Illuminating the horizon #5
Introducing Interior Monologues and welcoming the Zennor Sound Group. Plus, a look at Paul Nataraj's The Night is Young and a flashback to Scott Walker's Bish Bosch.
Interior Monologues
Interior Monologues is up for pre-order on the marvellous Difficult Art and Music label. As a real fan of DAAM I am very happy to be releasing on the label on 9 June. The album is available as a limited edition cassette and poster pack, as well as digital download.
“Heavy Cloud has provided us with a wonderful work of intimate confessions and monologues with some lovely ambient and minimal abstract tones.”
– Difficult Art and Music
The project is an abstract representation and reflection of individual and national anxiety. 11-tracks of textured noise, granular synthesis and musique concrete created from personal voice and field recordings. Words and actions were improvised – often captured in medias res – and then manipulated in real time.
The heart of this improvised experience is based on processed and looped personal samples created from a range of domestic objects, materials and environmental recordings. The body as well as the mind also became instruments: in breathing, in moving, in speaking, in thinking.
Each piece began with a textual or emotional cue and grew organically out of the collected samples. Sound was reshaped in order to attempt to illustrate a number of interior monologues that were circling during the week of recording. It is very much a monument to feelings during a specific moment in time.
Snippets of prose, poetry and spoken word interjects with non-verbal dialogue constructed from the erosion and recycling of surrounding soundscapes. Together these texts form an organic tone poem that tries to put forth questions towards both physical and emotional spheres, in hope of searching for potential coping mechanisms.
Interior Monologues is available to pre-order on Bandcamp
Welcome to Zennor
Capturing improvised performance, sound poetry and audio palimpsests, Zennor is a record of the rediscovery of interior and exterior map fragments and the subsequent dismantling of these into altered shapes and stories.
Taking inspiration from the self, the bric-à-brac collage compositions of Graham Lambkin and the sonic manipulation of experimental turntablism, Zennor looks both into the soul and out towards the horizon.
The village of Zennor lies between St. Ives and St. Just, on the Atlantic coast of Cornwall. Alphabetically, the parish is the last in Britain. Its name comes from the Cornish name for the local saint, Saint Senara.
Zennor became a metaphorical location for the Zennor Sound Group to workshop sonic ideas and share and cross-thread histories as a form of therapy, by way of a lofi radio play across timelines and ley lines.
The pieces that became Zennor were performed and recorded over a number of years and edited during the spring of 2023.
Foxy Digitalis Daily made Zennor their album of the day on 3 May and said the album “feels like unearthed artefacts … unearthing some ancient mystery. I feel like I should be taking notes because it feels almost like you're doing research. And I mean that in a really positive way.”
“There's real intention to take listeners on a strange and cryptic journey where there aren't any answers. That's the thing. And you have to kind of just accept that. But for me that just makes me want to keep going back. Go back and just appreciate the details and appreciate the journey even more.”
Zennor was also a featured album on Robin the Fog’s Fog Cast radio show this week. The full episode can be heard on Mixcloud.
Zennor was released on 1 May on limited edition 12” vinyl and CD art keepsakes + digital and is available to stream and download on Bandcamp
Lapsus memoriae
The latest CAMP Radio show aired on 6 May on listen.camp and is now available to listen back over on CAMP Radio’s Mixcloud.
The first half is a new longform sound and field works composition, If Every Day Was a Season.
It is followed by a second half featuring works by Gabi Losoncy, Keith Rowe & John Tilbury, Vanessa Rossetto, Slant, Paul G Nataraj, Graham Lambkin, and an excerpt from the final track on Zennor.
Sounds
These are just some of the excellent recent releases that have been gracing the stereo.
Natalia Beylis – Library of Sticks [Artsy Records]
Penelope Trappes – Heavenly Spheres [Nite Hive]
Karen Vogt – Le Mans [Waxing Crescent Records]
Josephine Foster – Domestic Sphere [Fire Records]
martha maclaren – chocolate for breakfast [self-released]
chik white and Bill Nace – Off Motion [Open Mouth Records]
Wolf Eyes – Wolf Eyes w/ Spykes [HN_AM Records]
OZMOTIC | FENNESZ – Senzatempo [Touch]
MAbH – QURL [self-release]
Amy Cutler – Sister Time [Strategic Tape Reserve]
Megzbow & Vinegar Tom – Welsh Noise Vol. II [Brachliegen Tapes]
tom betteridge – pearly [Brachliegen Tapes]
Body/Head – Come On [Three Lobed Records]
In focus
The Night Is Young
Paul Nataraj’s The Night Is Young is a moving tribute, in multiple ways, to his grandparents and their collection of gramophone records. The album, released on Hard Return (March, 2023), is a deeply personal project with a tactile attention to details and a tender affection for the past.
Music can be a form of communication that transcends the boundaries of time and space. The concept of inherited music has been explored in various studies related to the impact of music on nostalgia and emotional connections. In one conducted by Robertson and Howells (2008), it was found that music can be a powerful agent of nostalgia and can create strong emotional connections to past experiences. Music can act as a “trigger” for the recall of autobiographical memories, facilitating the retrieval of complex emotional experiences from the past.
