gacougnol:

Taskerlands by Taskerlands



“The term ‘mood record’ is often criminally over-used, a critical shorthand for describing an ephemeral listening experience that might be difficult to articulate. Sometimes, even the most verbose of language fails in depicting a certain sound impression to a reader. The notes dance away from relatable grasp, lighter than air, an atmosphere evoked without being anchored in any tangible emotion.

Taskerlands, a collaboration between Michael Tanner of Plinth and David Colohan of United Bible Studies and Agitated Radio Pilot, is most definitely a mood record, but one that conjures up more than mere atmosphere. These two extended pieces for guitar and keys were apparently ‘recorded in an unlit Belfast attic during one of the coldest winters in years’, and that would be the impression one would surely gather, whether reading the background or not. These pieces practically breathe frozen fingers in shaking, gloved hands, breath fogging in darkened, chilled spaces of wood and rusted metal, the outside world awash in white and swirling gray. The season and the nature of the recording situation must have weighed heavily on how these improvisations turned out. Plinth often works in precise mechanics and in miniature, as in their series of acclaimed recordings made with Victorian musical machines. And while the guitar workouts here tend more towards the dusty, reverb-hazed psychedelica of Colohan’s Agitated Radio Pilot, there’s still a sense of minute precision here, of exactitude in every swell of mellotron and every carefully plucked note of chiming, echoing guitars.

I’ll admit that this album has grown close to my heart already, after only a half-dozen extended listens, for a number of reasons that relate to my own aesthetics and experiences. Mr. Tanner relates that this recording was made with badly-grounded equipment, and thus they had to embrace the inherent technological foul-ups while putting the pieces to tape. I live in a 102-year old home in Burlington, North Carolina, thousands miles of ocean from Belfast, but the principle is the same. Working with ungrounded outlets, I’ve become accustomed to ever-present technological challenges while recording or rehearsing, but I’ve embraced them to where they’ve become a part of my music’s sound-map. Similarly, Taskerlands is awash with such moments that only add to the dream-like, ethereal nature of the proceedings. I’m always pleased in some secret, mysterious when I’m reminded of the shortcomings of musical equipment in recordings, when their inherent errors become part of the work itself, and color it with unexpected shades and textures. It renders them almost human-like. Taskerlands is never overwhelming or precious with this unintended ‘happy accident’, but its presence only adds to the overall sensation of some ghostly aura hovering about the music, something balanced just at the periphery of the notes.

Ghostly is certainly the word for it. Taskerlands is named for the haunted mansion from the classic 70s BBC supernatural-thriller program The Stone Tape. In the story, a team of engineers working for a firm researching potential new recording devices set up in a long-abandoned manse, and discover that a ghost seems to be ‘recorded’ into the wall of a forgotten room. Their idle interest soon shifts to finding a way to generate an entire new recording medium, with expectedly macabre consequences. While the cutting edge technology of the time is somewhat antiquated now (and there is a certain amusement to the researchers discussing tape as the highlight of the recording technology of the time, viewed from this era of the iPod and the mp3), with tape’s rebirth as a fetish object of both experimental musicians and record-bin-scavengers alike, there’s a certain nostalgic poignance to films like The Stone Tape. Taskerlands is a most aptly-named collaboration, the product of sound scientists in an attic working with faulty technology, trying to discover something new that might turn out to haunt them. Collaborations are always a dicey venture, and can end in incompatibility and missed opportunities. In this case, Mr. Tanner and Mr. Colohan have made my favorite album of the year thus far, a masterpiece of mood and hues of raw emotion, and I can only hope they’re encouraged to continue their researches into the possibilities of sound. (Zachary Corsa - A Closer Listen)”

released 15 May 2012

David Colohan - Right Guitar
Michael Tanner - Left Guitar

with:

Seán Mac Erlaine - Bass Clarinet
Kerrie Robinson - Upright Piano
Richard Moult - Frequencies

Originally released on Time Released Sound as TRS016 in a run of limited 3inch ‘Chocolate Box’ editions and standalone CD

Listen: http://iamplinth.bandcamp.com/album/taskerlands

dustintheair:

RELEASED JUNE 4th

Pre-order: http://www.gizehstore.com/products/17226

A new project that began as a soundtrack and continues as an experimental, dark-ambient jazz group.

