THE OUTER CHURCH

Poster design by Pearly Sandman. Click here for tickets

Fri, 17 May 2013 17:19:15 -0400

Poster design by Pearly Sandman. Click here for tickets

Only recently, we warned you that young people in their hordes are dabbling in the Dark Arts....

Thu, 02 May 2013 08:27:00 -0400

Only recently, we warned you that young people in their hordes are dabbling in the Dark Arts. Here’s more evidence to support that claim. Occult Hand are Isablood and Henry, two horror film obsessives whose ectoplasm-drenched music incorporates elements of noise, found sound and improvisation. They may well be Brighton’s most exciting new outfit but that doesn’t excuse their blatant disregard for all that is good and proper. Or perhaps it does. We’re still mulling it over, actually. In any case, we collared the pair for a chat and invited them to put together a mixtape. Better the devil you know. Download Occult Hand’s mixtape here and read on…

Hello Occult Hand. Please provide some information about the mix you’ve put together for The Outer Church.

1. Zardoz Opening Music Main Titles

Henry: “From John Boorman’s 70s sci-fi ‘flop’ Zardoz, starring Sean Connery running around in a mankini. I really love this movie though it took me several aborted attempts to watch and fully appreciate it. The musical theme running throughout it is based on the second movement from Beethoven’s 7th. A great version which sadly has never been available on a soundtrack or anywhere else. I would have put the original on but it was about nine minutes and you just can’t cut that shit up.”

2. Asei Kobayashi & Micky Yoshino - Eat Eat Eat (Hausu)

Henry: “This is from the Hausu soundtrack. Fantastic movie, the soundtrack needs a reissue!”

Isablood: “I chose this because Hausu is probably my favourite film in the entire world.”

3. Shopping - In Other Words

Isablood: “Shopping are my friends Billy, Andrew and Rachel. They kind of remind me of the brilliant post-punk band Devil’s Dykes. They’ve only been around for a few months and this song is just amazing. It’s coming out as a 7” in a few weeks.”

4. Emerson Quartet - Bartok: String Quartet #3, 1. Prima Parte

Henry: “From Hungarian composer Bela Bartok’s incredible string quartets, of which there are six, this is the first movement of the third. Recently my brother and I went to see the Emerson Quartet play this, along with pieces by Alban Berg and Janacek. It was amazing. Some of the most morose music I have heard. Real cut your throat stuff.”

5. Harumi - Fire By The River

Isablood: “I don’t know much about Harumi. This record is from 1968, psychedelic Japanese stuff, it’s just enchanting.”

6. Pulsalamma - The Devil Lives In My Husbands Body

Henry: “Horrors of suburban life? You can almost dance to this.”

Isablood: “This song is SO GOOD!!!! You can DEFINITELY dance to it!!!! The lyrics are so funny, it was a toss up between this and Smalltown Boy by Bronski Beat”

7. Hex On The Beach - Fire Mountain II

Isablood: “Hex On The Beach are from Australia, esoteric witchy catchy doomy gloomy. They did a cover of that Lady In The Radiator song In Heaven [from David Lynch’s Eraserhead] when I saw them last summer. I’ve always enjoyed the musical outputs of Maya - she was in Leopard Leg who were bloody fantastic [Agreed - OC], the Polly Shang Kuan Band and this brilliant band I played with once called Universal Orders, who did maybe 2 shows before splitting up. They were really special.”

8. Internet Club - Wave Temple

Henry: “I am wondering what people make of this Vapourwave stuff. While the name may sound a naff fad like Witch House or Chillwave, there is still something about this music I find really interesting. There are countless blogs where you can download this stuff - predominately digital releases only - for free. It’s a faceless music, almost like it has been made by no one. There is a plunderphonics vibe, being pilfered from 80s soul compact discs, shopping malls, waiting screens and other corporate muzak. Dead music repeating forever in stasis.”

9. James Ferraro - Surveillance/Sounds From The Cam 2: Inside the Mutant Church (edit)

Henry: “Last year whenever people on the net discussed James Ferraro they always mentioned his Far Side Virtual LP and rarely went beyond it into his vast discography. Now, I really loved that record but he has so much other stuff too. This track is an edited segment from his KFC City 3099 Pt. 1: Toxic Spill CD-R. Some of the most incredible music. This stuff is the full on trip. Also check out music made under his Edward Flex moniker, titles like Do You Believe in Hawaii? and Maui Blackout/Liquid Bikini. Amazing stoner body builder workouts, bad 80s films, toxic waste, it’s all there. It’s like, what is that sound? What the hell is going on? For me, Ferraro’s music still has lots of mystery to it, something rare and exciting these days. A while ago I made a fake soundtrack to the original Grand Theft Auto PS1 game hugely influenced by KFC City but I never let anyone hear it or told anyone about it. Its called Mandarin Mayhem.”

10. Scissor Girls - S-H-A-R-P-E-N-I-N-G

Isablood: “I have liked this band for yonks, they’re just brilliant. They’re a No Wave band from Chicago (I think), they were active in the early 90s, their live shows verged on performance art, they have really good videos. I think one of them was in Lake Of Dracula? So good.”

11. Jaap Blonk & Dylan Nyoukis - Broken Magic

Henry: “From the collab LP Dubbletwee I downloaded on the Free Music Archive run by the WFMU people. WFMU is the greatest thing ever and the best radio station in the world! Anyway, I love this stuff. Music for boneheads! Hits the spot after a really hard day at work.”

12. Goblin - Sleepwalking

Henry: “From the Phenomena soundtrack. What a movie, one of Argento’s best. There are also songs by Motorhead and Iron Maiden placed at really inappropriate times. I love all the Goblin soundtracks though this is a really 80s sounding one. It reminds me of 80s Tangerine Dream which I have been getting more into lately - Le Parc and all that Melrose years stuff.”

Isablood: “Yeah the reason I chose this was because a) this is THE BEST Argento film and b) the music is SO FUNNY. This is obviously good, but like Henry says, some bits are just so inappropriate, it’s hilarious.”

13. Blanche Blanche Blanche - Fireworks

Isablood: “I know very little about this band, I bought a tape on a whim and I really like them.”

14. Krzysztof Penderecki: Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra - The Dream Of Jacob

Henry: “I wanted to just put Classical music on my half of the mix but there was just too much other stuff that I could not ignore. Penderecki is certainly one of my favourite composers though and I am dying to hear his stuff played live. It rarely seems to get programmed which is such a shame. Written in 1974, this piece was apparently a gift from the composer to Prince Rainier of Monaco celebrating the 25th anniversary of his accession. I wonder what he made of it. It is based on the biblical tale of Jacob and his dream in the desert of a ladder to heaven with the angels ascending and descending. It is full of foreboding and absolutely terrifying, much like his other work up till then. Is it any wonder that the word for dream in German is traum - relating to trauma?”

15. Valerie Dore - Its So Easy

Henry: ”Lastly some Italo-Disco. I just can’t help myself. I had obvious qualms putting old Val and Penderecki together next to each other but here we are. I love this stuff, seriously, and this is my favourite track by her. It is so funny, her singing is so off-key but my appreciation for this goes way beyond mere irony. Those synths, the cheap production, bad English yet total danceability are key to good Italo. This is a slow one however, for dancing close with that someone special. The Valerie Dore project was really sung by Dora Carofiglio and the model on the cover didn’t always match the singer on the record, a kind of thing typical of the genre. Make sure you check out her videos and dig that soft focus!”

Isablood: “I love this song because she’s so bad at singing! It’s such a dancefloor hit…ahem.”

Thank you! So… what’s all this Occult Hand business about anyway?

Isablood/Henry: “Our friend Dylan who runs Chocolate Monk said he wanted the two of us to collaborate for a release on his label, but we were lazy about it… then he asked us to play with Thurston Moore for a Colour Out Of Space benefit - we could hardly say no to that!”

Is all your music improvised or is there an element of composition at work?

Isablood: “A bit of both? I tend to lean towards structure as I literally can’t function without it in anything I do. Henry’s the improv king. The music is often improvised but we pick out which samples/loops to make/use, for example I am really interested in abject theory in relation to horror, in particular Barbara Creed’s monstrous-feminine (in the horror film) - in one ‘composition’ we used a series of loops that link to those ideas, but it’s not a final piece, it’s an ongoing project/theme of mine I guess. When we play it’s mostly improvised but we have a rough idea of what’s going where. We want to get our cat Sissy Spacek more involved as we’ve made some recordings with her voice - the noises she makes are insane sometimes!!! We’d probably have the RSPCA after us though so I doubt that will happen.”

Henry: “I am hardly the improv king! It is certainly what I am more used to in my music making. Occult Hand is the most structured thing I have done in a while in fact, though there is some improvisation within a certain framework. To be honest I cannot remember making some of the sounds and music. I find scrunched up loops that I made ages ago which sound as if they have been created by someone else, or an ‘unknown force’…!”

How did Occult Hand’s distinctive aesthetic develop?

Isablood: “It’s kind of a joke, the name comes from a secret society of American journalists in the 1960s who attempted to (secretly) get the phrase “It was as if an occult hand had…” in print. There’s a list on Wikipedia of where it has appeared, I think one appeared in January this year… anyway we thought it was funny. Initially we had some samples from ESP experiments and séances etc and so I guess it just worked, same with the video we made, which was footage of women being hypnotised and forced to confront events from their childhood. It was really important that we created a whole scene, but without taking ourselves too seriously. We have different outfits now that are a bit less DOOM AND GLOOM, except Henry had an allergic reaction to the make-up so we might have to re-think that. I love the theatrics of it all anyway, dressing up is so much fun to do. For me it’s as much about the performance as it is the music. We want to make a video (VHS) next.”

Henry: “A video with trailers, yes! We both love horror films. Most of my recent solo work has revolved around 80s horror films, Troma, that kind of thing. We want to bring that out in Occult Hand, and make it as slimy as possible.”

Do you believe in UFOs, astral projections, mental telepathy, ESP, clairvoyance, spirit photography, telekinetic movement, full trance mediums, the Loch Ness monster and the theory of Atlantis?

Isablood: “I’d like to believe in all of that, I’m open to anything and I’m really interested in telepathy and things like that. I think it’s important to have a sense of humor about these things too. At the moment I’m reading a lot of astrology books for animals which are really interesting, and I have this amazing Sex Signs book by Judith Bennet - a ‘dramatic marriage of astrology, psychology and female sexuality’ written in 1980. It’s a bit dated but I find it fascinating and really funny. I started teaching myself palmistry too which I am getting better at, and I can read Tarot a little.”

Henry: “Yeah maybe - the truth is out there, man! Seriously though, there is some cool stuff I have read about - spirit photography in sound as well as photographs. I like the idea of certain combined frequencies containing ‘artifacts’ and ‘voices’. This can certainly be true in white noise or static. In analogue radio terms the static noises between stations are referred to as ‘ghosts’. This ‘otherness’ - a netherworld you do not get with a digital set. Anyway I am sure there is an interesting project in there somewhere…”

Do you have first-hand experience of the paranormal? Do tell…

Isablood: “I did witness a witch get on a broomstick and fly off at the bottom of a field when I was about 15. We thought it was our Grandmother dressed up until she flew off. I’m not lying. Our friends have a ghost in their house in Lewes, I haven’t experienced it myself yet but a lot of my friends have felt a sudden chill and someone/thing leaning over them when they’re sleeping.”

Henry: “I am not sure I believe in ghosts as I have never had any experience with this. Maybe I am not psychically attuned to those frequencies!!!”

What do you find terrifying?

Isablood: “The only things that really scares me is milk. I’ve never drunk it on it’s own and I have no idea what it tastes like but the idea of drinking it or even smelling it fills me with dread. As soon as I came out of the womb I rejected my mother’s milk. I HATE IT.”

Henry: “Real stuff like going to the supermarket. Especially troubling if you do not have a list or plan of action. Unlike Issy though I like milk A LOT. I think it is good to do things that scare you. I once went to India for a month on my own and practically on a whim, which was terrifying at first but also very exciting.”

Please rave about one book, one film and one record.

FILM

Isablood: “We’re both obsessed with horror films, yawn, I think we probably watch about ten a week. I can’t stop thinking about this film called Angst (aka Fear), by Gerald Kargl (1983). The film is based on the real case of the Austrian mass murderer Werner Kniesek. It’s amazing!!! It is probably THE most realistic/uncomfortable serial killer film I’ve ever seen and it features two of my favourite things – false teeth and an annoying dachshund. I suppose the premise is similar to that of Funny Games and home intruder type thrillers, it reminded me of Michael Haneke in its style.”

Henry: “I don’t know, I watch too much crap probably. I want to watch Damon Packard’s Reflections Of Evil and Foxfur. The trailer for Foxfur is really funny and bewildering in a really great way. I can’t say I am amazed by a lot of new films but that is perhaps a boring point of view. I end up watching a lot of inconsequential 80s teen dramas and horrors as a result.”

BOOK

Isablood: “House Of Psychotic Women: An autobiographical Topography Of Female Neurosis In Horror and Exploitation Films by Kier-La Janisse. I haven’t quite finished it, but the topographical idea of exploring horror film from a positive female perspective is of real interest to me, there are so few positive portrayals of female neurosis in horror. This book highlights those experiences but at the same time comes from a very intimate autobiographical angle.”

Henry: “At the moment I am reading Thomas Pynchon’s last novel, Inherent Vice. I love that guy. Gravity’s Rainbow is a favourite.”

RECORD

Isablood: “I haven’t bought any records recently, the last thing I got was Blood Stereo’s I Was Tucked Up Eyeless Inside A Fish CD-R. It comes with all these brilliant collage postcards that Karen Constance made, her paintings/collages are amazing. The Halloween III Soundtrack is so good, I love all John Carpenter’s soundtracks but this has to be the top. Death Waltz Records re-release loads of amazing horror soundtracks on vinyl with lovely new lithographed artwork. They’re releasing The Devil Rides Out soon which I’m really excited about. To be honest living with Henry drives me mad as far as buying Italo-Disco records is concerned. His brother put it well once when he said, ‘His record buying habit rivals my coke habit’.”

Henry: “Too many I guess. Most of what I buy are Italo-Disco singles. I just ordered three last night. It’s not fair on other kinds of music but what can I do? I am a guy obsessed. I have a lot of other cool stuff to get through – some Blood Stereo CD-Rs, got a couple of Borbetomagus CDs through the post today. A stack of tapes a friend found in the street and gave to me. I need to go through them all. Sometimes it is overwhelming how much music I acquire and is available on the internet. I have so many lists. I really want to get into Italian Prog, more African Soukous music….the time, you know? I have to pace myself.”

Do you have some releases planned for the near future?

Isablood/Henry: “Yes quite a few planned in the next few months - We already have a tape Illustrious Pairing on 666ties Records, we’re doing a CD-R for Chocolate Monk, a tape on Night School Records and a 12” on our friend Scott from Sealings/Pheromoans label Untimely Demise.”

The Outer Church put together a mix for the terrific Kit Records website along with a few words on...

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 12:18:00 -0400

The Outer Church put together a mix for the terrific Kit Records website along with a few words on spectral milkmaids, rattling doorhandles and rural psychedelia. Click here

It’s an undisputed fact that more and more young people are getting involved in the occult....

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 15:58:00 -0400

It’s an undisputed fact that more and more young people are getting involved in the occult. But are they aware of the dangers inherent in asking a Shadow Person back to their house for a glass of cream soda or playing Knock Down Ginger in a registered thin place? Possibly not. So when we encountered the music of Swedish duo Death And Vanilla we were immediately concerned that their sweet but sinister pop music might encourage impressionable listeners to dabble in the Dark Arts. Although Anders and Marleen were quick to reassure us with their easy charm and impeccable Scandinavian manners, we would nevertheless advise caution when listening to the mixtape they have assembled exclusively for The Outer Church. You could be inadvertently welcoming The Hag into your abode! And that would be just awful. Download Death And Vanilla’s mixtape below and read on if you dare.

So, Death And Vanilla. Who are you and what on Earth do you think are you doing?

Anders: ”Death And Vanilla are Marleen and Anders. We’re clean, good natured, well behaved and all around nice people from Sweden.”

Marleen: ”We’re like rabbits you know, just sniffing around, checking things out.”

This mix you have put together - what’s the story with that?

Marleen: ”It’s a mix of songs and sounds that we like and that inspire us. There’s a bit of psych, some electronic library music, French 60s pop, psychedelic Italian OST, swedish 70s Progg etc.”

Anders: ”There’s some very melodic catchy stuff, some psychedelic stuff and some experimental stuff. There are vibraphones, moogs, great groovy rhythms, fuzz guitar, cool bass lines, Mellotrons and lots of echo and spring reverb. Put all of this into a meat grinder and out comes Death And Vanilla!”

The name of the group is both sweet and macabre! What made you choose it?

Anders: ”We had a list of names and they were all quite boring so we started moving the words around and came up with some new combinations. Death And Vanilla stood out. And it was either that or Small Fluffy Rabbits or Pants Are On Fire! so it was an easy choice in the end. We actually had the name before any music was written.”

Your music is often very unnerving. Have you gotten yourselves all mixed up in the occult?

Anders: ”We do like the supernatural and the occult as aesthetic sources of inspiration, but we think our music is very melodic and very pop. There are no occult themes in the lyrics at all really [A likely story - OC]. The lyrics always come last when we write songs and we’re basically just trying to find words that supports the melody in the best possible way and that also fits the mood of the music. The melody is the most important.”

Marleen: ”We like to experiment with different sounds to give the music an ‘otherworldly’ feel. To combine found sounds, abstract noises, samples from films etc with sweet melodies is something we really like. ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘feel’ are very important when we make music.”

Is it your intention to corrupt the young folks with pop music whose content may encourage them to dabble in witchcraft?

Marleen: ”Yes, clean, good-natured, well-behaved, all around nice witchcraft from Sweden. Ha ha, no you’re probably thinking of the swedish hardrock band Ghost, that’s their mission. We just want to eat cinnamon buns, watch cute animals on YouTube and make cool music. With subliminal messages that corrupt the minds of young people.”

What kind of books and films have you been reading and watching?

Marleen: ”Like most people we love films and books. Some of our favorite films are Picnic At Hanging Rock, Don’t Look Now, The Innocents, The Cremator, Repulsion, Le Orme etc. We take lots of inspiration from films like these that kind of pull you into their world and stay in your head for days after you’ve seen them. We like our music to be like that. You know that if you close your eyes you’re transported to some other place.”

Anders: ”I read all kinds of stuff but some of my all time favorite books are The Magus by John Fowles, The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov and two Swedish HP Lovecraft omnibuses called Cthulhu 1 and Cthulhu 2.”

Your videos and sleeves are awash with occult imagery. Who is responsible for them?

Marleen: ”Good lord, are they? Well what do you know…”

Anders: ”The visuals are very important to us and we rather they look homemade or amateurish but have the right feel to them, than to hire someone with no connection to the band who just comes up with some “nice” graphics that has no feel to it. We want to take the listener on a trip and it starts right with the videos and record sleeves. All the graphics are made by me and so are most of the videos.”

You’re based in Malmö, Sweden. Is that a hotbed of witchery and occultism?

Anders: ”Yes, I met Satan on the way to the supermarket this morning! I grew up near a place where they used to hang people in the Middle Ages. The Gallows Hill was the name of the place. That could be a good name for a Doom Metal or Witch House band possibly.”

