music is impossible to pin down to a certain few elements, always evolving without nascent unease, and always purposeful. This is the key strength of the release, whereas other producers might leave less brush daubs on the material, and let the potential decelerate into an arcadian decay.

Stylistically Templeton has always been in the same sort of cache as modern composition composers, such as Deaf Center (Huw Roberts and Otto A. Totland) and James Leyland Kirby (The Caretaker). But there's greater urgency to his work than those artists and a revolvent absorbancy on the factors that can make musique concrete so delectable (see Michael Chion, Trevor Wishart, etc). The fact that over the course of five tracks so much is communicated - without the rusticness becoming chokingly soft - this is the compositional genius. I genuinely think this EP, call it that if you must, deserves to be heard by everyone, and if you were a fan of 2008's "Standing On A Hummingbird" LP. Likewise, it's a superb little nugget.

Federico Dal Pozzo - Untitled V20

Federico Dal Pozzo's latest Krysalisound recording is full of minute pleasures, a ice race avoiding the pinnacle of an all out avalanche. Instead, the sound waves are condensed drone designs based on sound design in its purest form: hum and counterpoint.

Much of the music relies on driving ground fissures, trips to metropolis, and like being stuck in a bunker, a firm grasp of the natural architecture of buildings. So in all, the music is wide ranging with all the experimentalism of a electromagnet inside a complex tape loop studio. One just has to tap on "play" to drift off to the hums of wonder within...

My favourite thing about "VZ0" is its concentric circles, its eddies and loops. These loops transform your sonic environment and offset any energy required to listen to them, meaning they are positively enveloping. I find nothing negative about this record, it's very pure, and succinctly put in its stylistic symbolism. It seems to enact a constructed set of poles that keep tessellating among moving waves of dozy sound. And there are washes of rhythmic passivity too, nothing aggressively done, just true float, real drift and weaving, like a spellcasting, mischevious witch, sunning herself in a weather mirror. These sounds move slowly over the lands like rays of the sun, forever sparkling and coming from a much deeper, encrusted whole.

Perhaps one's true intent becomes known from drones like these. In the searches for deeper meaning, and in general deep thought about life, the mirror reflects back on itself to a projection of powerful musical dualism to soothe the soul. A just exercise, given that the music is only heard when humans choose to listen. Krysalisound label is this under the radar that you can afford to give a unassuming drone suite some companionship, and possibly an endorsement, because this particular experiment is very fine indeed. So yes, not an avalanche of white noise, rather some of the quietest yet most ruminative music I've heard in the last 12 months. Recommendable lusciousness for Steve Roach and Robert Rich fans alike, it's sure to put a wry smile on the sleep ambient scene's brow. 

Nadine Byrne - Dreaming Remembering - Ideal Records

Nadine Byrne's latest, "Dreaming Remembering", is a fascinating document. Documentation never glances, constriction never gave us torture. In a way, the prim and proper spared merit of Nadine's curatorial style - short sharp and sweet - is its artistic license to interpret dreams. Like the Antonymes title of that nomenclature, there is much dolallying over thoughtful enterprise here: solid music, melodic integrity, interlocking parts, highly metatarsal movement from the feet up.

Feet or feat? Toe in the water or honeyed experiment? It's the latter, a fortunate answer surely for fans of this label. The lineal direction of the album is to walk a tightrope of strapping synthesiser pads, an atonal sense of harmony and the most sparing use of vocal, that it literally sounds dragged out the other sides of a desert plain. These lyrics, mostly motifs of the titles themselves, deploy a willing, questioning gravitas to the whole operation, as one starts to ponder the gap between dreaming and remembering. Is it just a magical flummox? Something that doesn't make descriptive sense like that comment. Or is dreaming, and remembering, for that matter, further embalmed into the regeneration of the life/death/life cycle than we thought?

Whatever, this is a puzzling dichotomy as musical artifact. Nadine Byrne uses her synthesisers and the placation of musical theatre - a Freudian slip here, an announcement there - to woo her audience in wondrous tapestry, befitting for a time where, in post-apocalyptic trauma exercises of possible third world war over Brexit, is all the more welcome. I enjoy how measured the metres are between each 16-bar phrase, and how metre is often forgotten altogether in favour of random selection. The noises are totally anti-predication, unpredictable, like stepping around an accident waiting to happen put to sound. The only criticism a human could levy here is that there is no glorious mess at the end of the experiment - Highly recommended!

SV Stop 315: Random thoughts on happiness

Happiness, as hypnotist Paul McKenna tells us, is natural. Overthinking then is a killing of that happiness. So, to prevent ourselves from overloading, we need to stop being anally retentive, and relax. Let life flow; chill out to our favourite music; spend time with dearly wanted friends. Whatever it is you like to do, happiness will come to you.

