The 17 is an interesting concept created by Bill Drummond (hence the ambient link – remember KLF’s Chillout album?). Though the composition seems to be quite new, the method seems to refer to the sound practices of Pauline Oliveros.The scores represented on the 17 website seem to use the same…
The ‘making of’ of this album is a nice story to tell:
Hammock (Marc Byrd and Andrew Thompson) released three full albums (not counting ‘The Sleepover Sessions’) since 2005.
Most of these filled with quiet, guitar-driven ‘post-rock’, with some crossover to the ambient realm.
If that description sounds a bit like Sigur Rós – so does some of their music.
The Serein netlabel once again lives up to their expectations. With their latest release, ‘Unknown Language’ by The Inventors of Aircraft, the label now offers 17 free album downloads. All of which are quality ambient music, albeit in different styles.
The latest one (#17) is “Unknown Language” by “The Inventors of Aircraft”.
To be honest I had never heard the name of Esther Venrooy until recently, when I was struck by a track on a compilation CD ‘Avontuurlijke Muziek in Brabant’ (‘Adventurous music from Brabant’, a freebie with a recent Gonzo Magazine). This fragment from her CD ‘The Spiral Staircase’ (released on Entr’Acte) definitely proved checking out in full.
Holger Czukay always used to mention ‘shortwave’ (radio) in the instrument credits on his album. The mysterious, vaguely distorted sound of shortwave radio has always seem to trigger the imagination of those interested in sounds of the unknown and unreachable.
Shortwave radio is a direct connection with uncharted territories. Its distortion and strange sweeping filter effects add another dimension to the radio broadcasts: the fleeting connection may be lost any moment. It’s as if you’re transferred through time and space to a world you did not know until then.
All of this magic gets lost when technology improves. The same stations may lose their attractivity when heard in full quality. They become part of normal everyday life (and then mostly prove to be as boring as the local stations).
In this time of world wide web global connectivity, where no place on earth seems out of reach, there’s an enhancing interest in shortwave sounds. For example, take “A Ghost in the Phase“, the latest in the series of the beautiful Low Light Mixes created by Dave Michuda. t’s a collage of shortwave samples and ambient sounds of artists using shortwave samples. Haunting and definitely worth listening.
Some of the shortwave fragments in this mix can be found on the Shortwavemusic weblog, strictly dedicated to found shortwave sounds.
Also included in this low light mix is a track from the latest CD by Stephan Mathieu, Radioland (‘Auf der Gasse’, also included below).
Just mentioning Rutger “Machinefabriek” Zuydervelt’s releases could fill a blog on its own. In the high quantity of releases he’s able to maintain a very high quality standard, making it hard to pinpoint highlights in the continuous stream of new releases.
But there’s no doubt ‘Piiptsjilling’ belongs in the ‘Best of Machinefabriek’ list!
Piiptsjilling, by the way, is the name of a bird:Wintertaling, or Teal (Anas Crecca), in the Frysk language spoken in Friesland, northern Netherlands.
It is hard to imagine that there’s a direct link between Napalm Death and extreme ‘isolationist’ ambient. But there is, and ex-Napalm Death drummer Mick (MJ) Harris is the linking pin.
As Scorn he has created post-industrial dub (working with Bill Laswell, among others), and as Lull he has createst some of the deepest, abstract ambient imaginable.
One definition of ‘drone’ music might be: ‘finding the least thing necessary for pleasurable listening’.
Although it’s not it’s not a very good definition (because of the ‘pleasurable’ which may prove to be a bit ehh…subjective. And what’s a “thing”?), it fits the purpose for describing the intention of ‘drone music’.
“Constant” is the well-chosen title of the drone Mystified (Thomas Park) originally ‘found’, and which he thought impressive enough to listen to it constantly. It has the basic soothing drone quality of distant humming machines…reassuring and comforting sounds to listen to, to ignore, or to help disguise other, unwanted sounds from your environment.
When listening to the music on this CD, it’s hard to imagine that the creator, 22-year old Tomasz Bednarczyk from Poland, wasn’t born yet when Brian Eno and Harold Budd created their genre-defining work in the first half of the eighties.