Marleen: ”I once attended a night time Sabbath [Aha! - OC] in a park in Malmö. My friend was into that kind of thing and I just went along to see what it was all about. I found it quite dull though. My grandmother and some of her friends meet every now and then to hold seances in the basement of a council building. I’ve never attended but perhaps I should. Malmö is good place to live, it’s a quite small city but has a big city feel to it, and there are lots of things going on all the time. It’s a very multicultural place with lots of people from all over the world and has many beautiful parks. It’s also a quite cheap place to live. One of the appeals of Malmö is the closeness to the European continent which makes you look south to Europe for inspiration, rather than north to the rest of Sweden.”

What scares you?

Anders/Marleen: ”Pitbull dogs, the two old guys on the balcony in The Muppet Show, early mornings, Phil Spector’s hair, spiders, North Korea, Cthulhu, earthquakes, horsemeat, being abducted by aliens, the strange man who cuddles pigeons every day near our apartment (we’re just waiting for him to bite their heads off) and… pitbull dogs.”

I dare say you have some evil plans up your sleeve. Care to share them?

Anders/Marleen: ”We’re planning to come to the UK soon and steal all your candy so watch out. Give us those Percy Pigs!”

Download Death And Vanilla’s mixtape here

Tracklisting:

Doris You Never Came Closer
The New Wave The Shade Of The Sun
Piero Umiliani Sequenza Psichadelica
Persona Introducao-Monte
Francois De Roubaix Mauvaise Nouvelle On Ne Part Plus
Giampiero Boneschi New Situation
Cecil Leuter Electro Sounds No 2
Shabazz Palaces Yeah You
Träd, Gräs Och Stenar Sanningens Silverflod
Gerard Manset Animal On Est Mal
Ennio Morricone Come Maddalena
Francisco Semprun & Michel Christodoulides Bric À Brac
Piero Umiliani Jeunesse Problematique No 2
Krzysztof Komeda Cul-De-Sac (Orchestral)
Les Roche Martin Tu As Peur Du Bruit
Mario Molino Jerk Beat
Älgarnas Trädgård Framtiden Är Ett Svävande Skepp, Förankrat I Forntiden

Poster design by Tim Scullion. Click here for tickets

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 09:39:00 -0400

Poster design by Tim Scullion. Click here for tickets

Ohio-based label Rano debuted late last year with the subterranean hum of the Paradiba EP by Polish...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 04:56:00 -0400

Ohio-based label Rano debuted late last year with the subterranean hum of the Paradiba EP by Polish producer Synek. We described it as “a crawl through the long dark ventilation shaft of the soul.” This was followed by Keep Sheila On Acid’s You Will Be The Same Tomorrow As You Were Yesterday and dsic’s Tiamat/Taniwha. Though the physical editions of all three releases have sold out they are still available to download from the label’s Bandcamp. On the strength of their output to date, Rano look set to take their place alongside similarly forward-thinking DIY labels such as The Geography Trip, Further, Broken20 and Cleaning Tapes. Here the label presents its exclusive OC Confessional mix…

“The concept behind the mix is loosely based on our Rano Radio sessions, which we hosted on Mixlr for a short while. We used the broadcast to show our appreciation to the artists and labels we enjoy, and to let the world know what type of music we wanted to be involved with as a label. We thought it’d be a good way to let people know early on that we love a wide range of music. Our goal was to release unique sounds from all over the globe, not just from one specific genre or region. We thought the broadcast was an effective and fun way to convey that concept to people and connect with fans and artists.

“Our mix for The Outer Church aims to continue that tradition and showcase some of the music we enjoy, give listeners a glimpse at some of what we’re brewing over here at Rano. Many of the tracks featured in this mix are either recently released or due out soon from people we know.

“We open with a field recording from Fakepop entitled Birds And Crickets Market. What I love about field recordings is how they paint a picture in my mind and take me someplace. I try to imagine an environment just based on the sounds I hear. When you read a book and you get sucked into this other world, I get a similar sense of that with field recordings. I especially enjoy the bit in this recording when you can hear someone asking the artist if he or she is recording. I can imagine them sitting there with a Zoom H4n in hand just giving a nod and smile. This track was used to put the listener in a setting in which the rest of the mix could be built from.

“At the very moment you hear the words ‘are you recording’ in the Fakepop track, I bring in the second tune by Cementimental entitled When Civilization Ends, The Fun Begins. It’s a short piece but I like how it brings a little chaos into this part of the mix. It builds off Fakepop’s recording of all the commotion at the market and is a nice juxtaposition to the softness of our third selection by Stephan Mathieu. My favorite part of the track is the quote at the very end, ‘Man is an instance’. It gives the listener a powerful thought to dwell on as the emotive piano notes enter your ears and the chirping birds fade off into the distance.

“Next up is a song by Stephan Mathieu entitled Imagination. Much like The Outer Church, Stephan gave our label a lot of support and encouragement from the very beginning. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Stephan as an artist and as label owner. If you’ve purchased any music from his Schwebung label, then you know he has high standards. It’s something I admire in this digital age where many seem to take the cheap and quick approach to things. Even his digital formats are of the highest quality, right down to the high resolution artwork. I love this song and I’m lucky to have it! Stephan posted it on Soundcloud for download as FLAC for a very short while, and I didn’t hesitate to snatch it up. I’m glad I did because I think it’s since been removed. It is a beautiful addition to our mix and I love the emotion it brings. We wanted to use something of Stephen’s as a way to thank him for his help to us. Imagination pretty much plays in its entirety without too much overlap from the other audio, but at the very ending I layer in a fresh tune from the The Revenant Sea.

“It’s Been Following The Plane Since Moscow is brand new from The Revenant Sea and is available from our good friends at Auditory Field Theory. Besides the fact that it’s a gorgeous tune released by a label we are acquainted with, I wanted to use a track by The Revenant Sea because we were first introduced to each other by The Outer Church (although the introduction was to his alter ego Wizards Tell Lies). I skipped over the beginning of this track, because I thought the middle of it sounded better being mixed into the end of Imagination. I encourage everyone to have a listen to the track in its entirety on The Revenant Sea’s debut cassette.

“So here we are, four tracks deep into our mix and you still haven’t heard from a single Rano artist… until now (8m 43s). Our next selection is a small portion of an unreleased ‘sketch’ from the duo known as MICROFL▼RSCNCE. Independently they are known as Micromelancolié and Wolf Fluorescence. They worked together on a split tape on A Beard Of Snails Records and have recently merged to create MICROFL▼RSCNCE. The first of three tapes is out now on Patient Sounds Intl. The second tape will be available soon on Already Dead Tapes and their third and final tape will be released by Rano early in the summertime. We’re also working closely with the other labels to provide our customers with a few complete sets of this series. We’re glad to be working with MICROFL▼RSCNCE, and love how their tracks seem to unfold and constantly evolve. If you skip ahead on one of their tunes, you may wonder how they got from point A to point B, but the transitions have a very smooth and natural progression. I love their use of soft and distorted synth layers in this particular sketch. I’m not sure if this sketch will be released in its current state so it’s a real treat for me to be able to share this ‘work in progress’ with you.

“As we fade out of the MICROFL▼RSCNCE sketch, The Revenant Sea still fizzles along in the background as the foghorn-like sounds of Bembridge Harbour by Emptywhale make their way into our mix. I can’t remember exactly how I came across Emptywhale but I know I’ve been a fan of his work since first listen. I love his treatment of the vocals throughout this mellow piece of music. This track is taken from some demos Emptywhale has been pulling together for his third album entitled ‘Some Hollow Lullabies’, which I’m told is due to be released in a few months. He also has two free releases available on the Haze netlabel.

“Bembridge Harbour rolls right into a nice little remix by Antoniak/Navmort. I don’t know much about Antoniak/Navmort, but they have a wide range of music on Soundcloud and Bandcamp that I highly recommend. I found this remix of the RSS B0YS track 0MG as a ‘name your price’ download on Bandcamp. I really like the way the vocals on this tune work with the vocals of Emptywhale, while bringing in the first solid beat of the mix. I let this beat ride alone for a little while, only to have it smothered by the sinister drones of oh/ex/oh, one of my favorite finds from last year. I’m not sure if I stumbled upon him through Manchester label The Geography Trip or the OC, but I was blown away by what I heard. His V/H/S Unreleased Horror Themes is awesome from beginning to end, and the Extant album on The Geography Trip is one of my favorite records of 2012. oh/ex/oh was kind enough to share two tracks with me for this mix. The Necronomicon and Dark Moors both come from his The House In The Woods soundtrack and are mixed seamlessly together for that collection. I wanted to use these two tracks exactly like he intended them to be heard on his soundtrack, so he sent me the two tracks pre-mixed. These are the only two tracks on our mix that weren’t mixed by me.

“The pulsing ending of Dark Moors melts into an edit of Russell M Harmon’s Amidst Wolves by Synek. Our next cassette (due early April) will be Russell’s We Are Failed. He released this album as a digital last year but wanted to do a physical release with Rano. We loved his album and wanted to produce it, but wanted to offer something brand new to our fans. We talked it over and decided to commission remixes from several artists and offer a completely remixed version of the album on the B-Side of our cassette. This tune by Synek is one of those submissions but unfortunately (even though we love it) will not be released on the tape. Instead we chose a remix by oh/ex/oh. Since the edit by Synek will not be available on our cassette, we included it in this mix. We still want people to hear it.

“As Amidst Wolves comes to a close we bring in a fresh tune from our good friend Keep Sheila On Acid entitled The Prophets Silence Is Deafening. This is from the recent Erotic Theology cassette from Auditory Field Theory. You may remember Keep Sheila On Acid from our second cassette. We really like The Prophets Silence… because it’s not like other tunes we’ve heard from Keep Sheila On Acid This is much more structured than we’re used to, but it still maintains the psychedelic feel we know and love. Keep Sheila On Acid is one of the reasons we launched the Rano label to begin with.

“As percussive elements of The Prophets Silence Is Deafening fade off into the ether, the vastness of I Watched The Mountain Move, With Me In Its Path by Lumbers takes us over. We didn’t do this track justice by putting it in our mix. Only a small portion of it was actually utilized. It’s another one of our track selections I would strongly recommend you listen to in its entirety. Sometimes I have an idea of how a song will work within a mix but once I hear it I realise it doesn’t work like I thought. This is one of those cases. I ultimately decided it sounded better using only a portion of it rather than the whole thing. You’ll have to do a bit of homework if you want to listen to the rest.

“Metallic hits and tribal drums from Clay Wilson’s Pfizing pierce through the drones of Lumbers as field recorded rustling and bird sounds of Duna by Tension Co echo beneath. I recently purchased Clay Wilson’s album from Styles Upon Styles label in NYC. It’s the second installment from their Bangers And Ash series, a very brilliant concept at that. The Bangers side is more of a danceable style of music while the Ash side encourages the artist to take a more experimental approach. The result is a hell of an album and a dynamic view into an artist’s creativity.

“As I mentioned before we have Duna by Tension Co playing pretty much the entire time alongside Pfizing but we gave it some reverb to keep it sounding more distant. I really wanted to use this Tension Co track to reintroduce the sound of the birds that we used in the beginning. Sometimes I like to have some repeated elements throughout a mix just to give it a cohesive feel. Perhaps it has to do with my background in design but I always feel if you use an element in only one place it kind of stands out like a sore thumb rather than becoming united within a composition. I think the exotic birds sound perfect with the tribal drums of Clay’s track.

“We let Duna ride on by itself for a bit before Hundred by Loam creeps in. (41m 47s). We received this track from our friends at Cleaning Tapes, a VHS/Tape/Digital label from the UK. We don’t really have much info to share about Cleaning Tapes or Loam since they are both keeping their cards close to their chests. What we do know is that Cleaning Tapes has been ramping up their Soundcloud page with new music and we believe we’ll see a release from them soon. They are a label we’ve been following for well over a year now and we can’t wait to see what they come up with. They’ve announced a pretty impressive lineup of artists, including Wanda Group, Huerco S, Bantam Lions, Sagat, DTCPU, Microburst and several others we thoroughly enjoy. We talked to them about donating a track to us from their label and they sent us this track by Loam. She is an interesting producer I hope to hear more of.

“Next up is Freeze Time by Larry Crywater, a newcomer to the Rano family. Larry has been working hard sending us a barrage of music ranging from experimental and noise, to house and techno. We think Larry Crywater brings a unique sound to our label and our mix. I especially love the way he changes this track up in the middle and goes from the banging drums into some fuzzy ambience. It really made a nice entry point to mix in our next selection entitled 800mts by Reverse Projection. This track has (what I assume to be) some field recorded dripping elements that make it sound like you’re lost in a wet cave. Along with the mechanical clangs and industrial sounds going on around, I get the sense that I’ve wandered into a place I probably shouldn’t be and love the way the track blends into our next selection by Primitive Ear entitled Another Planet Up His Sleeve.

“Again it seems we went for a recording with some bird sounds, although I chose this one more for its mechanical breathing effect. This tune by Primitive Ear is available for free download on the Auditory Field Theory digital compilation and brings us close to the end of our mix. Last but not least is a tune from Flowers entitled North To The Tundra.

“Flowers is an older alias of Bantam Lions who recently released a 12” with Scenery Records and has some work forthcoming from Cleaning Tapes, as we mentioned earlier. I have so many tracks from Bantam Lions that it was very hard for me to choose only one. I narrowed things down after many listens and decided to use North To The Tundra. I love this selection for the ending of our mix because it’s fun, funky and has a positive vibe. I wanted to be sure to include a tune by Bantam Lions because he’s an artist I enjoy and we featured him on one of our first Rano Radio broadcasts. It also helps that I have a healthy selection of his work to choose from.

“In closing I’d like to thank all of the artists and labels who have contributed music, The Outer Church for being such a gracious host and all of you for checking out this mix from Rano. We truly appreciate your support!”

Download Rano: The Outer Church Confessional here

Tracklisting:

Fakepop Birds And Crickets Market
Cementimental When Civilization Ends, The Fun Begins
Stephan Mathieu Imagination
The Revenant Sea It’s Been Following The Plane Since Moscow
MICROFL▼RSCNCE Sketch 01 (Unreleased Excerpt)
Emptywhale Bembridge Harbour
RSS B0YS 0MG (Reshaped by Antoniak/Navmort)
oh/ex/oh The Necronomicon + Dark Moors
Russell M Harmon Amidst Wolves (Synek Sheep’s Clothing Edit)
Keep Sheila On Acid The Prophets Silence Is Deafening
Lumbers I Watched The Mountain Move, With Me In Its Path
Clay Wilson Pfizing
Tension Co Duna
Loam Hundred
Larry Crywater Freeze Time
Reverse Projection 800mts
Primitive Ear Another Planet Up His Sleeve
Flowers North To The Tundra

The music created by April Larson is by turns sinister, violent, mournful and disorientating. It...

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 07:11:00 -0500

The music created by April Larson is by turns sinister, violent, mournful and disorientating. It creeps like the night stalker. It hovers like a low fog. It shudders like a spooked infant. It crackles and vibrates with a weird energy comparable to that of Hacker Farm - with whom Larson has recently collaborated - but it has its own unique spectral identity. The official word? To wit: “April Larson is the surface world representative of a tribe of nāga located along the coast of Louisiana. She listens to music through customized headphones with speakers placed along the jaw and translates music into sense-data through a collection of three interlaced brains. Somewhere between Henry David Thoreau and Crawford Tillinghast, she continues her research in oneironautic listening and regularly delivers lectures on relevant tone-clusters to beehives and ghosts.” So there. Here, Larson presents a brand new track and a short four-part mix which serves as a fine introduction to her work accompanied by some highly relevant ruminations concerning dreams, gnosticism and creativity…

“I’m very private and it seems rather personal to talk about one’s dreams, in words at least, so that’s where the tracks come in, I think. My first album How Do You Know My Name? is based entirely on dreams I’ve had, some of them loosely connected. The vinyl crackle sample seemed appropriate for creating a dreamy atmosphere. Haywire is the listeners’ unanimous favorite track, I’ve found, probably because it’s got the most recognizable piano, but Eyes Like Embers is my personal favorite. It originated from a very vivid dream in which I met someone I believed to be the Devil, because of his ‘eyes like embers’. He and I spoke for a very long time about very vague things, and he had a wonderfully caustic sense of humor.

“Harbor House is another dream excerpt, a physical house that’s not exactly haunted, but not benignly inanimate, either. Harbor House Exploration Number One is one of many (sixty or so) exploration, experimentation and recollection tracks that didn’t end up on the final version of the A History That Never Occurred album. The spoken portion: ‘The fact that there exists no clear photograph of him; that every attempt to record him amounts to endless tapes of distortion and static…’

“It Was Misplaced (Fuzzy Angels Version) was the original title track for my second album. Eventually, however, I cleaned this track up nice and pretty. This static-y version became a bonus track that only made it onto every other copy.

“Voiding The Contract (Not Raw) is a version of the same track on my SoundCloud page, that track being an example of my foray into incorporating raw data, databending, etc. This is the original ambient version, or base, of the finalized track. The ideas behind the more recent tracks are attachment, revenge, sacrifices, demons and sigils and blood magic, what we perceive as freedom, and how we so often forfeit our souls to redeem our hearts.

“The above image is a stamp I carved several years ago of an ouroboros - the perfect image, in my opinion, as I have a fondness for snakes (I have six of them including pythons and a boa, they are my scaly children) and the symbol itself is so gnostically meaningful.

“I’m interested in the symbols of gnosticism/hermeticism, the parables and occult fiction. The last thing I read was Philip K Dick’s Exegesis at Christmas, I could only read about ten pages at a time because the abundance of ideas and interconnectivity was almost too much.

“As far as coming into contact with Hacker Farm, I was following the author Warren Ellis’s blog at the time (this was early 2008) and he posted a link to Kek’s blog, where I read about Darren Bauler’s work as Medroxy Progesterone Acetate.

“I contacted Darren for copies of his albums and it was really my first introduction to noise/drone music, and it was life-changing! It opened up whole new avenues for meditation and fiction and integrating music with dreams and reality. Darren’s packages were beautiful and he was so nice and open about his processes of making music. Eventually I met up with him and a lot of his friends in Austin TX, where he put on a lovely live show with creepy projected videos of cackling CG heads on the wall of a beautiful wooden barn/studio.

“So, slowly, I started talking to his friends and supporters and one of them was Kek-W, whose farmpunk ways were very appealing as I grew up in the rural south, I got a copy of Hacker Farm’s album Poundland and loved it, etc etc. He asked a few days ago if I could contribute some words. I’d done so for Darren and I was happy to be of service! To be part of their amazing art is just… there aren’t words. I really and truly credit Kek and Darren for changing my life in such a positive and meaningful and artistic way, it’s given me a wonderful creative outlet. I’d always taken photos and written stories and tinkered with an old Casio and acoustic guitar, but blending all the arts together is fantastic.”

Download an exclusive new track recorded especially for The Outer Church here

Download April Larson’s four-track intro mix here

Tracklisting:

Eyes Like Embers (0:00 - 4:18)
Harbor House Exploration Number One (4:14 - 5:44)
It Was Misplaced (Fuzzy Angels Version) (5:42 - 8:11)
Voiding The Contract (Not Raw) (8:09 - 11:32)

The Outer Church stumbled into the waterlogged world of North Yorkshire’s Raining Leaf via...

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 11:59:00 -0500

The Outer Church stumbled into the waterlogged world of North Yorkshire’s Raining Leaf via their split release with the incomparable Paper Dollhouse. This was followed by the icily melancholic Frozen Landscapes EP and the ambitious 55-minute composition And Elohim Created - both released, like the split, through the artist’s own Chapel Yard imprint. Powerfully atmospheric and accompanied by the bleakly gorgeous monochrome photography that has become the label’s trademark, Raining Leaf’s music enfolded us in a beautiful gloom from which escape was neither likely nor desirable. We surfaced from our moist reverie just long enough to dash off a hasty missive and in no time at all a mix and interview materialised in the narthex…

Can you share some of the thoughts and feelings that went into the creation of your Ambient Purgatory mix?

