Journeys in Sound & Music
Since Aven was released to much acclaim by Touch in 2016, Los Angeles based sound artist and composer Bethan Kellough has remained busy drawing on her sound design and field recording practice to create ambisonic compositions for installations, film & media not to mention participating in artistic residencies, workshops, and interviews around the globe. While…
Read More
Melissa Pons is a field recordist and sound designer whose main interests revolve around anthropology, forests, culture and social justice. In recent years, she has explored sounds around the world from forests in Brazil and Sweden to Portugal where she is now based. In addition to her audio works, Melissa, maintains a fascinating and well-written…
Read More
Since its inception, Harry Towell’s Whitelabrecs label has been nothing less than prolific with release after release that seems to bring out the best in any artist that appears on the roster. In fact, Whitelabrecs made more appearances in my 2019 retrospectives than any other label. Given the creative impetus that represents, perhaps it is…
Read More
The EP is often overlooked when it comes annual round-ups, but this format continually provides us with memorable outsize moments and the year in music would not be the same without them as these 16 releases demonstrate.
Read More
For their latest record entitled It Billows Up, Brooklyn-based avant music trio Sontag Shogun sought to capture the essence of their live performances on record through the use of collaborative techniques and modular compositions they had developed while on tour in Europe, Japan, & North America in 2016/17. The end result is a kaleidoscopic pastiche…
Read More
“I could hear everything, together with the hum of my hotel neon…” Jack Kerouac One of the privileges of being on this journey of musical discovery over the past five years or so has been to witness first hand the trajectory of emerging artists from their tentative beginnings to their creative peak, and one of…
Read More
Each of these sixteen albums is conceptually, thematically or musically connected to places or moments in time. While this is a somewhat common motif in instrumental music (ambient in particular), it is absolutely integral in these outstanding works released in 2018. Some are personal narratives and some are depictions of landscape either real or imagined.…
Read MoreThe third and final installment in Lucy Claire‘s “Works” series is a beautifully conceived EP that takes her music out of the confines of living room and studio to integrate with a variety of soundscapes. In a rather fresh take on the concept, she has taken an especially interactive approach which, when combined with her…
Read More
How does one capture the essence of a landscape so as to describe it to another who has never been there? The vast majority of us would rely on words and pictures, but how many of us would think of trying to do this strictly with sound? Not music, mind you, but sound. That is…
Read More
Stationary Travels 