Charlemagne Palestine - Wire Magazine feature for BLAST First (petite)

Best to leave "it" for a while. "It" will be better then.
Never a truer word spoken. It, as in information technology, marriage, and whatever big ideas we have.

Big ideas take a while - take this Wire magazine featured advertisement and artwork by Charlemagne Palestine. I have liked some of his/her (I can't remember seeing a non-artisan photograph, so it could be either), work before, namely the drone style stuff that is similar to Ben Frost and Pauline Oliveros.

Afaik, Palestine is a more multi-layered and tribal noisemaker, taking in African and Chinese music(s), I could be completely wrong, The Wire magazine has unearthed MANY HOOOGGE discoveries for me over the years. The important point is this new release, with a intriguing title - "70th Bearth-Dayze", looks and I imagine sounds very tasty indeed...a 10 hours WAV collection with teddy bears.

And I am a tall lonely teddy bear, so what's not to like?

Check this link for more information about the £50 (for everything on 500g vinyl with art and digital extras) project:

 http://blastfirstpetite.com/charlemagne-palestine-schlingen.html

SV Stop 313: www.focisleft.bandcamp.com update (Muttley SV musologue)

1. music
 
2. merch
 
3. fan club
4. edit navigation bar

Foci Left & Foci Right - Iridescence Is Irrelevance Liveset

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	FL & FR - The Only Answer Is Iridescence 01:28 / 15:00

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FL & FR - The Only Answer Is Iridescence 15:00

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about

The first catalog-stroke-stylistic-mash between the Foci Left and Foci Right aliases, after about 100 public releases on the internet that people sometimes send me money for. It's all infinitely appreciated, of course, but seeing as I ain't motivated by financial gain, I am setting this Sparky New Moon practice run free. It's comprised of my awful voice, boring narrations, plinky plonk piano sounds and abysmal attempts to be guitarist Jon Fahey. 

SV Stop 312: Random Thoughts Instalment 1st June 2018

I'm a pretty liberal person, relating to my last writings, whom likes to see the good in everything, and satirises the bad. What is bad, anyway? It's a fluid question in itself.

It's the same with genderqueer theory, I consider myself gender-fluid, that is the fluidity to be both male and female, but it all sounds so poncy, all these millennial terms applied to everything.

In fact these terms had been going long before the term millennial was invented, of course they were there, it's just the mass groupings of categorisations I don't like. I predicted this with TDD, and the fools have gone arse-about-tit with the predication. That is, instead of being descriptive, they create different terms for the same thing and create confusion for absolutely everybody. Crap trap, meet claptrap, y'knowwhatammeen chavvy?

Unfortunately life is made up of chancers and people who think you have all the time in the world, time enough for life, to unfold, but often, you have less time than them, and they are wasting theirs in a coffee shop somewhere.

SV Stop 311: [Politics] Lord Lawson and the Brexit slurry pit

In typical Partridgean style, enter the Conservative Party "Vote Leave" head operative, Lord Lawson. He ruined last generation's election, he'll do it for the next, and all he wants isn't another baby, it's to keep his French luxury home with a cote du jour amendment to the French residency plea after Britain leaves the European Union.

Yes, that's the long and short of it. Lord Lawson wants to stay living in France, even though he was head chancellor of "Vote Leave" in the UK Referendum that happened not so long ago now.

Hypocritical, isn't it? Yes, it's not French nationality, but that's a cop-out anyway - he's English.

But let's not get waddled in with benign and banal facts; if Henry VIII can tear down several monarchies for the sake of another shag, what really commits these deluded psychopaths that their place in the world is so important?

This type of political shambling has been happening too many times that I don't care to remember, but this really got my goat last night to comment on it. I mean, what a waste of space. What's wrong with the English countryside you so seek to advocate? And furthermore, less dubiously, why do you think it's fine, Lord Lawson to carry on living in a foreign land when Joe Bloggs is UK-stricken?

The aristocratic bastards, I hate the lot of them. Damn you! :shakes fist but it's more like a wanker sign at this point:

SV Stop 310: Dua Lipa

Got a bit of a thing for Dua Lipa at the mo =)
It's just plain nice pop dance music. Cool implementation of guitar fretwork.
"IDGAF" club mixes hit the spot. They optimise themselves in Dorian mode and do it well.
I can get them from ZIPDJ.com legal subbie. That's my go-to for most club music I hear dreaming.
Glad she won a Brit Award. (The artist)
Same happened for BFL and Saint Vincent, and I've seen/known those performers too.
Real women do it better. Chauvinist pigs and irritating arrogant men aren't where it's at.
Yeah I'm a mincer, but I'd rather be prolife than psychopathic.
Way too many idiots about in hyperspace for my liking. And the reason I stay away from cities.
Why don't you all just go to Benidorm already and get it over with?
That would mean not buying so many six packs to fit your twenty pack bellies though, wouldn't it.
Really though, I've got stories circulating around my arse for where these alienoids come from.