“I’ve basically just picked things I think are really beautiful. The opening track is Venus by Don Yule, I sampled and reworked it right at the very end of one of my tracks called Los albores del Norte. So I thought the original can go first on this mix. Venus was released on Domestic who have put out two Raining Leaf albums. I poached Rubik from Domestic for an EP on my label so I have included one of his tracks along with a Raining Leaf one from the same release. Everything else on the mix is just stuff that I listened to a lot. I’ve been a dEUS fan since Worst Case Scenario so a song from that record is on there. To people who know me I guess there are no real surprises, if there is then maybe it would be Supercute. I heard that song on some online radio thing about six months ago and thought it would be by some freak-folk band so was very surprised to find out it wasn’t. I’d love their voices on my music. I don’t really listen to music that is similar to Raining Leaf, I don’t sit at home listening to drone or soundscapes or anything like that but it seems to be what I end up making. I really don’t know where it comes from. When I first started I wanted to do something along the lines of Múm, gnac and Labradford but I have no idea how to do it and just seem to have ended up where I am now wherever this is, some kind of ambient purgatory. So there are tracks on the mix by all three of those. I have listened to Labradford’s E Luxo So a thousand times and never tired of it so taken something from there too. The album has no track titles, just a list of recording credits which is why that track is called Dulcimers Played By Peter Neff. Strings Played. Or just the third track as I’ve always called it.”

What inspired the creation of your 55-minute long track, And Elohim Created?

“Trouble sleeping. I’d made a couple of really ambient tracks to put on my ipod and help me try to drift off but they weren’t working too well. I noticed that one led seamlessly into the next though, and I just built it up from there really. Doing an album as one track was something I’d thought about doing on an earlier piece called Los albores del Norte but in the end I didn’t have the confidence to go through with it and instead it became the focal point of the Winter Solstice album. I’ve been collecting samples for a while, some field recordings, bits taken from freesound and places like that and thought I’d just try it and see how far I get with it. After it got to the seventeen minute mark something seemed to click. The titled is based on And Elohim Created Adam by William Blake. It’s meant to sound poetic rather than arrogant.”

Describe what your hometown means to you.

“Well my hometown is in Lincolnshire but I haven’t lived there for nearly 15 years. I now live up the road in York. It’s a nice enough place but I haven’t felt too much of a connection here to be honest. I actually prefer it going towards Scarborough and Whitby, near the moors. I do miss my hometown but I outgrew it. Every now and then I get a bit homesick and have to remind myself why I left there in the first place. All my happiest memories are there though, so that’s what it means to me really. Most of what I love about it has gone, its character has been knocked out. Every time I go back something changes and it’s rarely for the better.”

So you feel a deep connection to the North Yorkshire landscape?

“Absolutely, It’s tough to describe though. I had the same connection to the peak district in Derbyshire when I was a child. Memories obviously play a vital part in these connections but I’ve always known I’d end up in North Yorkshire, It’s Raining Leaf country.”

Presumably weather and atmospheric conditions are a major source of inspiration for the project?

“Yes they are, I began using sample/field recordings of wind, rain and storms initially to create a sense of atmosphere and I really love hearing them in music so I thought I’d make it a continual theme throughout Raining Leaf. Sometimes it feels like something is missing in my music and I stop to think about it for a moment and then realise it’s the sound of waves lapping on the shore, the wind through the trees or a birdsong. I’ve become quite attached to these sounds now. The titles come from whatever my mood is on the night I complete a track. It’s usually about 1am when I finish something so I just think of the night sky or some kind of imagery which the piece of music has provoked in my mind. The name Raining Leaf came to me a few years before any music was ever made. I was listening to Sonic Youth’s Murray Street while waiting at a bus stop one evening, and it literally started raining leaves from some nearby trees. The song playing was Rain On Tin and my train of thought just switched to Rain On Leaf (which ended up becoming the name of the debut album) and then to raining leaf. It stuck with me for ages and when I tried to form a band with a friend about two years later I picked the name Raining Leaves. We never got going though so that idea was abandoned. Eventually I started to make music on my own and Raining Leaf seemed the natural name to use. Around this point I was regularly getting hit in the face by random leaves and every time it happened I just thought to myself ‘raining leaf’. I was walking home along the river in York one afternoon and a giant one slapped me right across the face really hard, and I just thought ‘this is getting stupid, it has to be a sign.’ And Elohim created Raining Leaf. That’s really how it all began.”

You recently released a split EP with Paper Dollhouse. Do you feel a particular kinship with their work?

“I’d read an interview Astrud had done and noticed that the way she’d recorded her album was very similar to how I was recording my stuff, using the built-in skype microphone to record and little things like that. We were doing something in a similar style but creating something quite different to each other. When we put it alongside each other it fitted together perfectly. We met each other when we were teenagers but I haven’t seen her for years now so it was nice to reach out to her again.”

Are there any other current artists whose work you feel close to?

“Not really, probably just Rubik because I’ve been allowed to hear some of the new stuff which is excellent, it’s really dark. Evil genius.”

Your artwork - as with all the artwork on Chapel Yard’s releases - is exceptionally evocative. Is it your own work?

“Ninety-nine per cent of it is. On a couple of the very early releases I used public domain images but at that point Chapel Yard was just an umbrella to release my stuff under than a label. It took until about the tenth release before I got some genuine continuity into the artwork with the black and white theme and started to take it all more seriously. Most of the photos are in or around the York area and are things I see on a regular basis so when I walk the fifteen minutes from the city centre to my house a pattern develops. When I get to St Mary’s Abbey it’s the cover of EP2. Four minutes around the corner I get to Scarborough bridge, as I cross it and look back towards the city it’s the sleeve of Frozen Landscapes. Step off the bridge and backtrack slightly and it becomes the cover of Dead Of Winter. Go about a hundred metres along the river and you’ll get to EP1 and a bit further along Cinder Lane it’s the cover from Silver Morning. Walk along the field from there and you’ll get to where I took the image for And Elohim Created. I might even design a Chapel Yard treasure map when I’ve done a few more of them. Plant clues at the location of each photograph or something.”

How would you describe the Chapel Yard aesthetic?

“I’m not entirely certain myself what the aesthetic is, I’m just playing everything by ear really. A lot of releases have been spontaneous, the Paper Dollhouse EP took the longest to get together, from agreeing to it and releasing it I’d put out a Raining Leaf mini album and a full album of completely new material none of which had even been conceived when the idea of the EP was suggested. It only took just over a month to get together which is still no time really. That probably gives you an idea of how obsessively I work on Raining Leaf.

“Musically, it just has to fit. There’ll be drone releases and hopefully some electronica kind of stuff, all depends who wants to work with it. I do everything myself which isn’t that much. I do no press. I drop no emails to anybody about new releases, I depend on word of mouth because it’s how I’d like it to be. I’m not here to play the game, I tweet and post on Facebook and then leave it for anyone who chooses to share it or not. Physical releases will all be homemade, there’ll be no sending CDs or tapes off to pressing companies or whatever people do. Just all done by me, in my house. A cottage industry.”

What are your plans for the label?

“I’m currently doing some Paper Dollhouse/Raining Leaf CDs for EP2 and will make a few of EP1 which featured Rubik. Instead of making separate CDs for Layers and Silver Morning I’ve compiled them onto an album called Tales Of Industry and will do a CD run of that too. Then there’s EP3 which will hopefully be ready in the not too distant future, which will be another split EP with another one to follow that. Maybe even something without Raining Leaf, will just have to see what happens. I’ll be going down the digital distribution route for a year too just to see the effect it will have on sales. As for Raining Leaf, I’m not sure. In April it will be 12 months since the first EP came out, so in the first ten months I think I’ve put out 79 tracks if I include the four cover versions I made available on Soundcloud. So maybe I’ll aim for one hundred before then. Or maybe I’ll just call it a day after one year. Or I’ll actually take my time for once and write a classical album.”

Don Yule Venus
múm K/half Noise
gnac Observed vs Expected
Hacia Dos Veranos Despertar
Massive Attack Weather Storm
Malcolm Middleton Crappo The Clown
Rubik Drifted Away
Bowery Electric Over And Over
Supercute Haunted Hostel
dEUS Right As Rain
Raining Leaf Odda
Zita Swoon Ragdoll Blues
The For Carnation Alfredo’s Welcome
Labradford Dulcimers played by Peter Neff. Strings played

Click here for tickets

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 16:31:23 -0500

Click here for tickets

Somerset’s Hacker Farm have been taking things apart and putting them back together all weird...

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 10:37:00 -0500

Somerset’s Hacker Farm have been taking things apart and putting them back together all weird since 2009. Their new album UHF (Exotic Pylon Records) has gained considerable acclaim for its unique strain of confrontational DIY electro-rural noise, while its self-released 2011 predecessor Poundland is equally worthy of investigation, not least for its excellent use of crows. What a carrion! Here, ahead of their appearance at the sold-out February 16th edition of The Outer Church in Brighton with Kemper Norton and IX Tab, Hacker Farm’s Kek-W and Farmer Glitch pay tribute in word and sound to one of their formative influences: Mave.

Download ‘Hacker Farm - MAVIS’

“Mavis Slater - or ‘Mave’ as we call her - is a face familiar to generations of music-lovin’ Yeovilfolk. She’s like our favourite aunt or something.

“Mave is Mutter Slater’s mum - you know, that bloke from Stackridge -but we all know her as the lady who, over the years, has sold us some of our best-loved, most treasured records and CDs. She’s part of our landscape, our musical lineage. Everyone round here who ever played in a band owes her big-time - everyone! - she’s our accidental muse, the woman who provided the coal that fuelled our respective fires. Just ask Polly Harvey, or Mark Wilson from The Mob, or Tim Goldsworthy of Mo’ Wax/DFA infamy, or Wayne and Bruce from The Pineapple Thief: everyone knows and loves Mave. We all owe her an unspoken debt.

“Now in her mid-eighties, Mavis is the engine that underpins Acorn Records, its beating heart. Chris Lowe might pretend to run the shop, but we all know who really pulls the strings! Two, three times a week Mave is there, busy behind the counter. And whenever we see her the years melt away.

“I first consciously encountered her in the mid-70s back when she worked in Radio House, Princes Street. It was an oddly cool shop: old school TVs, stereos and radiograms in the front; albums, singles and listening-booths at the back. Stockhausen albums were stacked up next to Baker-Gurvitz Army and the Edgar Broughton Band: a vinylspotter’s wet-dream. To us snotty-nosed rural kids, Mave was “that funny lady”, the one who’d make an insightful and deliciously sarky remark when you waved some crappy album under her nose and demanded she played it. She was both knowledgeable and knowing, street-smart and a good laugh; in retrospect, Mave must’ve had the patience of a saint, dealing with all us cocky, annoying, hyperhormonal teenagers conducting our uncool teenage transactions in the shop, but never actually buying anything. Though, actually…

“I bought Neu ‘75 and Zappa’s One Size Fits All on the same day in a Radio House sale from Mave. Still have the same copies. Still adore them.

“A couple of years later, we would pile into Radio House every Saturday and rummage through the box of Punk seven-inches, elbowing each other out the way to get at the good stuff. I heard Donna Summer’s I Feel Love for the first time in one of the Radio House listening-booths. They were painted black, scuffed and decorated with the torn remains of promotional stickers and labels. Moroder’s sequencers pumped away on the tinny-sounding little speakers and my friend Ken said, “This is the future, man. One day, all records will sound like this. This and Kraftwerk…” And I nodded in sagely-uncool teenage agreement.

“Ah, those listening-booths! People used to get pissed-up in them on tinnies, pee in them, throw up, cop off and even, sometimes, try and have a surreptitious quickie. It’s true: Mave told me she once caught a couple at it.

“Rewind briefly back to the mid-70s and a couple of hippies - Rob Bacon and Chris Lowe - hit town after finishing college in London and open a tiny, cupboard-sized record-shop down the road from Radio House called Acorn. Man, I lived in there too: boxes and boxes of Duul, Can, Nektar, Hawkwind, Kraan, everything you can imagine… most days of the week, I yo-yo’d between Acorn and Radio House. Good times, man. Great times.

“So, when Radio House shut in the late 70s and Acorn moved to larger (more modern!) premises down by the bus-station in Glovers Walk, Yeovil, they poached Mave and the three of them headed off into local record-retail legend and the pages of Last Shop Standing. Rob’s sadly no longer with us - and, man, I sooo miss his acerbic wit and his opinions on Country Joe & The Fish, Dylan, etc - but Mave and the boys, well, they should be proud: they’ve seen them all off over the years: Our Price and Virgin and HMV and WH Smiths and….

“You know, I didn’t realise until half a lifetime later that Mave had worked in the record-department of WH Smiths back in the 60s, so I probably bought Monkees singles and Gerry Anderson EPs off her before I knew her. And I bet IX Tab almost certainly bought his Orbital and Coil albums from Mave in Acorn in the 80s and 90s.

“We all owe her a debt.

“Sometimes, it’s the smallest of things that change us, the little things that set events and subtle transformations in motion.

“We’re all ripples in a pond. But the ripples that quietly emanated from Mavis went much further and touched far more of us than she could ever realise or know. Sure, she didn’t make the great music that we bought, but she fed our dreams - helped enable us.

“It’s time to acknowledge that debt, though I don’t think that I - or any of us - could ever pay it back in full. Mavis has enriched us in ways that it’s difficult to quantify or describe. Just by being there, just by being Mavis.

“For years I wondered where it came from, all that music. Mavis is like a conduit, I guess - a Portal - the music flows out through her, into her son, into the world, into us…

“But where did it come from, the music? And where will it go?

“Well, wherever we let it take us, right?

“Mave, this is some love back. From all of us to you.”

HACKER FARM, YEOVIL, JANUARY 2013

A recent conversation with South London based artist and electronic composer Paul Snowdon turned to...

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 14:22:00 -0500

A recent conversation with South London based artist and electronic composer Paul Snowdon turned to the subject of formative influences: what arcane sounds kicked off the process that would culminate in the birth of his horological alter-ego, Time Attendant? On discovering that Snowdon’s creative secretions were initially stirred by the extreme end of early 90s Metal - not so unlikely when one considers the abrasive tones and textures of his recent Tournaments EP for Exotic Pylon Records - we invited him to pay tribute to the rampant morbidity and restless innovation of that unholy epoch. Soon after, the nasty, brutish and short Caput Mortuum mix arrived in our narthex, leaving a sulphurous odour that persists no matter how hard we scrub the stonework. Download it here and read on for Snowdon’s commentary…

“Here we go, retracing the musical steps of my teenage years… after a brief stint of early 80s electro, which at the time I found too camp and vacuous, I rapidly descended into the murky world of Heavy Metal in search of a more difficult, challenging and therefore more meaningful sound, or so I thought. Positively sprinting through Soft Rock, Glam Rock, anything ending in Rock, pausing for a while in Thrash Metal, some of which stuck with me. I wandered into Black Metal, didn’t like the theatrics, and eventually arrived at the gates of Death Metal, which gripped me with it’s powerful angry tales, confirming what it was to be human and vulnerable.

“By the time I was 15 years old I’d bought my first electric guitar and formed a Metal band, practising every Sunday in a drafty farm barn with a big old combine harvester as company. On discovering that it was really quite difficult to play as fast as my heroes, I drifted into Doom Metal, writing long elaborate riffs that were impossible to drum to, but great to zone out to.

“As soon as I was old enough to drive, I bought a van for the band and the next five years saw several oufits form and dissipate, with regular gigging slots around the scummy pubs of North Yorkshire.

“Then came university and being an art student, I thought I’d better stop listening to Metal and start listening to Jazz, ha! This has been my route into experimental music and the reason why Time Attendant sounds like it does, innit.”

1. Entombed ‘Left Hand Path’ (from Left Hand Path, Earache 1989)

“Back in 1989, Tomas Skogsberg, soon to become a highly respected metal producer, got together with Swedish death metallers Entombed to produce their debut album Left Hand Path, and practically invented a new guitar tone in the process, primitive, soily, grinding and disintegrating. A kind of super-heavy stuttering ‘FUZZz’ which phases around reverb-drenched vocals. Entombed are all dark magic and chainsaws. One of the first and best of this Metal subgenre.”

2. My Dying Bride ‘Act 1’ (from Symphonaire Infernus et Empyrium, Peaceville 1991)

“Austere northern romanticism from Gothic Doom kings My Dying Bride. Quasi-religious lyrics, mournful violins and massive gloom! A Shakespearean darkness delivered with the brutality of a ripper murder. I would love to see and hear this bleak, old and seedy-sounding music accompanied by some classic lantern-lit scenes from the BBC archives.”

3. Paradise Lost ‘Gothic’ (from Gothic, Peaceville 1991)

“Paradise Lost’s Gothic is a highly original album that doesn’t rely on heaviness to produce the right level of dread. Instead, icy harmonious licks from a guitar that sounds like a keyboard are saturated in delay and chorus, forming a kind of constant solo. Operatic female vocals and shifting visceral growls combine over a low mix of power chords and doom-style drumming. A classic.”

4. Obituary ‘Circle Of The Tyrants’ (Celtic Frost cover from Cause Of Death, Roadracer 1990)

“It was at this point in my long walk through the undergrowth of Extreme Metal, age 17, that my old dad popped his head around my bedroom door and simply said, ‘I’d just like to say that I think your taste in music has really gone downhill of late.’ Ha! I don’t remember my response but needless to say, I did think I was on a righteous, rebellious path. I also recall feeling genuine fear on hearing John Tardy’s vocals - what kind of depraved human would make those sounds? Obituary’s music is quite simply about all the different ways we might expect to cop it but I find these bloody tales of mortality life-affirming.”

5. Cathedral ‘Reaching Happiness, Touching Pain’ (from Forest of Equilibrium, Earache 1991)

“The poetically fantastical Lee Dorrian (ex-Napalm Death) croons away in dreary pain on this psychedelic, hippie-tinted, Dope Metal classic. Combining half-sung warbling vocals, flutes, keyboards and achingly slow riffs, all packaged up in Bosch-style artwork with a Tolkienesque twist. This is music without horizons as the drizzling grey sky of Cathedral’s home town of Coventry merges with faceless post-war blocks passed off as buildings. A pre-groovy Cathedral here, and a personal favourite.”

6. Autopsy ‘In The Grip Of Winter’ (from Mental Funeral, Peaceville Records 1991)

“Death, doom and gore! Autopsy cover the lot. Theirs is a hollow, loose, downtuned and out-of-control kind of sound, emanating from muffled amplifiers and deadened drums, seemingly made from the bloodstained cardboard of a homeless heroin addict’s abode. Yet the genuinely memorable riffs will stick to your brain like flypaper, as we circle around the sticky mass of poison and decay. Conceptually perfect in every sense, Mental Funeral is a no-brainer!”

7. Slayer ‘Raining Blood’ (from Reign in Blood, Def Jam 1986)

“I wasn’t going to include Slayer in this mix, thinking them too obvious a choice, but then realised that no Metal mix could ever be complete without the best Metal band ever! The only way to close the mix, nuff said.”

Time Attendant’s Tournaments EP is out now on Exotic Pylon Records. You can listen to his improvised live performance from the September 2012 edition of The Outer Church here

You may already be aware that February 16th edition of The Outer Church at Caroline Of Brunswick in...