Guitar, drums and bass clarinet provide an intense, improvised journey into the abyss.

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From Fluid-Radio:

“Andrea Ics Ferraris is a self-taught musician with a hardcore/experimental background. He started recording and touring Europe during the nineties with bands such as Burning Defeat and Onefineday, amongst others. While broadening his listening and technique he started playing with musicians hailing from a heterogeneous background be it rock, electronics, etc. Over the years he developed his interest for experimental music, using more and more effects/instruments and different techniques and started playing “cheap electronics” and/or laptop. He currently plays with the electro-acoustic ensemble Airchamber 3, the kraut-industrialist combo Ur, the experimental-psychedelic group Luminance Ratio and the IDM post-drum & bass duo Ulna, amongst others.”

solarflares:

  Ad Hoc Premiere: Hangedup and Tony Conrad: “Gentil The Unlucky Astronomer”

Niiiiiice.

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the new objective - “brother’s keeper”

drone, field-recordings, sub-bass, effects

Studio

Vladislav Delay has been searching for the better and more personal sound since he started producing records in 1997. Through several studios (two in Helsinki, one in Berlin) his experience and the collection of equipment has grown and his current Shark Reef studio in Hailuoto, Finland is a testimony of that development.

The biggest change compared to his previous studios is that the Shark Reef features a purpose-designed and built studio building. Where there was a forest few years ago now resides the Shark Reef. Even the trees were cut off by Mr. Delay himself. Building a completely new space with only the acoustics in mind obviously allows for very even and analytical acoustic space to be designed, and the results were beyond expectations. The acoustics were designed by Finland’s leading acoustics company Akukon and their star engineer Mr Anssi Ruusuvuori who has designed many of the country’s premium studios.

The studio includes a fine collection of analog and digital equipment, old and new. Selection includes pieces by API, Burl, Crane Song, Eventide, Helios, Manley, Tube-Tech, Weiss, and much more. The cabling in the studio is done using Mogami cables without compromising patchbays. Studio also includes Genelec 8260A monitors with 7271A and 7070A subwoofers, and the monitoring system was installed and tuned by the chief designer of the 8260A, Mr Jussi Väisänen from Genelec.

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2. It’s inaccessible

Balderdash. Rewind a few decades. Have a look again at the menagerie of cultural icons on the cover of the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Who’s that cheeky chappie on the back row, whose big brown eyes and side-parting peer out between Lenny Bruce and WC Fields? Why, it’s the furthest-out composer of any of the out-there 60s avant-garde, Stockhausen. A piece of coincidental Beatlemania? Not a bit of it. Without Stockhausen’s electronic dreams and experiments the decade before, and his trailblazing example of how you could use the studio itself as a musical instrument, the Beatles would be mired in musical pre-history, and Lennon and McCartney’s imaginations – and yours – would be infinitely the poorer. Spooling on through pop culture, in the 70s and 80s, bands “discovered” tape loops, phases and rhythmic complexity. But that’s only because Steve Reich, Philip Glass and the minimalists had got there at least a decade before. Sampling? Again, it’s the avant garde you’ve got to thank, everyone from the pioneers of tape-based musique concrète to Alvin Lucier and beyond. Coming bang(ish) up to date: who is Björk’s favourite composer? Stockhausen again. Brian Eno would be nowhere without Erik Satie and Cornelius Cardew, Stephen Sondheim owes it all – well, some of it – to lessons with Princeton-based serialist Milton Babbitt, and don’t get me started on Jonny Greenwood’s love-affair with Krzysztof Penderecki. Without the “classical” avant garde, pop music just could not and would not be the same.

viralradio:

Tom Service writes about Pauline Oliveros in the Guardian, whose sonic explorations take on life, the universe and everything.