The clunk of the gramophone startup in The Night Is Young sets the listener up to emotionally time travel, as well as establishing one of many repeating sound motifs alongside vinyl crackle, pops and hiss, and the mechanism that powers it. The operatic voices and piano fragments that appear seem at first familiar and function as a nostalgic thread to follow back to a bygone era, but in Nataraj’s hands the deconstructed manipulation of the records only adds extra layers of dust and decay to the inherited sounds.
Reynolds (2011) states: “Vinyl crackles evoke a sense of time passing…they can evoke not only a moment but a whole era.” Receptive loops and miniature stutters, created through physical manipulation and post-processing, allows Nataraj to explore and reestablish the sonic potential of the original records in new and emotive ways. And in doing so, establishing a stuttering door and half open hazy window into past moments to share in the present.
The Night Is Young has a dreamlike quality, in part because of the new rhythms it magics out from its manipulation; creating a hypnotic, entrancing motion that shifts, slows and pauses time. Although the crackle of the gramophone creates a sense of a connection to the past, what follows is not always what you expect to happen. This uncertainty creates an uncomfortable immediacy and a feeling that this is music maybe of the past but also simultaneously of the present, which establishes a disorienting yet beautiful experience.
The manipulation of the speed, tone and frequency of sounds found on The Night Is Young creates repetitive and hauntologic soundscapes and demonstrates how skillfully playing (and being playful with) inherited music (especially old vinyl) only enhances the fleeting nature of time and echoes of loss.
The act of reviving old family artefacts, like the ones shared on this album, destabilises the natural flow and direction of time. Listening to The Night Is Young, in multiple settings and at different times of day, the mind is led to wander off into almost forgotten memories, which hits quite differently in the present. The Night Is Young is a poignant reminder that our past is always a part of us and how much music has the power to reconnect us to it.
The Night Is Young is available to stream and download on Bandcamp
Flashbacks
Decoding dissonant language in Bish Bosch: Revisiting Scott Walker’s fourteenth and final solo album
Bish Bosch is epic and weird, wonderful and frightening — the zenith of the metamorphosis of fallen star Scott Walker.
A pinnacle of rot, conducted and deconstructed as a pigswill opera of offal and wheezing orifices, cryptic and explicit words, and meticulously constructed ugly tableaus.
It’s still its own world within a world, fed by the lingering shadows of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg.
It’s about the ageing body. It was about his body. Our bodies. Society. Scum and the streets. Blood. Excrement. Castrations and mutilations. Plus, drippings of humour, too.
The voice is still undeniably his, but even lower and more stretched and twisted than even what came before it.
Drums and guitars and other rock music identifiers exist — it’s true — but the decaying roots of this city is found in the dissonance of the turn-of-the century compositions by Stravinsky et al — the catalyst for audiences to applaud, hiss and laugh at. Or perhaps all three?
Walker’s trilogy of Tilt (1995), Drift (2006) and Bish Bosch (2012) charted his progression into a black hole of his own making, surrounded by deep, dank waters previously traversed and tasted by a tradition of music that tried to find different ways to articulate the same old misery of the world.
Wagner operas, Mahler symphonies, the brutal cabaret of Jacques Brel, several sides of David Bowie, the vocal terror of Diamanda Galás, the aggressive anti-music of no wave, all honing in and submerged and bathing within the hideously bleak underbelly of a society trying to survive.
Walker was an artist that people wanted to ‘get’. Beyond the web of references and hyperlinks to texts of the past, both from far away and the not so far, Bish Bosch is spectacular on the surface without needing to have a clue about what is going on or what is being sung.
Beyond the existential despair, the politics of Nicolae Ceaus, fascination with illness, and general disgust at the human body, in between the layers of nods to notable literature lynchpins — particularly Beckett and in his fascination with the passing of time — and Paul Celan’s Death Fugue, as well as the music of post-war European modernism such as György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis, beneath the stars and constellations, deep down within the rot and decay and ageing bodies of dictators and jesters and paupers and pop stars, there is also a desire to emote humour and to be humorous.
This dark music can — still — be very funny. We are allowed to laugh, I think. I’m sure Walker would have welcomed it.
Yet, at the same time, the world of Bish Bosch, like Finnegan’s Wake or Pound’s Cantos before it, continuously creates itself to the point of perceptual collapse, and thereby implores or forces us as listeners to trip and fall numerous times over its lengthy runtime.
But we should embrace these difficulties, too. And from whatever vantage we find ourselves looking from (most likely from below with the mice and rats) we should hail and admire and likely be a little repulsed by the black emperor and the twisted and twisting decaying language, while being both blinded and slowly bled out (think Kafka’s In the Penal Colony) by the eternal orbiting star.
Bish-bash
Slip-slop
Watch your step.
See you don’t bump your head while plucking feathers from a swan song.
Blip, boost, bust, brother.
It’s dense, tense.
Pain is not alone.
Don’t let the room of mice bite
(too much)