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 13:01:00 -0500

You may already be aware that February 16th edition of The Outer Church at Caroline Of Brunswick in Brighton will include live performances from West Country frictioneers Hacker Farm, Kemper Norton and IX Tab. In addition, we are very proud to announce that the event will also incorporate a special midnight screening of writer Leo Whetter and director Will Hutchinson’s zero-budget psychological horror film, Overhill. Shot on location in Cornwall, the film is sure to escalate the atmosphere from the compellingly weird to the utterly terrifying.

Advance tickets for the event are available here

“It’s very hard to get lost in America these days, and even harder to stay...

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 17:45:00 -0500

“It’s very hard to get lost in America these days, and even harder to stay lost.” - Heather Donohue, The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The music of North Carolina duo Lost Trail evokes the Mythic America glimpsed in such films as The Blair Witch Project, American Movie and Cropsey - a haunted landscape steeped in folklore, as unknowably vast as imagination itself, and every bit as dangerous. The Outer Church’s first contact with Lost Trail came with the discovery of their excellent October Mountain album via Bandcamp. Further investigation revealed an outfit with a self-contained and highly immersive DIY aesthetic encompassing music, photography and film. We’ve been toying with the term ‘Disembodied Americana’ as a means of describing husband and wife Zachary and Denny Corsa’s spectral manifestations. In truth, categorising their marriage of sound and vision is considerably less rewarding than surrendering to its evanescent glow. The following interview with Zach and Denny was conducted via the white magic of electronic mail and is accompanied by an exclusive mixtape entitled Music For The Woods And Fields…

Tell us about the mix you’ve created for The Outer Church…

Zachary Corsa: ”I called this mix Music For The Woods And Fields, for reasons that will probably become apparent later in the interview. Essentially it’s a collection of pieces that inspire us either atmospherically or musically, sort of the ingredients that go into this big stew of influences that is our work. As expected, you’ll find a lot of woodsy-naturey sort of themes, and a lot of broken machines breaking down further.

“The Belong piece I included because October Language is an indisputable masterpiece in my opinion, and when I first heard this song in particular, it proved a fine example of the haunting beauty of taped music disintegrating as you listen. Esmerine is a fantastic Godspeed offshoot, much more chamber music inflected than Godspeed itself, and this piece features some incredible use of static as tension-builder and contrast. Mount Eerie’s album with Julie Doiron and Fred Squire, Lost Wisdom, is probably my very favorite album, if I had to choose. Phil Elverum’s imagery and whole extensive mythology is a gigantic influence on Lost Trail and on myself personally. Forest Swords is a newer project from Liverpool that has a perfect name, and the dude evokes his landscape musically very much the way we aim to ourselves.

“Library Tapes is an obvious pick, because David Wenngren is the reason I began Lost Trail. We started out very much in pale imitation of him, except I’m no pianist. Jean Ritchie is one of my very favorite mountain ballad singers, and delivers absolute chills with precision. Six Organs Of Admittance fall into a similar category as Mount Eerie, in terms of thematic influence. Tim Hecker is an obvious totemic inspiration to any experimental musician, and this piece particularly has a lumbering sort of charm, like a Wendigo blundering through a northern taiga. The M83 piece is a frozen tunda wasteland of a song in all the right ways, and if hard-pressed, might be my favorite song of all time. Mountain Man was included for their gorgeously spine-tingling harmonies. Pitchfork once described them as sounding like the practitioners of some lost backwoods cult, and I think that’s a very apt description.

“Set Fire To Flames (another Godspeed family band) were a huge revolutionary inspiration to me when I first discovered them, and I expand on that a little more later in the interview. I included one of my favorite Chopin nocturnes because it’s Chopin and thus it’s amazing. Boards of Canada have great nostalgic implications for me, as well as being one of the first gateway drugs I had getting into experimental music growing up. My friends and I used to drive back into the haunted woods behind my best buddy’s house at 2am, and turn off the headlights, and listen to ‘Gyroscope’ in the dark. No song sends me back to those times like ‘Gyroscope’. Finally, Sacred Harp singing is one of the most beautiful expressions of faith and wonder you’ll ever hear, and is an ongoing obsession of mine. Nothing we ever create musically will be as perfect as Sacred Harp singing.”

How and when did Lost Trail come about?

Z: ”I had been in a number of bands since moving to Raleigh after finishing college. I knew I wanted to pursue music as a career, but my years living in Raleigh and Durham and playing in more traditional indie bands just didn’t feel right. The prevalent scene in central North Carolina was, and still is, folk-inflected indie rock, and I began to feel more and more that it wasn’t what I was meant to play. I felt no creative spark making song-oriented music at that point. When an alt-country sort of band I was in shared a bill with Andrew Weathers (at Nightlight in Chapel Hill), it literally changed everything. Andrew was an experimental composer from Greensboro making music unlike anything I was familiar with at the time (he’s since moved on to Oakland, to study at Mills College under Pauline Oliveros). I remember our cellist in that band confiding in me that she didn’t ‘get’ that kind of music, and that was the moment when I knew that this was the kind of music I wanted to make. Challenging, intellectual, with the ability to make a listener think as well as feel. It was a revolution for me. I come from a very small eastern NC town, and before college, and the rise of blogs and the like, I really had no exposure to what I’d call ‘deeper’ music (other than maybe Radiohead).

“I continued on from that band and played in a post-rock band for awhile in Raleigh, went on my first tour with that band, and eventually decided to try and do everything myself. With the exception of adding Denny to the permanent lineup in our second year, which was inevitable given the amount of field recordings and production choices she was contributing to the band, its been something we’ve held fast to, that DIY ethic. We have great friends who help us out with instruments we can’t play once in awhile, but that’s all. Now its been two and a half years, seven or eight tours, a dozen albums, and an absurd amount of splits, EPs, film scores, B-sides collections, compilation appearances, and the like. Meanwhile, we’ve started a tape label, held some memorable house shows here in Burlington, and I’ve continued writing for blogs like Decoder, MTYMNHKA, and A Closer Listen, something I’ve done for most of a decade.”

What inspired the project’s name?

Z: ”I was in Cincinnati on tour with the aforementioned post-rock band, and I was already formulating the idea for my own project in my head. I asked Denny via G-Chat if she had any ideas for the project name, and she didn’t, nor did I. We moved on to a discussion (I don’t recall the context) about a bit of land she owns in the little southern Virginia town of Clover. The property includes a collapsed house, an even-more collapsed barn, and a trail that’s long since been lost. When she suggested ‘Lost Trail’ it seemed perfect, a summation of the intended mysteriousness of the project, coupled with our intention to keep the themes of the band grounded in nature. At times it hasn’t been the easiest name to deal with (people very much seem to want to pluralize it, and the amount of bad Lost Trail jokes I’ve heard is stunning), but it’s still very much in line with the overall mood of our band, so it wins on that account.”

You’ve already amassed a considerable body of work. Why release so much material?

Z: ”In a number of ways, primarily Lost Trail, I’m involved with music full-time. No day job. It was a decision Denny and I came to in the early days of the project, that if I was going to make a go of this career, I should focus all my attention on it and work as hard as possible (another reason for that DIY ethic we maintain so fiercely). I record almost every day, and over the past few years I’ve morphed from someone who valued my lazy time to someone who gets restless and uncomfortable if they aren’t working. I’m not just going to sit around all day eating cereal while my wife goes off to her day job. So I record. And if I spend my time on something, I’m going to at least toss it up on Bandcamp, whether I like it or not. Even the mistakes are worthwhile to share. It’s all a learning and growing process. This project started out very rough and unsure, as an experiment in making music on an instrument I didn’t know how to play (piano, very much thanks to that Library Tapes influence), and listening back to those early recordings makes me cringe in the best possible way. As its shifted back towards guitar drone and noise collage, we’ve learned more, but we still have a long way to go. Basically, I like sharing the process. That’s why we keep our old Bandcamp open for B-sides collections and the stray side project. A few people who’ve reviewed us or whatever have questioned us maybe ‘over-saturating’ with our output, but I can’t change my nature. My feeling is, if I spent time on it, I’m not just going to throw it away. I’m not a self-editing type of person. By now our fans know the difference between wayward experiments and the stuff we value enough for albums.”

What would you recommend as a good point of entry for the uninitiated?

Z: ”People’s favorite full-lengths of ours thus far seem to be A Stained August For The Jetcrash, which was released on cassette by Sunup Recordings (Minnesota), and October Mountain, released on cassette by Felt Cat (Iowa). October Mountain was full of a lot of atypical experiments for us. I think our most cohesive and representative work is definitely Jetcrash, though there’s an album we just completed, which I’m calling Blacked Out Passages at the moment, that might be better. We set out to deliberately record a concise summation of all our sounds and themes, and I think Passages achieves this handily. Also, the split we released with Theo’s Mystic Robot Orchestra, on Sarcastic Magician (Kansas), is a good entry point, I’d say.”

Denny Wilkerson Corsa: ”Eerie Light, Eerie Woods would also be a good entry point. That’s an earlier self-released album that I happen to like a lot. It was one of the first albums, and also one of the first ones I worked on. It was when Zach began to use more drone guitar in the music, so that was the album where the current sound of Lost Trail really began to take form.”

What do you consider your most successful release to date?

Z: ”Jetcrash and our score for our film Traumatic Attachments have probably gotten the nicest attention blog-buzz wise. Personally, I’m never entirely satisfied with anything we’ve done. There’s much that makes me wince and regret decisions I’ve made, looking back. We have obvious equipment limitations with the way we choose to do things, and that’s probably the most frustrating part of the process. But I’d say Jetcrash is probably our ‘best’ work.

“Honestly, I don’t know how healthy it would be for us to ever be entirely content with one of our albums, anyway. The struggle against financial and technological restraints drives this band, and I think we need to maintain that underdog sort of status in order to produce our best art.”

D: ”There’s so many ways you can define success. It could be what sells best, or what people rave about the most, or what we personally like the most. Each album has been successful in many different ways.”

How would you describe your hometown of Burlington, North Carolina?

Z: ”Burlington is a small city of about 50,000 people in the very middle of the state. It’s very 50s-esque, it’s not considered a ‘cool’ place and it lies immediately between two larger and more cosmopolitan areas (The Triangle and The Triad). Neither of us are from Burlington; I grew up partially in western Massachusetts and partially in eastern North Carolina, and Denny is from Durham and Chapel Hill. We moved to the area because we wanted a large, old house to record in, and found a beautiful, spacious 1910 home for next to nothing. I wanted an escape from the indie crowd that I was surrounded in back in Raleigh and Durham. I never quite fit in with the people there, which is a shame, as I moved to the area specifically for its music scene.

“I’ve met some amazing folks on tour other places, but in my experience, the central NC music scene isn’t the most welcoming to outsiders. There’s unwritten codes and rules that I just didn’t match up with as a person. I may share most music and art tastes with those kinds of folks, but that’s kind of where the similarities end. If you make this kind of music in this state, unless you’re in Asheville or maybe Wilmington, it can be a real uphill battle. Local press coverage, reliable crowds, even band solidarity, is very hard to find. It was a very lonely time, living in the Triangle, especially once I changed to making more experimental music. Having house shows in Burlington, too, is always a challenge; most Chapel Hill and Durham kids are very reluctant to spend a night out here. There’s definitely a sense of superiority to towns like this; they have their own preconceived notions of what we’re like. But I’m glad we’re here, around authentic, genuine small-town people. That’s the kind of crowd I like to surround myself with.

“Our reviews always seem to make the point that we’re sort of mysterious, shady figures, but I think that’s largely because we live in a town that isn’t a major arts scene sort of city. We tour a lot because hitting the road and getting great crowds beats playing here to slim ones. The one real exception is Nightlight in Chapel Hill, which is one of the only places we play in central NC anymore. The 919 Noise folks, led by Bryce Eiman, are fantastic. Greensboro, too, has its bright spots; the house show/DIY scene there is stellar and growing fast. But essentially, I struggle with feeling like an outsider as a ‘weird’ NC musician. Probably always will.”

D: ”Burlington is a town that grew around textile factories, particularly sock factories. It’s busy and full of sprawl, but it also has some great parks. Burlington City Park has some great rides, such as a historic carousel and train, and they hold some cool special events for the people of town, such as a large Halloween event with fireworks. Burlington was originally named Company Shops, and now there’s an organic food co-op downtown called Company Shops Market. As far as I know, they came up with the name ‘Burlington’ at random.

“Socio-economically, Burlington is definitely poorer than the surrounding cities, such as Chapel Hill and Greensboro. The biggest employer currently in town is a company called LabCorp (blood testing facilities). There’s many beautiful old houses in Burlington, and I certainly wish more people would move here from the surrounding areas and help bring life to some of these houses, and also to the old factories in town.”

How important is Burlington to your work?

Z: ”Well, to continue from the above question, very. Burlington itself is a fascinating city, which is something people really miss out on by not checking it out. Its story is similar to a lot of NC towns; at one point, Burlington was the very center of the hosiery business in America. Textiles, namely sock-making, built this city. Of course, jobs have gone overseas and what we’re left with is some hardcore industrial abandonment and blight. While a sane person wouldn’t find that appealing to live in, that sort of decay, it’s absolutely ingrained in our music, and the atmosphere has been incredible here for creating our art. Aside from that, this town is full of genuinely kind and decent people, and downtown is coming back in a big way. The more people that move here that care about making things better, the better Burlington will become.

“This town definitely has a mysteriousness to it, an eeriness. It’s something our touring friends always note when they come through to play our house. It’s a very David Lynchian sort of vibe. You know the theory how there’s some places where the fabric of reality wears a little thinner? Burlington is one of those places. I call it ‘Other Burlington’. There’s like a surface Burlington, and then you’ll turn a corner into an unfamiliar neighborhood and you’ll know you’ve crossed over the threshold, into ‘Other Burlington’. Some of our music is very much inspired by that. After all, Burlington’s most famous resident is a female serial killer who poisoned numerous lovers and family members. This is definitely not your typical Mayberry-like small town.

“This band didn’t really start, in my opinion, until we moved here. And there’s some pride in the fact that we’re a band in a small town, making music no one else in this town is making, absent of any real music scene (aside from a couple really good punk bands). I’d like to think it would attract people to us, that we’re not just another Brooklyn/Portland/Austin/whatever band.”

Which local sites are especially resonant for you? Can you reveal a little about Burlington’s local mythology and folklore?

Z: ”My whole life I have found abandonment and decay achingly beautiful, especially industrial decay, and in Burlington you can’t turn around without tripping over an abandoned textile mill or collapsing old Victorian house. Burlington is very much haunted by its past, still in the shadow of the serial killer I mentioned, and in the shadow of its past prosperity. It’s literally in the shadow of a towering, grand abandoned Army missile factory, a great and rusting old hulk east of downtown that’s appeared in our album art and film works a number of times.

“This town is very much tied in with the culture of its river, as well, the Haw. The Haw is a lovely little body of water thats largely bounced back from years of mill pollution. We find it an inspiring feature to Alamance County. Really though, I’d say the most crucial locale in Burlington for us is our house, and all the history that goes with a home over a century old. Each day, I discover a new feature I hadn’t noticed before that captures my imagination further.

“This part of NC has deep roots in its history; Alamance County was the site of one of the first Revolutionary War battles, and there’s Quaker roots here going back to long before America was an independent country. North Carolina as a whole is beyond haunted by its past, more than anywhere else I’ve been in America. We wouldn’t make the same kind of music if we weren’t from here; we’re definitely a North Carolina band, and the past has a hold on us, too.

“We love camping at Cedarock Park and exploring the old mill village of Glencoe, in northern Burlington. Someone who lives on a steady diet of shitty indie-rock shows and nights at bars would undoubtedly find Burlington boring, but I think we have enough imagination, and enough of a love of history and the natural world between us, to think otherwise of this city.”

There are references to the paranormal scattered throughout your work. Are these employed solely in a metaphorical sense or do they reflect a genuine openness to the unknown and the uncanny?

Z: ”Both. I think one reason the idea of ghosts and hauntings is so prevalent in ambient, experimental and noise music is that its the most powerful analogy for loss imaginable. Still, we aren’t setting out to make endlessly dark or enduringly sad music, just truthful music.

“On the literal end, I’ve had more than my share of unexplainable occurrences in my lifetime, and the other world outside of this one has been a lasting theme in my family history, as well. There’s moments as you get older where you look back at different events in your life and see the things that’ve happened to you, and you realize that it was a forked path, and you went one direction as a result of those experiences, and it colored everything that happened afterward. For me, that was a supernatural experience the summer I was sixteen, and the lasting fallout of that is very much present in the work of Lost Trail, as well. There’s ghosts everywhere, both literally and metaphorically, and some of us just feel their presence deeper than others.

“As I’ve said, Burlington, the state of North Carolina, even our old and crumbling house, are all full of ghosts. Our music is a reflection of that, but the moment you bring up that subject matter people either default their thinking to ‘Goth’ or ‘Metal’. We’re probably cheerier, sillier people than our music implies. ‘Dark’ and ‘Sad’ are unimaginative, reductive descriptions of any form of art. Human emotion is so much more complex than that. Thus so is our band’s music.”

Your music often exudes an unsettling atmosphere of fogbound desolation. Is this an effect you aim for or something that just occurs naturally?

Z: ”I think it comes naturally to us. The contrast is important; uplifting music has to have a counter-weight of melancholy or it loses meaning, and vice versa. I’ve never tried to make music that’s bleak or merciless, or unrelenting in its dourness. It’s just what I naturally gravitate towards in my sounds. Complicated emotions in art make that art richer and more invigorating. It’s the art that people remember; people don’t remember just standalone sunshine and rainbows, they remember raw emotion and complex shades of feeling. Sometimes life is desolate and fog-bound; sometimes it’s incredibly moving and awe-inspiring, in equal measure.

“What can I say? It comes from ‘out there’. I’m just a conduit. I begin playing and this is what happens, for better or for worse. And for her end, I think Denny contributes some levity to the proceedings with much of her sound and production work. She’s an inherently cheerier sort than I am, and her contributions have a lighter touch. It makes her efforts more than essential.”

D: ”I feel like that’s how drone music often is. Besides, I’m not cheerier than Zach – he always makes up jokes about everything and is generally not a very serious sort (except about his art). I don’t feel that the music is very unsettling overall, just that drones can sound somewhat haunting.”

Then again, it’s also oddly comforting at times…

Z: ”That’s what I hope for; a comfort, a catharsis, a way of working through difficult feelings or a reflection of stirring moments. I always view our work in landscape terms, describing a place or a feeling evoked in our minds. God knows music is a comfort and a cathartic release for me, so I can only hope it is for other people. When someone writes to us describing a transformative or emotionally resonant moment listening to our work, that makes it all pretty worthwhile. As selfish a pursuit as music can be, I wouldn’t be doing it if I didn’t also want to affect people.”

D: ”I guess hearing extended notes is comforting because it sounds a bit like a calming hum.”

One of your songs is entitled ‘Hauntology’. What does this term mean to you? Do you feel it applies to the music you make?

Z: ”Hauntology is a concept from Derrida, that goes with our ideas and impressions of how the past impacts the present. The concept is that when the end of history approaches, people will orient themselves to the ideas of past living, i.e. more agrarian roots, more community involvement. North Carolina is in a constant state of hauntology, and for every shopping mall or new freeway this state builds, they can’t escape the implications of this state’s past on the present. That’s NC to me, a place struggling against the past by forcibly inserting itself into the future, almost as a scoffing sort of denial. But it’s like a double exposure; the original is always lurking there at the boundaries of the frame, beneath the newer image. No amount of Applebees and Best Buys can change that. And I think that plays into our music as well, in that we try to operate in those spaces where the wild and natural world intersect with the grimly man-made. Suburban sprawl in North Carolina gives way at a moment’s notice to dense, rolling forest and black swamp. This state will never stop being old. It’s one of the things I love about my home.”

You have stated that Lost Trail make “Music for the woods and fields more than for the city”. Can you elaborate?

Z: ”As people, nature and the natural world are far more important to us than cosmopolitan city life and all its artifices of culture and sophistication. I find more rewards of experience camping than I do in some teeming throng of khaki-clad IT workers drinking at some nightlife magazine-sanctioned hot spot. That seems false to me, a shell covering reality. Trees and rivers and mountains are the real world to me, not highways and driving ranges and appliance stores and office parks and chemical plants. That all seems false. Maybe it’s the New England in me, but this land is deeper than any of us, and it’s the land I respect. We’re bound to it, and as much as we try to dilute our connection to it with iPhones and Lolcats, it’s always there. When the Puritans settled here, they saw an endless forest full of hauntings and unknown monsters. What’s changed about that except we’ve tried to keep it at bay with Arby’s and Sam’s Club?

“We like our small-town life, we fit in here. The music exists for nature and places on the edge of nature, not steel and glass and concrete. I can respect musicians for whom the city is a fascinating landscape they wish to evoke (Burial is a great example of this), we’re just sort of the opposite. I was raised by a wildlife painter mother first in the shadow of densely-wooded northern hills, and later along a windswept beach, communing with nature by trails and salt marshes and nights drinking with friends in lifeguard stands. That’s my background. I can’t shake it. Nature was always emphasized as the true reality to me, not the messy life of cities.

“One thing that had a great impact on me culturally prior to Lost Trail was the years I spent at college, at Appalachian State University in Boone, North Carolina. Mountain culture is an unavoidable presence there, and it has this uneasy time-warp intersection with the more modern culture of the university. My time in Boone was a tapestry of surreal immersion in that culture – from Thursday night bluegrass jams at the local community house, full of old-timers who couldn’t hold a pen anymore but could play expert banjo or dulcimer from memory, to just driving into dark woods and hills late at night, looking up at stray little campfires lost in the wilderness. It’s an ominous, almost-frontier landscape there, very isolated, and communing with nature isn’t really a choice, it’s mandatory. Old time music has a huge influence on Lost Trail, even though it isn’t readily apparent in our sound. I listen to more Carter Family and Stanley Brothers, more Almeda Riddle and Sarah Ogan Gunning, than I do any ambient or drone music.”

D: ”When I think of city music, I think of loud nightclubs, people driving by playing music loudly. Things that one hears in crowds. Drone music is more appropriate for calm listening, maybe while watching what might be out a window in a country house – deer, trees, rolling hills, ponds, rivers, creeks. There’s a certain calmness required to appreciate experimental music, particularly drone, and it’s hard to find that calmness in cities full of traffic, movement, and noise – it may be fruitful to record and use those sounds in future recordings, but they can also be distracting.”

What led you to make the film Traumatic Attachments? What does the title refer to?

Z: ”I’ve always been interested in film; my great hobby outside of music is photography and film. It goes back to loathing that falsehood, that Apple culture ideal of digital perfection and false reality. I like damage and decay in my art, it seems more organic and real to me. Cassettes, Polaroids, Super 8 film, VHS, Holga… all of that is genuine to me. It’s full of unexpected variables and elements that can’t be controlled. It isn’t an ironic love, it’s a genuine affection for a scratched and corroded aesthetic. The thing I love about doing everything ourselves in Lost Trail is that our photography, our film, our poetry, all ends up within Lost Trail, whether it be film projections or album art or what have you. I’ve been thrilled with the renaissance of this ‘obsolete’ technology, as I was already there years ago. Our music is very colorful and visual to my synesthetic brain, so film and photography are just a natural extension of that. I take photographs when I want to relax; it’s a simpler, more uncomplicated form of art than music.

“We wanted to make a visual representation of some of our themes, mainly what I’ve discussed above, this idea of North Carolina as an unsettled territory on the border of suburban sprawl and the natural, depthless void. So we drove around shooting short, un-narrated bits of digital video, as Super 8 was too expensive to process at a feature length. I usually detest digital technology as a rule, but my digital camera shoots very poor quality video, with a lot of focusing errors and lighting errors and stabilization errors, so it seemed perfect for this sort of fragmented reality we were trying to represent. I like limitations and challenges, and working with what you’re given. There’s a purity in the sacrifice of not having everything be perfect.

“The film score aspect was something I wanted to try, because I’ve always said I’d love to move into doing more film scores eventually. We’re a very improv-based band, we don’t write ahead of time, we just sit down and the music comes out of its own accord. So having to write music specifically for images was an enjoyable challenge, and I hope we get to do more film work.

“As far as the title goes, Traumatic Attachment theory is the psychological idea of dependence on someone in an unhealthy relationship. It seemed an apt metaphor for that uneasy relationship between natural resources and the exploitation of land for human consumption. In its most developed areas, NC can often seem like a wasteland of logos shouting for your attention. We wanted to capture that in the film, but also in a way that was respectful of the strange, abstract sort of beauty that man-made spaces sometimes obtain. I have a fascination with electric lighting, and the shapes of certain shopping centers, and the strange grasslands and ponds and roadways you see surrounding office and industrial parks. These places are destructive, an evidence of consumerism gone awry, but there’s beauty in nearly everything. People sometimes need to adjust their stereotypical expectations of what constitutes beauty.”

What is the difference between feeling (heart) and thought (brain) when it comes to making music?

Z: ”My biggest gripe with a lot of experimental music is that it’s very cold and clinical. It can come off as a scientific exercise. Sometimes there’s no discerning a human face within that icy sheen. I think playing experimental music with the heart more than the brain means trying to bring back an imperfect sense of raw punk ethos into the work, an unbridled passion. If there’s one thing I hope people never say about Lost Trail, it’s that we sound dead and cold and emotionless. We don’t sandpaper away our mistakes, we don’t edit out happy accidents that don’t go according to plan. We don’t ‘plan’ much in general. One thing I can’t stand about the current indie generation is the irony, the cold and sneering witticisms, the refusal to admit that yes, we’re human beings and we love things and hate other things and genuinely feel things and cry and get pissed off sometimes. I’m a heart-on-sleeve emotionalist, and I’ll never consider that a negative trait or uncool thing. I refuse to couch my humanity in witty too-cool irony. I mean, I love Pavement as much as the next dude, but fuck that lazy slacker attitude. I love music and I care about music, and I care about this world around me. I’m not going to hide that fact.”

D: ”I briefly learned how to play other instruments as a child (piano and clarinet) and thus learned how to read music, but this did not stick in my brain. I think if either of us knew better how to read music, then we may be more mathematical in the writing and recording process. However, we don’t, and that seems to work better for us. We can include sounds that we’ve recorded that don’t line up perfectly with the music we’ve written, but that fit well. Sometimes music sounds better when someone makes it up as they go along, and puts thing together that seem like they work together rather than planning things and making sure things are on beat.”

You seem fascinated by images of neglect and abandonment. How and when did this start?

Z: ”It’s been as long as I can remember. I grew up in a decaying industrial town in New England, and I find myself in a similar landscape as I near thirty. I don’t think it’s accidental. I find a lot of things beautiful in the natural world that others would agree with, and I also find many things beautiful that others consider an eyesore. Personally, I fail to see much of a difference between the woods and an abandoned factory thats been reclaimed by the woods. Once people are done with using a building for economic or living purposes, it takes on a whole new context.

“It’s fascinating the way nature reclaims a place; when I was on tour in Detroit, I found the ‘urban prairie’ situation there absolutely fascinating. It’s the closest thing we have in this country to ancient ruins, our Industrial Revolution now decaying as our Tech Revolution will one day decay. When deer and badgers begin to take up residence behind the Genius Bars of Apple Stores, or in the stockrooms of Jamba Juice, I’ll find that gorgeous as well. Remove things from their context, out of any ethical or social ideology, and the world opens up its beauty to you. It may be a pretentious ideal, but hey, it also happens to be a true one.”

This element of decay and degradation is mirrored in your music, of course…

Z: ”And it always will be. I’m not going to suddenly become uninterested in urban exploration, that giddy thrill of going into a dark place that no longer functions as was originally intended, at twenty-eight years old. Musicians that claim their personal lives and quirks don’t influence their music are frankly full of shit. Our music is a reflection of who we are as people, and that’s as it should be. It isn’t something that should be fought. If it isn’t coming from some part of yourself that loves and feels certain things, then why even do it? Art is a way of presenting yourself as an individual to the world, and your perspective on that world and its interactions. I’m not going to present a fictional character, and I couldn’t make our music fictional if I tried. Lost Trail is a way of working out emotions, a way of commenting on what we see around us, in all its otherworldly and transfixing glory. Truth is, I’m an introverted, passionate, moody young artist in America. I have a specific perspective on the world that’s unique to my culture, time, and personality. Why pretend to be anything but who I am? Authenticity may be overrated (so says Pitchfork), but I haven’t seen enough authenticity yet, and music has never been an excuse to wear a mask or become someone else to me. Rather, with music, I become the most distilled and accurate representation of myself, if anything.”

Where does the medium of cassette tape fit into all of this?

Z: ”Lo-Fi is definitely an aesthetic affectation, not gonna lie. Part of it originally was poverty, and part of it was that I’m no good at tech stuff. I’ve never used a proper mic or a mixing board or phantom power in my life. That stuff is utterly gibberish to me, and I like how we do things, so I have no interest in learning ‘proper’ techniques. I don’t play guitar the ‘proper’ way, I play it the way I like to play it, so recording is no different. Studios are sterile and bland in my limited experience with them; I like recording in an old house where accidents can get caught in the mix; a train passing by, or a fire engine, or someone talking on the sidewalk. When I first heard the Set Fire To Flames albums, with all those little bits of incidental, accidental sound left in the mix, it expanded my mind to the possibilities of doing things differently. That seems real and organic to me. The fact is, I like the way cassette sounds better than anything else. The warmth, the hiss, the warbling, it creates an immediate nostalgic sense memory that goes with both our ideas of decay and abandonment and our ideas of the past and being haunted by the past. Digital recording’s icy glare just can’t accomplish that. We’re purists that way, nearly Luddites, and hell, I grew up with cassette so it means a lot to me. The first attempts I made at recording were with a four-track Fostex in my childhood bedroom. The album is important to us, the track sequencing, the art, the font used for the liner notes, all of it. You can manipulate tape recorders in a way you can’t manipulate digital machines, and unlike digital machines, each tape recorder sounds different. Our music would not be the same if we didn’t use tape. Static, damage, all of it is important for our work to sound ‘right’ to me. I always say I want our music to sound like it was found on a mangled tape dug up from the forest floor after twenty years of neglect. There’s that intersection of abandoned and obsolete technology with nature again, of course. No one’s ever going to wax nostalgic for the sound quality of mp3s, are they?

“It isn’t like we’re pioneers with this, of course. A lot of people influenced me on this end, growing up and recently. Boards of Canada, William Basinski, Belong, Set Fire To Flames, Tim Hecker. Nothing to me sounds as beautiful as guitar or piano on a damaged cassette tape. So we’ve made the move to doing almost all our recording on cassette, even the field recordings. I won’t say we never use digital pocket recorders, we do. And our mixing is done on Logic, by necessity and ease. That may make me somewhat of a contradiction in my ethics, but frankly, that’s the nature of modern America. Trying to find someone who has high ideals but isn’t also a little bit of a hypocrite is impossible. The system is slanted against independent living, period. And I think human beings are natural contradictions by their very nature, in the end.

“Cassette is just part of who we are as a band, our irrevocable identity. We have thousands; I buy them in bulk from a store called Scrap Exchange in Durham, the world’s best junk store. I find wonderful things on them for sampling, especially the hundreds we’ve dug up from the Edgar Cayce Past Lives Institute in Virginia Beach. If I got a nice fat recording advance from Drag City or Temporary Residence tomorrow, I wouldn’t spend it on a mixer or a new guitar or better pedals. I’d buy more tape machines, and maybe an Edison wax cylinder recorder or wire recorder while I’m at it. If there’s a new frontier for Lost Trail’s fetish for imperfect-sounding recording, it’s going back to even more ancient technology. The grittier our music sounds, the more real it sounds to me, the more naturally oriented. And tape sounds more like a forest floor than digital ever could.”

Static is a recurrent texture in your work. Why do you think this is? What effect does it have on you as a listener?

Z: ”Static is a great way to represent tension and disquiet, and it contributes that counter-balance I mentioned earlier, when matched with a conventionally pretty guitar or piano melody. It always makes a song sound ‘fuller’ to me. I love shortwave radio static for all its whines and whistles, and I especially love vinyl crackle of all varieties. It just makes everything sound more ancient. The effect can be subtle or jarring, depending on whats required within the framework of the piece in question. There are times where I could just listen to different flavors of static and nothing else.

“I find static to be a comforting sound; it reminds me of growing up by the ocean. I remember a time of great stress once, years ago, when I turned on AM radio static to comfort me and calm me down. Static can be soothing, violent, or both, all at once. It’s a very dynamic element.”

What role(s) do found sounds and field recordings play in your music?

Z: ”It rounds out the sound as well as static does, and it adds another element of emotion and intrigue that the music wouldn’t attain on its own. Listening to a Godspeed You! Black Emperor album, the implications of someone’s voice and what they’re saying over a beautiful bed of strings can really add a layer of depth and feeling that the song wouldn’t have otherwise. Because Lost Trail is a primarily instrumental project, I find they’re an effective way to get across certain themes we want to communicate in a subtle manner. I delight in finding obscure dialogue samples to record, whether from YouTube or record fairs or just on the shortwave. As Denny’s gotten more involved with the project, she’s contributed the counter-balance of more nature-based samples, which really has rounded out the work. That’s how Denny joined Lost Trail as a permanent member; we would go out so I could record, and she’d get involved and find it great fun. Eventually I gave her her own pocket recorder, and she started bringing back some stellar stuff. As a non-musician, she has an instinct for sound and production ideas that I don’t have, having played guitar my whole life. She’s a great second voice and a superb second editor, and this band really began taking shape when she began to contribute more. As time goes on, we’ve begun to utilize her lack of experience in playing instruments as well. It’s always valuable to have someone playing guitar or keys or drums who doesn’t ‘know how to play’. It’s healthy for the creative process. There’s no ‘wrong way’ of playing things in our universe.

“Certain themes, as you’ve mentioned, come up in our work time and time again, and mostly through samples or song titles. As an instrumental band, song titles are very important to us, both the meanings of the words and just how they sound phonetically. I’m very synesthetic when it comes to both words and sounds as colors, and field recordings are no different. Religion/the fierceness of belief, travel accidents, the supernatural, these all seem to come up regularly in our work. It tells me something about myself, about subconscious obsessions I didn’t know I had. How they tie into the greater whole remains to be seen, in my opinion.

“One thing I’d like to do is try to incorporate more ideology-minded content into our work. We’re both passionate about progressive causes, it’s a big part of our lives, but finding an artful way to integrate that into our music without seeming preachy is a tightrope challenge. Godspeed pull it off remarkably, of course, but we’re no Godspeed. So we’ll see what happens.”

D: ”It’s possible I’d never heard of found sound before I met Zach, but this is definitely a major part of Lost Trail’s music and what brought me into being part of Lost Trail. I carry around a little recorder and record things like lawn mowers, giggly kids, construction sounds, or whatever else I might hear while out and about alone or with kids (I’m a nanny). However, regardless of the fact that found sounds are relatively new to me, I enjoy recording various things, sharing them, and imagining how Zach will use them in songs later. One of the children I care for has even mentioned some sounds she’s felt I should record when I’ve had my recorder with me.”

Improvisational strategies vary from artist to artist, group to group. How would you describe yours?

Z: ”Our work basically is improvisation. I record bits of music on the spot that sound interesting, throw them all together on a screen, and move them around until they sound good. I very rarely overdub in the traditional sense; I’m much more interested in the accidental and messy collision of notes interacting with each other than I am with playing things to any sort of beat or mathematical, precise pattern. That’s part of the excitement of how we work; it’s unexpected until the end. When elements happen to mysteriously line up in interesting ways, it’s heaven. You can almost hear the click, like a puzzle we’re constantly working to solve.

“It’s well-known among our circle that I don’t love playing live. I find it very hard to reproduce what we do recording-wise in a live setting, since I obsess over the recordings for days until even one piece is close to ‘finished’. This music is very hard to get across live; people talk over you or complain about the noise, and it’s very hard to find an attentive audience and a receptive venue (not to mention, working purposely with shoddy, cheap equipment is always risky). We don’t play in bars or traditional clubs much; I find our type of music just doesn’t mix with alcohol, and I prefer anyone of any age be able to come if they want to. I remember being seventeen and pissed off that I couldn’t get into local punk shows; the idea of someone being a less valuable music fan because they can’t spend drink money at a bar is beyond insulting to me. Some of the best, most rewarding shows we’ve played have been to rooms full of teenagers. So we just tend to fit better at art galleries, house shows, DIY spaces, coffeehouses and the like.

“And as time goes on, the stress of live performance and the shortcomings of our sets have given way to renewed excitement, as we pretty much always perform improv sets now. Gone is the disappointment at not being able to reproduce songs live; we just do something new every time, and its become very rewarding. Lost Trail live is a wholly different entity than Lost Trail recorded. That’s as it should be. I don’t see a band live to hear them accurately reproduce their album to the letter. I’d much rather stay home and listen to the album on the couch, in that case.

Are there specific works of art, literature, photography and film that have a totemic value for Lost Trail?

Z: ”Absolutely, too many to list. All forms of art are as equally important to me as music; to me they’re just different views of the same face. I went to school for Creative Writing, so literature is an extremely important part of my life. Not every writer I love has specifically influenced Lost Trail, of course, but a few that have include: Don Delillo, JG Ballard, Algernon Blackwood, MR James, Sylvia Plath, James Howard Kunstler, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Delillo’s ‘White Noise’, especially, probably my very favorite novel. I’ve read four or five copies to tatters. For art, being raised by a professional artist, I was exposed to a great deal of visual beauty growing up. Matisse, Magritte, Goya, Bacon, and Bruegel the Elder come to mind as a few influences. There’s an obscuring of reality and of traditional features that I’ve always found deeply intriguing in Magritte’s best pieces.

“Photography-wise, I’m really into Justine Kurland, for one. One of her photographs is my very favorite album cover (M83’s Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts). That landscape, the highway coursing through the snowy patch of woods, really strikes a personal chord with me, and all of her work in general, these almost spirit-like female figures lingering at the edges of suburbia, in those wild places. Also Todd Hido for photography, and Weegee, Arnold Odermatt, Jason Koxvold, Francesca Woodman.

“For film, well, film is a huge deal to me as well, really only second to music, so that’s tougher to answer. I have a deep abiding love for slasher films from the genre’s Golden Age (roughly 1978-1984). I grew up with the better known ones but thanks to YouTube I’ve tracked down pretty much every obscure C-movie slasher in existence. I’ve seen literally hundreds. It goes with the sense of nostalgia, and the music, the atmosphere, all of it. Slashers tell us a great deal about that time period, the sociology of the eighties, and about memory itself. Horror films in general are a real treat artistically when done well, which they so rarely are. It’s a frustrating genre to be a mega-fan of. Outside of that, I’d say Michael Haneke and David Cronenberg are HUGE influences on Lost Trail aesthetically. There’s references to early Haneke films in the names of some of our first recordings. Also, David Lynch, Atom Egoyan, Harmony Korine, early Todd Haynes…those are the ones that jump out at me as having a big influence on Lost Trail directly.

“Denny, for her part, is a fan of a lot of contemporary folk music, and is a devoted abstract painter herself. If only I could get her to share my love of all those cheesy horror films…”

Lost Trail is to all intents and purposes an entirely self-sufficient unit. Is this a point of principle?

Z: ”Indeed. As I said before, I like the way we do things and for someone else to come and try to change that, that would be a problem. I wouldn’t be able to operate any other way. Lost Trail partially came out of being fed up with the artistic compromise of being in traditional bands…the petty power struggles, the constant schedule problems, same old story. I knew I was serious about music and that I would rather do everything myself and have artistic control, as egotistical as that sounds. Now I have a great partner I trust with artistic input and whom I consult on all decisions, but really, I can’t imagine being in a band with someone not my wife again. Temporary collaborations, yes, that’s different and fun.

“It’s just how I was raised. The only reason I’m pursuing art as a career is because I was brought up by a single mother who fought like hell to make art her’s. I wasn’t raised with the kind of cliched parental practicality bullshit that can snuff out so many young talented artists’ futures. I was always encouraged to pursue art professionally if I liked, but with a real business sense and a real independence. I trust myself to work harder than anyone else I could hire to help out. I know I’ll work hard at the film projections, the web design, the producing and mixing, the booking. It’s a kind of hardcore punk ethos I think we strive to maintain despite being an entirely different kind of music, and it’s just how I prefer to operate. I’m so used to it now, I have no urge to change. The last thing I’d ever want is for some record label slick to bully me into things I’m uncomfortable with, like working with an outside producer or recording in a studio. The only thing we farm out is mastering, and that’s because I can’t afford the equipment.”

Lost Trail are part of the Living Room Visions collective. Who are the other members and what ties them together?

Z: ”I became involved with Living Room Visions through Marcus Eads, who runs Sunup Recordings in Minnesota. He favourited one of our tracks on Soundcloud and we became friendly, and soon enough I was part of this growing online scene of label owners, musicians, and artists that was really exciting. To have that kind of online family, that community, when I was lacking an in-person scene here in NC, was really rewarding to me. We really do support each other like a family. We love each other, and we help each other along as much as we can. There’s no competition, it’s all for furthering each others’ works. It’s interesting that with the Internet shrinking the world so much, music scenes have gone from city-based to more web-based, but I like it. We all have this general aesthetic of experimental, usually lo-fi, outsider sort of art. Most of us don’t live in the major cities, we’re freaks in our small towns doing something different, looking for folks to support it. Those who do live in the major cities are not on the cusp of the ‘scene’ there, either. But we have each other. And if we do find the success as a band that I strive towards, it will entirely be thanks to LRV. Our audience multiplied absurdly once we joined that group, and for that I’m eternally grateful. Having a family to back you up, a name recognition that means quality, has been such a blessing. More and more, people are catching on that LRV is one of the most exciting collectives of young musicians, labels and artists around. As far as membership itself, LRV is made up of a rotating cast of labels like Sunup, Ailanthus, Carpi, Holy Page, Sarcastic Magician, Lava Church, Illuminated Paths, and our own little label Wood Thrush Tapes; artists like us, Lasership Stereo, NYKDLN, Brandon Locher, FAVRTSM, Public Spreads The News, Lockbox, Clear Winner and folks like Joshua Rogers, a filmmaker from Broken Machine Films. His work is absolutely brilliant.”

You’re both Quakers. Can you explain what this means and how it informs your work as Lost Trail?

Z: ”We haven’t been Friends for very long, but I won’t pretend it doesn’t affect the music. Denny was raised Presbyterian, and I’ve been agnostic bordering on atheist most of my life, with Catholic background on both sides of my family. I suppose I’ve always felt some spiritual tug, but never thought there was anything out there that matched up to my beliefs. Denny began to miss having a spiritual community to count on, especially being fairly new to Alamance County, and so we began to look into the Friends, who happen to go back to the 1700s around here. Historically they’re very important to the county and to North Carolina in general.

“We attend a meeting called Spring Friends in the little town of Snow Camp. It’s an intimate meeting of about twenty to thirty regular people, which was ideal for me as I had no urge to be overwhelmed by a giant and intimidating spiritual situation. These people have been beyond welcoming to us; recently we suffered a break-in in which we lost some valuables and musical equipment, and the Friends have really pulled together and rallied behind us to help us out. I’ve never seen a community, faith-based or otherwise, that has each others’ backs so firmly. I can only hope that the younger Quakers continue the tradition, as it seems to be sadly dying out.

“I was shocked to find a faith that matched my personal beliefs to the letter. The idea that God is a light existing within everyone was so refreshing. There’s no need for some self-righteous asshole condemning you hypocritically from a pulpit. Everyone is on equal footing. And the use of silence is very calming and centering, something I need in my life. The broadness of ideals, the emphasis on simplicity, all appealed to me. I’m the most un-materialistic person I know. Stuff means literally nothing to me; I try in all I do to reject the trappings of a consumerist culture (well, as much as one can in 2012 America and still survive). If I had a way to live self-sufficiently at this moment, entirely off the grid in a cabin somewhere growing my own food and making my own clothes, I would. Maybe we’ll get there someday. I’d like to think so.

“All of this matched with the fierce progressive ideals and dedication to social justice that comes with a traditional Quaker meeting, and I knew I’d found a match. It’s enriched and deepened our work in Lost Trail, given it an entirely new cast it lacked before, a greater context. Our music has always seemed very spiritual to me, which is why so many of the faith-based field recordings seemed to fit, even if I didn’t absolutely believe in what was being spoken. It was more the idea of the power of belief itself, the passion in these peoples’ voices, their inflections. Lost Trail very much seems to turn on the axis of powerful belief, which I never expected at the start of it.”

Is your label Wood Thrush Tapes a straightforward extension of the Lost Trail aesthetic?

Z: ”No. Wood Thrush Tapes is largely a hobby, and a way to release our friends’ work in small runs for our own reward and theirs. Essentially, I like to keep busy. I’d love to have the money and time to develop it into a proper label, but alas, not happening. I never intended it as a vanity project to release our own work, but as an outlet for friends who needed short runs of things. What we’re hoping to experiment with in the future is unusual ways of releasing things. We’ve got a lot of stuff planned on the horizon that should be interesting to fans of odd releases.”

I’m fond of the track ‘Videoroom’ from the Longing album. But I’m intrigued - what exactly goes on in that room?

Z: ”It does sound a little sinister doesn’t it? Sometimes we really do pick track names just for how they sound. There’s an eeriness to the idea of a ‘video room’. Your mind doesn’t go to nice places when confronted with that image, it immediately reverts to the darkest option.

“It seemed a very Cronenberg type image to me at the time, I guess. Cronenberg’s early period (through maybe The Dead Zone, which is still the best King adaptation) really inspired that sense in Lost Trail of the frightening possibilities of dying technologies, how they take on almost anthropomorphic qualities, and usually in a forbidding manner. Videotape only seems eerier and eerier in its flaws and peculiarities as time goes on. It’s almost always disturbing or luridly illicit in its implications. Videos become like this hidden, shameful art form, full of blurs and warps and damage that just unsettle the soul. That’s one reason we love VHS so much. Technology, especially obsolete technology, may be made by human hands, but it’s colder than human, that’s for sure. And VHS will always be associated with voyeurism and wickedness on one level, and golden-tinged nostalgia on the other. Those two meet in very intriguing ways.

“Part of that return to obsolete technology I’ve mentioned, this fetishizing that we’re guilty of, of venerating VHS and Super 8 and Polaroid and the like, is definitely a reaction to the hollowness of perfection-craving digital culture, I think. Yet it’s an uneasy admiration, because as things age and disintegrate, they naturally take on a foreboding sort of light. Decay and the passage of time will always unsettle us, as it means mortality, death. The usage of VHS in the horror genre has gone absolutely insane lately. There’s definitely a sociological reason. An album like The Disintegration Loops is almost a technological genocide in its implications.”

What are your plans for Lost Trail over the next few months?

Z: ”A lot going on, as usual. We just had a little 20-minute split tape with FAVRTSM come out on Sunup. Early in 2013, physical copies of another full-length that was recorded way back at the start of 2011 are finally coming out on a splendid new Alaskan label, Tired Sounds. Also another full-length next summer on Visceral Media, a music and film project coming out soon on a label I’m going to keep under wraps for now, new EPs for Birch Grove Recordings and Benadrone Tapes, and another full-length after that, probably late in the year, label pending. Additionally, there’s some film score projects planned, a collection of some of my poetry we’re working on music to go with, an 8” lathe cut release and a Minidisc EP (yes, Minidisc) that we’re putting out on Wood Thrush Tapes at some point soon, a straight field recordings collection, a couple of awesome collaborations planned, and a whole bunch of compilation appearances coming up. We’re also heading out on an East Coast tour with our bud Sebastian (Proud Father, a killer noise project from Jacksonville, Florida) in the fall of 2013, and at some point soon I have an IDM/tape loop side project, Cobra Mist, that I’m trying to finish up. Lots of releases coming up on Wood Thrush Tapes, as well, the first of which is a Linear Bells album /// in a run of 20. So, much going on! Keep up with everything we’re doing at our website and the Wood Thrush Tapes Tumblr, on Twitter and Facebook.”

Belong Who Told You This Room Exists?
Esmerine Why She Swallows Bullets And Stones
Mount Eerie w/ Julie Doiron & Fred Squire Lost Wisdom
Forest Swords Hjurt
Library Tapes But Now Things Were Different, With Birds Unable To Speak
Jean Ritchie There Lived An Old Lord
Six Organs Of Admittance Eighth Cognition/All You’ve Left
Tim Hecker Chimeras
M83 Gone
Mountain Man Mouthwings
Set Fire To Flames Omaha
Frederic Chopin Nocturne #20 In C Sharp Minor
Boards Of Canada Gyroscope
Alabama Sacred Harp Singers Shelburne

Paper Dollhouse (Astrud Steehouder and Nina Bosnic), Angkorwat (Niamh Corcoran) and Embla Quickbeam...

Mon, 31 Dec 2012 04:13:00 -0500

Paper Dollhouse (Astrud Steehouder and Nina Bosnic), Angkorwat (Niamh Corcoran) and Embla Quickbeam (Rowan Forestier-Walker) recently collaborated on a new piece of music entitled Unicorn. The track was specially commissioned by The Outer Church and given away as a free download to everyone who attended the event on 17.12.12. You can listen to it here

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 14:14:00 -0500

Over the past decade, Washington DC emigre James Ginzburg has released a plethora of material under...

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 04:55:00 -0500

Over the past decade, Washington DC emigre James Ginzburg has released a plethora of material under assorted pseudonyms, co-founded Bristol’s Multiverse organisation (with Rob ‘Pinch’ Ellis, Paul Jebanasam and James Fiddian) and established low-frequency research unit Emptyset (with Paul Purgas). In Spring 2013, Ginzburg will reveal a hitherto undisclosed talent for psych-pop songcraft when new project Faint Wild Light makes its debut via Digitalis. Similarly distinct from the bass-heavy explorations for which he is best known, Ginzburg’s mix for the OC is described by the producer as “a musical pause, a gap between years.”

1. William Basinski ‘Vivian & Ondine’

“Ideally all albums would be comprised of one repetitive track that played off until infinity. Conveniently, this piece, while only being 45:10, can be looped for an infinite listening experience.”

2. Penguin Cafe Orchestra ‘The Snake And The Lotus’

“A touchingly somber guitar and shaker.”

3. Hans Zimmer ’Journey To The Line’

“From the soundtrack to Terrence Malick’s excellent and somewhat overlooked The Thin Red Line. Hans does Arvo Part meets Steve Reich.”

4. Brian Eno ‘Thursday Afternoon’

“According to my itunes I have listened to this album for 187 hours over the course of the last year.”

5. Rachmaninov ‘Piano Concerto #4 In G Minor, Op. 40 - 2. Largo.1’

“To me this sounds like an ever-frustrated aspiration towards happiness, though perhaps it’s something of an auditory inkblot test, and to you it sounds like drunken 19th century Russian aristocrats grieving over their late night gambling losses.”

6. Goldmund ‘Image Autumn Womb’

“They slept profoundly, desperately, greedily, as though for the last time, as though they had been condemned to stay awake forever and had to drink in all the sleep in the world during these last hours.” - Narcissus And Goldmund, Herman Hesse

7. Susumu Yokota ‘Azukiiro No Kaori’

“My CD player broke and got stuck on this track for six hours sometime around 2002. At the time I thought that time was just passing very slowly.”

8. William Basinski ‘Melancholia II’

“What I wouldn’t give to have my Melancholies sound like this.”

9. Arvo Part ‘Fratres For Eight Cellos’

“I heard this for the first time towards the end of a week I spent on my own in middle of nowhere Wales during which I didn’t listen to any music. When I finally couldn’t bear silence any longer I put this on and I stared out a window at a half mined out mountain and I cried over that mountain for a while.”

10. Johan Johannason ‘Melodia (I)’

“This tangentially reminded me of the section of Vivaldi’s The Rite Of Spring as its appears in the sequence in which the dinosaurs all die in Fantasia until I went back and watched it again and realised it had a less than vague, if any, connection to it. It does, however, work as an alternative soundtrack to that scene, if one is inclined to try it. If not, one can simply just imagine a terminally ill diplodocus while listening.”

11. Vigh Mihaly ‘Valuska’

“This piece is from the opening scene of Bela Tarr’s Werckmeister’s Harmonies in which closing time Hungarian drunks act out an eclipse in a stumbling dance.”

12. Nils Frahm ‘Keep’

“We tried to catch Nils Frahm’s set when we were at Decibel festival Seattle this September. Having driven up Mt Ranier to catch the sunset, we raced back to town and ran into the venue to find we had got the performance time wrong. We heard the final piece, this tune, through the auditorium doors, blocked from even entering.”

13. Basic Channel ‘Q1.2’

“As if when the techno rapture came the kick drum was saved and taken up into the heavens leaving just a synth to peacefully mourn the end of days and the vacuum left behind.”

14. Roly Porter ‘Caladan’

“Above and beyond its Asimovian textures and existential angst, it is the peculiar causality of Roly’s music that I find most interesting. Nothing happens when or in a way that I expect, so I always have the sense I’m peering through a window into to something that doesn’t belong in this universe.”

15. Paul Jebanasam ‘Book Of Revelations’

“This is a studio recording of this track that never has seen release. A live version of it features on Paul’s Music For The Church Of St John The Baptist on our label Subtext. The instrumentation is Viola and Viole-de-Gambe both performed by Bristol’s Phil Owen.”

16. Max Richter ‘Spring 1’

“Max Richter flipping Vivaldi. It reminds me of the 1998 trance classic by Binary Finary titled ‘1998’.”

17. Ash Ra Tempel ‘Quasarsphere’

“If one evening I were to strip off all my clothes in a fit of lysergic revelatory ecstasy and ooze out of my front door, a polychromatic puddle of transcendent confusion, I would have the heavenly declarative trumpets play this to forewarn the doormat.”

18. Pink Floyd ‘Echoes’

“One of my favorite records, ever. When I first listened to it in our new studio on our super hi-res monitors I noticed that they didn’t noise gate the vocals and you can hear the sound of David Gilmour’s saliva in the gaps between phrases.”

19. Squarepusher ‘Iambic 5 Poetry’

“I bought this on vinyl in 1999 after I’d lived in England for about a year, so it conjures up that slightly odd, ill-adjusted and malformed part of my life.”

20. Herbie Hancock ‘Butterfly’

“From Thrust, I think this is best mellow track of the early 70s Hancock stuff. I thought that a ride of the cosmic love machine was a suitable place to end a mix that threatened at times to be earnest and heartfelt.”

Oscillating between tenebrous witch-folk and bleak electronics, Paper Dollhouse are the musical...

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 19:45:00 -0500

Oscillating between tenebrous witch-folk and bleak electronics, Paper Dollhouse are the musical equivalent of a hologram projected from a frostbitten tree trunk. The solo project of Rayographs guitarist/vocalist Astrud Steehouder recently became a duo with the incorporation of longtime collaborator Nina Bosnic, whose contributions can be heard on the limited edition Rituals & Practices release for Folklore Tapes, a split with Rochdale acid folk savant Magpahi. Steehouder and Bosnic are currently working on the full-length follow-up to 2011’s A Box Painted Black for Bird Records and will perform live at The Outer Church on December 17th alongside Angkorwat and Embla Quickbeam. Here they discuss the Paper Dollhouse aesthetic and present an exclusive mix entitled Emerald Cave.

What is your Emerald Cave mix about?

Astrud Steehouder: “A dark embryo of sound that reflects what we’re inspired by right now to take with us in future recordings. It’s dense, laden with doom and in luminous in places. Like a massive cave with glittering icicles. It’s a winter mix. By the way, we love Skinny Girl Diet. They are 15 years old and they rule - we played with them recently and they were ace. Nina got a t-shirt - it’s cool and has a cat on it.”

Nina Bosnic: “Yeah, they have incredible raw energy and power to move and awaken. They will do incredible things. Our mix is about about new discovering and total inspirations.”

Your side of the Rituals & Practices release on Folklore Tapes was something of a departure from previous recordings. How come?

A: “It was an opportunity for us to work in a very different way, learning about Devon folklore via a vaguely academic route, picking up themes that resonated both within the tales and our lives at the time, and producing a response to the whole experience, or in some cases, like the spoken word stuff, recording the experience itself. Someone described it as Ouija theatre, which I can see. It was marked by the seasonal changes of spring and involved playing around with different methods and practices ourselves through meditative and transformative states. It was how we were feeling at the time. It’s kind of frightening in places I guess. We bought these black Moroccan robes and went to the cemetery and burnt coloured smoke at dawn in the garden which was fun. Blue smoke looks wicked in that light.”

N: “There was a lot of story telling and reading, walking and talking about the things we learned and read… thinking about the elements of the Devon folklore stories we were particularly inspired by. We were drawn to cemeteries and did a lot of recording at the old Norwood cemetery near my house. It was an eerie and miraculous time in lots of ways. It was special to experience it and let it into our lives. It is very powerful and it influenced our lives profoundly. I think this is the essence of folklore. It was a very special project to be a part of.”

The debut album was comprised of very sparse home recordings. How do you feel about this approach now?

A: “That whole record was recorded on the Skype mic of my mac into Garageband just after I had written each song. I appreciated the rawness and purity of it on reflection so it became a record but that wasn’t the intention at the time so I think there’s a complete lack of self-consciousness about it which I could never repeat. It’s slight but possesses a complete essence of what was happening, partly as you can hear the environmental textures in it. It roots it in experience, so provides this realism, but a lot of the content reads as a cerebral riddle. I wanted to do something a lot different after that, or at least be capable of it, and was listening to a lot of electronic stuff for a good while so definitely wanted to channel that love a bit into recordings, however it transpired. In as far as recording I’ve definitely improved my production techniques but I still love the sound of just a simple guitar and vocal. It can express a lot more than something with a lot going on in it regarding instrumentation and production. I have some old 4-track stuff that might make it on to the album; I like a mix of qualities and textures going on.”

N: “I love doing things in very simple ways. We spent a summer in Astrud’s garden listening to the subtle urban and natural sounds around us, writing and recording. To me it felt like a very raw process, unrefined and pure. There is something very beautiful about feeling in the moment, when you just know inside that something important and great is happening and shaping your life and you as a human being. It was a pivotal time for both of us and out of that those recordings were born, just like that, so quickly and simply. I think that personally I will always work in that way, a little by chance, a little by desire. It’s the perfect formula.”

You often post demo tracks online. Does this serve an artistic purpose?

A: “Mainly just to share what I’ve found or what is in progress like a sketchbook. I used to do a lot of art and my sketchbooks were often way more interesting to me than the finished work. Obviously the final product should be the refined culmination of all the work leading up to it, but there’s an open magic to the rest of it that you often don’t get to see. Sometimes I want to see how I feel about it if it’s exposed a bit. Some of those demos will rack up and not be released for a good while and others will be developed into records.”

N: “I think putting ideas out there while in the process of being formed can help shape the work. The practice of sharing ideas can inform development and growth. I naturally shy away from exposing my work to anyone so for me, as difficult as it sometimes is, it feels liberating to have work in progress online weather it is music or visual.”

Aside from the distinctive vocal, something like ‘Helios’ sounds very different to the rest of your music. How do you reconcile the dark electronic element with the more acoustic material?

A: “Referring to the first album, I guess so, but the electronic stuff has always been a very important part of the spectrum of music I’m into and want to reflect in terms of what I can produce myself so it’s pretty vital it comes out somehow. It was a very good gateway broken when I learnt how to use the drum machine for that track. I like ambient folk stuff but that’s only part of it and only reflects one aspect of what I want to say. In one way it was fairly deliberate releasing a very raw, mainly acoustic album knowing that the music was going to turn more electronic, to play with that traditional notion of a folk, pop chanteuse a little as it’s never what I viewed this project to be about, though I am a fan of that canon for sure. I like the apparently odd juxtaposition of ethereal folk and electronic tracks, but it doesn’t seem odd to me at all. As long as it flows and makes sense as a whole, that’s what it’s about. I like variety but I think, as you say, there is a stylistic link that is kind of impossible to detach from, it still emerges from the same filter as all the other stuff so I think overall there’s no reason why it can’t be reconciled.”

N: “The merging of the folk and electronic feels completely natural for us. I think those two elements, folk and then the more noisy or beat based songs, are a natural and compulsory development for us working together because of the things we are influenced by.”

You’ve recently become a duo. How has this affected the way you work and the music you create? Do you have specific roles within Paper Dollhouse?

A: “Yeah, generally it’s a lot more fun. Things can get fairly insular otherwise which has its benefits but isn’t always the healthiest way to be. Roles are in flux as we introduce more equipment and recording techniques. Live, Nina’s doing keyboard and I’m doing guitar but we have a sampler and pedals, soon to get a mixer as well. Nina played some shows with me right at the beginning then I did some stuff and shows on my own, now we’re properly writing recording and playing shows together. It’s great; we share a complimentary aesthetic so it works really well I think.”

N: “For the earliest Paper Dollhouse performances I had a completely different role, I guess we both did in a way. I started by operating a slide show, we’d set it up really close in front of us and I’d change the slides manually one by one with each song, incorporating the wholesome mechanical click and turn of the slide wheel into the sound of the music we were making. I was adding flute, clarina, shaker, thunder, speech and other ambient textures. We do have roles I suppose but they are in flux as we develop what we are doing and experiment with instrumentation and equipment. The visual element has always been really important to both of us. The projections we are working with at the moment is a piece Astrud made and very much reflects our visual ideals. We couldn’t play with just any visuals and we never have.”

Would you incorporate more band members in future?

A: “I think two’s good.”

N: “No, the balance feels just right. We both make or have made music with bands and other people too, Astrud with Rayographs and me with Liberez. I love both ways of working with people and it’s a different dynamic and energy with each project.”

What does the term ‘folk music’ mean to you?

A: “Stories, truth, an important simplicity that cuts through layers of bullshit supplied by and catered for society. I’m talking about the spirit of it rather than the style. There is a folk style of course which I generally like as well but I mean the point and value of it.”

N: “I grew up with folk music and I think that it helped shape my tastes and values. My parents have always played and sang old Sevdalinka songs which are Bosnian folk songs. I am fascinated by stories told through music passed on from generation to generation and how melody is preserved through people sharing songs. It is educational, informative and inspirational and I think that is important.”

Is folklore important to you?

A: “Insofar as it stimulates the imagination and recontextualises historical and seasonal imaginings in terms of potent external or divine forces it’s interesting. It creates culture to a certain extent in which is bound a sense of personal understanding and pride so I guess it’s important in that way. It depends how you define folklore; London’s is very much about violence, drinking, darkness and horror. And eccentric behaviours. You never know if what is happening now will become folklore. People need stories to explain things and to entertain themselves.”

N: “On a personal level yes, it gives me a sense of being part of something bigger and greater which may be spiritual and ceremonial. I think it is something which binds me to family and tradition. I think it can be a beautiful and empowering thing and can help forge a sense of belonging, identity and affinity with other people.”

Do you both have a strong sense of your own roots?

A: “Yes. Mine are pretty mixed culturally and geographically, I know that much but I’ve also always been in or near London which I’m sure has influenced my ideas and values. Musically it’s been a very interesting place to grow up. I’ve had the same friends for many years which is really important to me and I have a strong sense of who my family is. But there are so many ways anyone can be shaped, with the same origins, that it’s more about what’s happening now and how you choose to live your life. Who you are is always evolving. You could always trace it back to your roots which to an extent is interesting but really it’s only one variable about who anyone is.”

N: “In a way yes and no. I’ve always had mixed feelings and notions about my own belonging. My family are from former Yugoslavia and we moved to London when I was ten years old. I think cultural identity can be a complex thing and more so now in the 21st century than ever before. Mostly I feel like I am growing my own roots as I get older as opposed to having grown out of my own roots. I am aware of my family past but at the same time I am creating myself and my own belonging that isn’t necessarily connected to a physical place.”

Do you view your music as rural or urban?

A: “Urban but ethereal I guess. I like trees though.”

N: “Yes it is all connected to psychogeography. I am inevitably inspired, informed and shaped by the environments which I am a part of; nature and the elements as well as urban city surroundings, whether in positive or negative ways.”

Have you ever been haunted?

A: “Yes. In Blackpool. Terrifying. Shining Hotel. Very fucking weird.”

N: “I will always be haunted.”

Is God alive? Is magic afoot?

A: “We have no idea what’s really going on.”

How would you define the Paper Dollhouse aesthetic?

A: “Apparently bleak but in fact ardently escapist, luminous, spectral, layered.”

N: “A gloomy yet blissful half-dream state.”

Do you each bring in ideas from disciplines other than music, like photography, film, etc?

A: “Yeah we’re both really into a lot of visual stuff. I’m particularly into chunks of coloured light and am getting into making short films but too early days to give particular references. Just messing about really. I’ve got more into 60s psych posters recently and graphic novels, I really love that stuff.”

N: “I have always studied and done a lot of photography. I am interested in very simple, primal ways of recording images such as with a box camera and very long exposures. I have an obsession with light, cameras, sound, voices, words and dreams.”

Do you feel a particular kinship with any other artists or groups?

A: “Liberez, Emma Tricca, Old Apparatus - I don’t know, I should probably speak to more bands but you meet who you meet. Hopefully the kinship will grow naturally as you meet like minded folk.”

N: “You’re Only Massive. We’re staying with them in Berlin this month, we love them. We also love School Tour and Patrick Kelleher from Dublin, we went on a mini tour in Ireland with them, we’d love to play with them again.”

Do you enjoy being part of the extended Finders Keepers family?

A: “Yes. They are all definitively wicked.”

Are you strongly influenced by location? If you could establish a Paper Dollhouse HQ anywhere, where would it be?

A: “At the moment it’s my bedroom which isn’t ideal. Somewhere near some nice trees with some wicked metallic objects and coloured glass. Get James Turrell to design a tree house. Wicked.”

N: “I love being in nature away from big cities. I’d love to live somewhere very remote on the coast maybe, reflect and write. We’ve been thinking about staying in the Yorkshire Dales for a week or so, walking, talking, recording sound and making music.”

You’ve expressed an admiration for the 1988 film Paperhouse. What is there about it that captures your imagination?

A: “The colour scheme, the duality of worlds, the bad dubbing. I just remember watching it when I was really young and it sucked me in and scared me at the same time, I think someone gets garotted. Therein lies the qualities of intrigue and obsession. Talking of which, I had exactly the same thing with Possession, of which FK recently released the soundtrack. I remember a naked couple getting hit with baseball bats or some such. I was genuinely thrilled to realize it was the same film because that scene had haunted me my entire life. Lord knows how I ended up watching these films so young. A TV in my room I’m guessing. That film was shot in the empty streets of wall-era East Berlin and there is a tracks are called ‘Kreuzberg 1’, ‘Helen Has Green Eyes’, and ‘Man With The Pink Socks’. Cool. I think it was all around the same age - I got really obsessed with Wayne’s World as well but I don’t know if that influence will be filtered so obviously through PDH. You know never know though. Sonic Where’s Wally. I’m getting a Where’s Wally advent calendar by the way, I’ve decided.”

N: “I never had a TV in my room… or an advent calendar.”

What’s your favourite kind of weather?

A: “Rainy, autumnal.”

N: “A clear blue Winter or Autumn sky, the cold, snow.”

Do you have an idea of what the second Paper Dollhouse album be like?

A: “More of an odyssey than the first. What we’ve recorded so far is pretty mixed.”

N: “An after-dark kind of album.”

What are you going to do now?

A: “Buy some coloured jack leads and listen to some more Holy Other on the Triangle Soundcloud as I’ve not heard too much of it.”

N: “Make us tea.”

Oophoi Cold Sun
Julianna Barwick Cloak
Diamanda Galas Birds Of Death
Crime And The City Solution It Takes Two To Burn
Oneirogen Excoriate
Buddy Holly Phone Call (1957)
Skinny Girl Diet Eyes That Paralyse
Andy Stott Execution
Aphex Twin Falling Free
Broadcast You And Me In Time
Tim Hardin Lenny’s Tune
Paper Dollhouse Untitled
Autechre VLetrmx21

The Outer Church first encountered Wizards Tell Lies via their second release for the First Fold...

Fri, 07 Dec 2012 04:37:00 -0500

The Outer Church first encountered Wizards Tell Lies via their second release for the First Fold label, 2011’s The Occurrence EP. A strange concoction of makeshift radiophonics, witchy atmospherics and post-Liars rhythms, it sounded bewilderingly unlike anything we’d ever heard. Their new full-length album The Failed Silence marks a considerable evolution, benefiting from a broader outlook and a more expansive sonic palette. Though credited to the trio of Fox (guitars, percussion, bass, keyboards, field recordings, vocals), Owl (‘The Orchestra of Lost Things’, drums, percussion) and Hart (acoustic guitars, bass, synths, sampler, vocals) Wizards Tell lies is in fact the work of one man, Wigan’s Matt Bower (not to be confused with the Skullflower/Total/Hototogisu fellow). Here he discusses the wild ideas that fuel his project and blesses us with an exclusive mix entitled Ceaseless Mazes & Scattered Angles.

Can you elaborate on the title of your mix for the OC?

“When I was younger I recorded Alien and Blade Runner to Mini Disc so I could listen to the films on the go. I became interested in the sound of film and how the music and audio, when divorced from the images, would ‘open’ the films out, reach out beyond their edges to excite my imagination. It made the films into something else, creating their own fresh narratives.

“I think with the mix I’ve tried to create a sort of audio map for unknown spaces, a filmic narrative. A lot of the music in it will be very familiar to visitors to the OC but I hope I have structured it in such a way that the tracks narrate a journey beyond their original intention to make something different and interesting.

“The title ‘Ceaseless Mazes & Scattered Angles’ actually comes from a short story by HP Lovecraft called ‘The Festival’ written in 1923. The story is set at Christmas time and the narrator is travelling to an ancient sea town (Kingsport, Massachusetts) where his relatives with ‘primal secrets’ have lived for centuries - the narrator has never been there himself. The title comes from a paragraph describing the layout of Kingsport as the narrator walks over the crest of a hill and the town is revealed. For a mix that describes, in an abstract way, maps and spaces, journeys to old dark places, I think the title works well.”

How would you describe the orientation of the latest Wizards Tell Lies album, The Failed Silence?

“I had intended not to make another Wizards Tell Lies record for a while after The Occurrence so I could kind of regroup and rethink the approaches and the sound. But that didn’t happen. So that was the first part of it, actually failing to remain silent because once I had started rethinking the music and how I was approaching it, it was natural to just keep on recording. Bit simplistic, but true. It soon became obvious that there was an album somewhere in amongst all this stuff.

“The Failed Silence was about moving the Wizards away from the Forest Of Dark and out to other unknown/magical spaces where silence might pervade, like the sea and outer space. I wanted to see where that would take the music, imposing those backdrops on the Wizards. I suppose it’s a bit like playing games with it, ‘What if..?’, that sort of thing. Challenging the previous two releases creatively was important too – the sound had to develop, it had to be an artistic and sonic step forward. I hope that it is.

“From the start of recording, I had this image in my head of a tar black sea with shadowy unknown horrors moving just below the surface and that image worked as a template for the whole album in one context or another. From ‘Paralysed We Slumped Into the Gloom Of The Consuming Waters’ and ‘Another of Nature’s Treacheries’ to those pieces that have a domestic setting like ‘We Are In Your House’ or ‘To Him Who Had Been’ I think they all stay true to that idea. Having said that, I don’t think The Failed Silence is as dark or unsettling as the other two WTL releases but I did feel that it was important to close the album with a bit of hope, a touch of optimism, some kind of redemption for the listener and WTL. That’s where ‘Anabioein’ comes in. ‘Anabioein’ is a Greek word which means ‘return to life’ and that felt like an important way to close the album, to sign off and say goodbye to the record.

“Paul McIntyre, an editor friend of mine (and an excellent writer), wrote the press release for the album and he got these ideas straight away from his first listen. He wrote a beautiful little paragraph about each track, describing this journey through seas, outer space and dreams, seeing The Failed Silence as a medium that can be moved through and experienced. It added such a wonderful dimension to the whole thing and it helped me to clarify all these thoughts I had about the album.”

How did you come to work with actor John Guilor?

“I had written and recorded ‘To Him Who Had Been’ (from The Failed Silence) as an instrumental piece but it lacked something, it needed a voice. I had experimented on the previous two WTL releases with vocals, mainly expressionistic noises really, but I never saw Wizards Tell Lies as having songs as such. I find singing a weird thing to do anyway so sung lyrics on the track wasn’t an option.

“I ended up writing this story based on the work of Nathaniel James (whose story ‘The Maddening Machine’ had inspired the track of the same name from WTL’s debut album). I had tried to narrate the track myself and asked a few other people but it always fell flat. My day job is as a TV editor and I ended up getting in touch with a director friend of mine called Iain Cash who I have worked with on and off over the years. I asked him if he could recommend anyone and he came back with two or three people and after listening to their voice demos I settled on John. He was perfect for it. His voice is full of colour and authority and it ended up being such a simple collaboration, such a pleasure to work with him. For one thing John is a really nice and interesting bloke and secondly he totally understands where Wizards Tell Lies is coming from. Without too much direction he knew exactly how to narrate the track and it glued the whole thing together really well. John has just been working with the BBC on the reconstructed third and fourth parts of the 1964 Dr Who serial Planet Of Giants, where he plays/voices the First Doctor (originally played by William Hartnell) - and he is brilliant at it. That is pretty cool. Very proud to have him on this album.

“The track ‘To Him Who Had Been’ features Italian musician Matteo Uggeri (Sparkle in Grey, Meerkat) on trumpet (he also plays on ‘Another of Nature’s Treacheries’). I have been in contact with him for a while now (via email etc) and, like John, he understands where Wizards Tell Lies is coming from. Another easy collaboration from my point of view but he was really worried about his contribution but I love it, it adds another much needed layer and texture to the music.

“Making music can be satisfying in itself but when people understand where you’re coming from and want to contribute to it, that is a massive compliment. These creative partnerships are so important. Even these days in the ‘digital age’ when no one is really ever in the same room anymore and it becomes all a bit ‘Exquisite Corpse’ I find it incredibly inspiring and exciting.”

You recently presented a series of portraits of Owl, Hart and Fox. What was the thinking behind this?

“The Fox, Owl and Hart avatars were created at the start of the project to enable me to distance myself from the project and allow me a degree of anonymity. This works too for anyone involved in WTL and I think the animalistic portraits act as an access point to the WTL ‘world’ and hopefully people buy into that. I have always seen WTL in visual terms, almost as if it was a film, and usually the tracks are initially written as little short scripts, so I do draw a parallel with actors playing a role in a film and musicians playing one of the animal characters in WTL. Whether WTL is a band or just one person, I don’t think that is important, what is important is that the music is as good as it can be and that it all works as a solid concept within this ‘world’ that I’ve created. It’s a bit of fun really and with a name like Wizards Tell Lies it is hard to take it all too seriously anyway!”

First Fold seems very much a collective rather than simply a label. What does it mean to you?

“First Fold has been so important to Wizards Tell Lies and me creatively. They allow the artists absolute freedom and they aim to create a really solid back catalogue of incredible music and art. Without their support, I doubt Wizards Tell Lies would exist anymore. It is such an incentive to create stuff when you have an outlet for it. It’s that old thing of ‘art is nothing without an audience’ and even if that audience is two or three people it doesn’t matter. The fact that these few people spend their money on the music or mention it or send a message of support or play it on the radio or people like The Outer Church ask WTL to contribute to something that makes it very satisfying, and the audience keeps growing in small little steps. All this, I would say, is down to First Fold putting this music out and really caring about who they work with and what they release.

“They are such a nice bunch of people and being part of a collective really does give you strength, bit clichéd but it is true. Knowing that they have my back and they will support me pushes me to create the best music I possibly can at any given time.

“It was really good to release The Failed Silence alongside fellow label mates Them Use Them’s The Muse, The Mountain album – I felt there was a common ground between those two records, like a brotherly bond, if you like, and it would be great in ten years time to re-release them together as a double CD or something. Who knows!

“A lot of opportunities have surfaced due to my involvement with First Fold and I know that without the label they wouldn’t have happened. French blogger Lapin Radin approached Wizards Tell Lies to create a new piece of music for his Des Cendres a la Cave blog. The track is called ‘The Hex of Ezra’ and follows on from the ideas built up on The Occurrence EP. It will be included on a free-to-download compilation that will be released just before Xmas. The compilation features, at the last count, some sixty artists from all over the world. A massive undertaking for Lapin but good for him for attacking such an epic project with constant enthusiasm and excitement.

“Being asked to do the mix for The Outer Church was another great opportunity. I always loved to create these mixes but never had much incentive to do it (or the time!) and it was great to dip into it again. But again without the OC being made aware of WTL through the releases on First Fold this would never have happened.

“I am also collaborating with Craig Earp (who is an artist and musician) on a series of prints and we have also talked about a potential music project between Wizards Tell Lies and his group Damrai Vent. We became aware of each other through First Fold (we both contributed to First Fold’s journal, Premier Pli 2). I find all this stuff very exciting and it’s great to collaborate as it challenges and questions your own creative ability. Never a bad thing.

“So, yeah, First Fold is really important to WTL and me personally-label boss Stuart Tonge (who performs and records as Papa November) has been incredible throughout my involvement with the label. It’s all down to him and his wife Katy Aquaye-Tonge (an artist and musician in her own right) really. Without Katy, Stu and I would never have met! I used to work with her in a record shop many years ago and this all came about when I got back in touch with Katy a few years. Stu liked what he heard of WTL’s early recordings and asked if I would do an EP or album and I jumped at the opportunity. I have never spoken to Stu about this but I think he and Ben Sadler (Them Use Them, he runs the label with Stu) were initially quite wary of the occult side of the project (I would be too!) but when I explained it was only a device for artistic expression they were cool with it. It has worked out amazingly well for me and WTL and I hope it continues far into the future as long as I have stuff to release and as long as they want to release it I hope we will keep working together.”

Do you feel a particular kinship with any acts or artists outside of First Fold?

“Not sure about kinships but there is a lot of stuff out there that inspires and informs Wizards Tell Lies, quite specific stuff. Maybe a lot of what follows is obvious but being asked to talk about these things sort of gets you to hone in on those things and really concentrate on what inspires you to do whatever it is you do.

“David Lynch’s Rabbits and Eraserhead and his film score music, Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist and The Kingdom, Ridley Scott’s Alien and Blade Runner, George Lucas’s THX 1138, Jan Svankmajer, the Children of the Stones and Chocky TV Series, HP Lovecraft’s Dagon And Other Macabre Tales collection, William S Burroughs’s Word Virus collection, comics like Jamie Delano’s early Hellblazer issues and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series (and Dave McKean’s covers for those two titles), Liars’s They Were Wrong So We Drowned, Reload’s A Collection of Short Stories, Future Sound of London’s second Essential Mix (1995), The BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Goblin’s soundtrack for Suspiria, Pan Sonic’s Kesto (234.48:4) Disc 2, Raccoo-oo-oon, Tom Waits’s spoken word tracks ‘What’s He Building In There?’ and ‘Children’s Story’. There are loads more but I find lists dull to read so I’ll quit while I’m ahead! It gives you an idea about where WTL comes from, and the sources I tend to go to pillage for inspiration.”

Where are you based? How do your surroundings inform your music?

“I am based in Wigan and yes I think that my surroundings do inform my music. I live opposite a graveyard that is surrounded by woods. It’s a great place to go walking, to think and to record stuff. It’s definitely a serene place rather than a terrifying place but having said that, I haven’t been up there at night yet! There is also a vast country park nearby which is just woodland really. That is an amazing place, really inspiring particularly at this time of year as Autumn switches effortlessly into Winter. It does have a certain magic to it and I hope some of that rubs off onto Wizards Tell Lies’s world.”

Urban or pastoral? Discuss.

“I can’t really put one over the other to be honest and I think that both have inspired WTL in one way or another, either directly or through other people’s art and creativity. David Lynch’s architecture and domestic spaces depicted in his films are very powerful and how he shows ‘the horror’ encroaching on that (Eraserhead or Lost Highway) is extremely unnerving, it stays with you. Jamie Delano’s early Hellblazer comics had urban settings and were made unsettling because of it. I think artistically an urban setting for ‘horror’ works really well because it is about it invading your own safe area, if you know what I mean, that is what makes those ideas universally frightening. But there is also a lot to be gleaned from the pastoral and how terrifying those places can be (Eden in Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist for example) especially when you are taken out of your comfort zone and you get foxes saying ‘Chaos reigns’ to you. Unsettling. As hard as people try to remove the pastoral from their living areas, nature will always win. Like Tom Waits sings in ‘Misery Is The River Of The World’: ‘You can drive out nature with a pitchfork/But it always comes roaring back again.’ Nature’s weird anyway and quantum theory shows how unimaginably strange and counter-intuitive nature can be. But again, there’s a bit of magic in all that and a lot of gaping-mouthed-wonder. I suppose it’s about trying to retain a childlike awe for these places (the forest, the sea and outer space) and trying to incite that via the artwork and music and not get too bogged down in fact and theological baggage. It can all work in its own universe to its own rules and as long as it is consistent then I think you’re half way there.”

Have you ever had what might be termed an uncanny experience?

“I haven’t had any uncanny experiences as such but my imagination does kind of take over and no matter how rational you are about hauntings or whatever your imagination will win you over every time. I have been very lucky in my job as an editor and the sorts of shows I used to cut to be able to visit some of the country’s reportedly haunted buildings but not once have I experienced anything that would make me believe that they were haunted. It’s very cool to have visited them but I think once you hear the stories about places, that’s it, your mind is off with the tales and making you see and hear things that clearly aren’t there.

“But, having said that, my first house was weird. My wife and I completely gutted this old Victorian terrace and uncovered some very spooky stuff that made my head sing and my skin crawl. In the back bedroom under the floorboards, there amongst a load of hypodermic needles, were about a hundred paper crucifixes. This was really unnerving and a little bit terrifying. Not only that but all the doors were bolted from the outside and thinking about that now, it doesn’t seem that odd, but at the time I thought, ‘What the hell were they trying to keep locked up in that back bedroom?’ My wife had experiences of hearing her name whispered in her ear at very close quarters, a dark figure sat on the bed at the side of her. There were other things that happened but even though I am ninety nine point nine percent certain that ghosts don’t exist, I believe my wife. She has no reason to lie about these things. The light in the back bedroom with the crucifixes in would inexplicably turn on randomly and our godson, who was four at the time, saw a circle of children sitting on our kitchen floor and he also described a ‘man with a bad ear’. The next day we found an old hearing aid boxed up in a cupboard. Bizarre. There was a cupboard under the stairs and scrawled on the wall above the doorway it said, ‘I don’t like it in here.’ Awful and truly terrifying. This all makes me shudder as I talk about it.”

How do you feel Wizards Tell Lies has evolved as a project since its earliest recordings?

“Even though at the very start I was obsessing over Ghost Box and obsessing over their obsessions I could never make music like they do, my mind is in another place. I love what they do and they have created this universe around themselves that works really well so why try to compete with that if you have nothing new to say? Reigns do a similar thing with each record. They had a different take on that whole world of Ghost Box spookiness but with a totally different approach and style. That really did inspire a lot of my early WTL recordings. I think as you take on inspiration, ingredients from here and there, you slowly whittle it down and focus your own intentions so that eventually it does become your own take on music or art. I am not quite there yet with WTL but it’s getting there.

“I think the WTL ‘world’ has become more elaborate and there are periphery characters/ personalities that inform the music and project as a whole. Gilbert Delaney (‘The Final Transmission of Gilbert Delaney’ from the self-titled debut), Ezra Parker (whose story inspired The Occurrence EP), Nathaniel James (whose work inspired ‘The Maddening Machine’ and ‘To Him Who Had Been’) all have had a hand in that universe. It has to be fun and creating universes is fun. It also must be challenging and creative and if it isn’t there is no real point to it on a personal level. You have to retain an enthusiasm for the stuff because if you don’t no one else will!”

Your releases come wrapped in beautiful artwork. What impression do you hope to convey with their presentation?

“Apart from the debut album and the mini-zine insert I made for The Occurrence EP I haven’t had anything to do with CD artwork. I think the question maybe should be for Gareth Courage who designs all the artwork for First Fold’s releases! I don’t usually have any input as that’s part of Gareth’s role within the collective. All of First Fold’s musicians send their finished EPs or albums to him and he disappears for a while and comes back with these consistently striking and incredible images. He seems to create them as a reaction to/interpretation of the music, and the images he comes up with work so beautifully for Wizards Tell Lies. Gareth’s images are incredibly important to me and the project because they add another layer to the Wizards Tell Lies ‘world’, they sort of extend it out beyond my own intentions and concepts.”

What’s wrong?

“The Twilight Saga.”

What’s right?

“Near Dark.”

How do you feel about the future?

“Positively. I am a bit of a pessimist to be honest and I know this is a contradiction but I get a bit uncomfortable by absolute negativity, those doomsayers who say the future is going to be a dark and miserable place where Western civilisation has crumbled and society is screwed beyond redemption. There has to be hope and something to look forward to. Maybe it’s a naïve cliché but art and music helps. Family and friends too. If it does all end in December (unlikely) as the Mayans predicted I like the idea from Don McKeller’s Last Night of spending the final day on earth with your loved ones listening to exotica records while watching the world burn. Funny.”

Are you looking forward to Christmas?

“Absolutely.”

Wizards Tell Lies The Symmetree
THX 1138 Extract
Rhythm Devils Cave
Paul Giovanni Lullaby
Tom Waits Children’s Story
Wizards Tell Lies The Maddening Machine
Buffy Sainte Marie Adam
THX 1138 Extract
Papa November Banished Part II
Zdenek Liska Et Cetera
Giuliano Sorgini Torment Of The Dead
Aphex Twin Untitled (Grass)
Wizards Tell Lies How It Starts
Mum & Dad Kiss of Death
John Carpenter Ghost Story
William S Burroughs Dinosaurs (Extract)
John Murphy Welcome To Icarus II
Thomas Koner Novaya Zemlya 1
David Lynch & Dean Hurley The Air Is On Fire VII (Interior)
Vangelis One More Kiss Dear
Main Remain
Wizards Tell Lies The Remembering
THX 1138 Extract
Them Use Them Ghosts Along The Shore
Daphne Oram Kia-Ora
The Advisory Circle Swinscoe Episode 1
Wizards Tell Lies The Failed Silence
Reload Enlightenment/Event Horizon
Thames Television Ident

2012 has been an astonishing year for music. Here are some of the releases we’ve loved at The...

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:27:00 -0500

2012 has been an astonishing year for music. Here are some of the releases we’ve loved at The Outer Church, in no particular order: Production Unit There Are No Shortcuts In A Grid System (Broken20) Alexander Tucker Third Mouth (Thrill Jockey) Pye Corner Audio Sleep Games (Ghost Box) Oren Ambarchi Sagittarian Domain (Editions Mego) Black Bananas Rad Times Express IV (Drag City) Panabrite Soft Terminal (Digitalis) Killer Mike R.A.P. Music (Williams Street) Bear Bones, Lay Low El Telonero (Kraak) Slomo The Grain (Trilithon) Scott Walker Bish Bosch (4AD) Lost Trail A Stained August For The Jetcrash (Sunup Recordings) Raime Quarter Turns Over A Living Line (Blackest Ever Black) Hacker Farm UHF (Exotic Pylon) Blawan His He She & She (Hinge Finger) Stratus As The Crow Flies (Tummy Touch) Innercity Bloodcake (Amnesia Agency) Penalune Not All Clouds Are White (Broken20) Synek Paradiba (Rano) EL-P Cancer 4 Cure (Fat Possum) Kemper Norton Rough Music: Collision/Detection v6 (Front & Follow) KTL V (Editions Mego) Lindstrom Smalhans (Feedelity) These Feathers Have Plumes Hegira (Robert & Leopold) Vindicatrix Mengamuk (Mordant Music) Time Attendant Tournaments (Exotic Pylon) Van Halen A Different Kind Of Truth (Interscope) Anna Meredith Black Prince Fury (Moshi Moshi) Panabrite The Baroque Atrium (Preservation) eMMplekz IZOD Days (Mordant Music) Áine O’Dwyer Music for Church Cleaners (Fort Evil Fruit) Black Mountain Transmitter Playing With Dead Things (Auris Apothecary) Geoff Barrow & Ben Salisbury DROKK: Music Inspired By Mega City One (Invada) Young Smoke Space Zone (Planet Mu) Kiran Leonard Bowler Hat Soup (Self-Released) oh/ex/oh Extant (The Geography Trip) Fairhorns Doki Doki Run (Invada) Mirrorring Foreign Body (Kranky) TVO Red Night (Broken60) Air Le Voyage Dans La Lune (Virgin) Hong Kong In The 60s Collision/Detection v4 (Front & Follow) Jessica Bailiff At The Down-Turned Jagged Rim Of The Sky (Kranky) Steve Moore Light Echoes (Cuneiform) Robert Hood Motor: Nighttime World 3 (Music Man) Kemper Norton Carn 1 (Self-Released) Old Apparatus Derren/Realise/Alfur/Harem (Sullen Tone) Devin Townsend Project Epicloud (HevyDevy) Minack Downed (Self-Released) Nick Mott The Visitors (alt.vinyl) Mothlite Dark Age (Kscope) Beru Fire Eyes Gather Souls (Digitalis) Hexvessel No Holier Temple (Svart) Emptyset Medium (Subtext) Now Wakes The Sea Hot Cygnet Tape (The Geography Trip) Robin The Fog The Ghosts Of Bush (The Fog Signals) OGRE 184 (Self-Released) Jon Brooks Shapwick (Clay Pipe Music) Ship Canal Please Let Me Back Into Your House (19F3) Silver Pyre AeXE (Sedgemoor Recordings) 10-20 Magnet Marsh (Broken60) Soft Mirage Ionian Dream (Kinnta) The Haxan Cloak The Men Parted The Sea To Devour The Water (Southern) Bass Clef Reeling Skullways (Punch Drunk) Wizards Tell Lies The Failed Silence (First Fold) Abul Mogard Abul Mogard (VCO Recordings) Erstlaub Marconi’s Shipwreck (Broken20) Patti Smith Banga (Columbia) The Beach Boys That’s Why God Made The Radio (Capitol) Pye Corner Audio Black Mill Tapes Vol 3 (Pye Corner Audio Transcription Services) Ombre Believe You Me (Asthmatic Kitty) Rush Clockwork Angels (Roadrunner) Earth Angels Of Darkness, Demons Of Light II (Southern Lord) Sone Institute A Model Life (Front & Follow) Umberto The Night Has A Thousand Screams (Rock Action) Imbogodom And They Turned Not When They Went (Thrill Jockey) Them Use Them The Muse The Mountain (First Fold) Oren Ambarchi Audience Of One (Touch) Majeure Solar Maximum (Temporary Residence) Emptyset Collapsed (Raster Noton) Lindstrom Six Cups Of Rebel (Smalltown Supersound)

Manchester-based label The Geography Trip made an auspicious debut this year with the sunken coastal...

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 19:01:00 -0500

Manchester-based label The Geography Trip made an auspicious debut this year with the sunken coastal drone of Now Wakes The Sea’s Hot Cygnet Tape. The Outer Church received its copy with a rather fetching postcard, now firmly pinned to the notice board in the narthex. More recently the label hooked up with OC ally oh/ex/oh and will release the shadowy British producer’s beautifully vaporous full-length debut Extant on December 21st. Somewhere in the midst of all this excitement one thing led to another and the Trip found themselves making the OC an exclusive mixtape accompanied by an illuminating track-by-track commentary…

Hill Fort Listening Station: A Geography Trip

“I like it when sounds have a sense of journey about them. Ever since falling under the terrifying spell of Boards Of Canada’s Geogaddi, I can rarely listen to anything without positing some kind of imaginary ramble through its whale-like sonic belly. That’s probably why I started The Geography Trip; a soundtrack for my personal reveries through abandoned quarries, the curated artefacts of my mental town-centre, the catalogued topographies of illusory coastlands. This particular Trip is about a journey to a strange transmitter up on a hill fort in Wales. I hope you like it.”

Enraptured by the curvature and sheer volume, our eyes bulge.
The mast looms out of a bank of deepest green, thrusting forth with silent pulse.
There is a momentary haze, a flutter of the heart.
And then the horror creeps in, a gaunt shadow encircling the spine.
Sheila has left her flask on the bus.

1. Black Mountain Transmitter ‘Black Goat Of The Woods’

“I actually listened to this when I walked over the hill fort. It genuinely scared the hell out of me, although I couldn’t place exactly why. The ominous circularity of nightmare and ritual, building and building like a mountain gradually looming into view. Except that you are hog-tied to wooden stakes and the path is lined with old skulls. Something to do with that, probably.”

2. Robin the Fog ‘Cold Space and Peeling Oxide’

“Since my introduction to The Ghosts of Bush earlier this year I’ve found it almost impossible to stop listening. It feels as though I’m scuttling through a massive organic submarine, walls breathing and shuddering as load-bearing spines twist and buckle. It’s magnificent.”

3. Bibio ‘Dwrcan’

“This sounds like a scrambled transmission from a hip-hop protocol droid. The skewed beats are wires that entangle a CPU of melancholic binary memory. It has a combination of the rural and the exotic that is compelling; the mechanical beside the natural, the strange inside the familiar. And it reminds me of Boards, which is always lovely.”

4. Moon Wiring Club ‘The Moontower’

“This is one of my hardy perennials, I play it a lot. It feels quite native, familiar somehow; the vocal samples all have that Edwardian accent that identifies them as being taken from programming for schools or something like that. Call it Hauntology or Psychogeography or whatever you like, for me it’s about finding your own personal buttons to press to transform the space you are in.”

5. Chris Watson ‘The Forest Path: Meallan Na Ceardaich, Glen Affric, Scotland’

“Chris Watson makes recordings that sparkle and resonate. They seem to retain something from the surroundings that other field-recordists cannot cling on to. This is probably due to a combination of excellent technique and considerable experience, but I prefer to believe that he is unnatural and brilliant.”

6. Boards of Canada ‘Audiotrack 13A’

“I suppose it’s kind of a cliché, but BOC are pretty much the reason I do what I do; from the very first second of ‘Aquarius’ heard on Peel, my mind had been re-programmed like a copy of Operation Wolf for the Spectrum thrown from a moving vehicle, spools fluttering in the breeze. And now my mind (the spooling tape) is entwined in some shrubs and disintegrating.”

7. Heathered Pearls ‘Beach Shelter’

“I don’t know much about this. Someone mentioned it on Twitter and I fell in love with it, the sunkenness and murk. It sounds like a beach travelling in reverse.”

8. Slowdive ‘Souvlaki Space Station’

“I had Souvlaki on tape when I was younger and I like the way this track feels like a gyroscope gradually slowing down in space. When the gyroscope stops spinning, the space station hits the edge of the atmosphere or something. So the astronauts are understandably miffed.”

9. oh/ex/oh ‘The Resonator’

“This may seem like some kind of shameless plug, but it isn’t. This track makes my hairs stand on end. oh/ex/oh is a polymath in a land of monomaths and semimaths. Pre-order now to avoid disappointment etc.”

10. At the Drive In ‘One Armed Scissor (Coda)’

“There’s a little coda on the end of ‘One Armed Scissor’ that’s like a vignette from a Radio 4 play about scientists escaping from a doomed laboratory. I thought I would mix it in here because it has a real chill to it and also I can be a bit of a pretentious dick sometimes.”

11. Ship Canal ‘Sat Nav Wanker’

“I don’t know anything about Ship Canal, but someone put this on a mix for me and it’s incredible. Incidentally, I had a great idea for a comic about a superhero who lives in a submarine in a canal. If anyone wants to write it with me, get in touch.”

12. John Barry ‘Countdown For Blofeld’

“The incidental pieces of music that John Barry made for film, but particularly James Bond, are my earliest memories of being moved in the way that I have attempted to move people with my label: to instil a sense of the abnormal and the ominous wrapped inside a sense of vast, cinematic soundscapes.”

13. Chris Watson ‘The Blue Men of Minch: Moray Firth, Scotland’

“More Watson, for he is grand.”

14. Kemper Norton ‘821.914’

“Someone, not sure who, reads Philip Larkin’s ‘Aubade’ above a beat that recoils into itself like maggots chewing at flesh. Chilling.”

15. Jacob Kirkegaard ‘Heavy Water’

“For a while I worked as a writer in the office of a shitty travel company. I wasn’t particularly good at my job, so I used to pretend I was doing my work when I was actually listening to Jacob Kirkegaard and looking at pictures of haunted lighthouses.”

16. Super Furry Animals ‘Some Things Come From Nothing’

“The Furries are the first band I really fell for, and I fell quite hard. They are certainly accountable for my considerable collection of bobble hats and my ability to say ‘sunny intervals’ in Welsh. More so, they exposed me to a kind of experimentation with sound I hadn’t heard before. This particular track uses a lot of Caribbean steel drums and for that I am truly thankful.”