★Helen Scarsdale Agency
Connector
Stelzer/Murray is the duo of Brendan Murray and Howard Stelzer, two stalwarts of the Boston noise / experimental scene over the past two decades. Both artists have long been friends and both artists have never shied away from collaborating with avant-garde musicians hither and yon. Yet, this marks their first collaborative work together. Better late than never, we say. Stelzer brings to the table an array of mangled and partially demagnetized tape; and Murray brings his knack for compacted…
Inflame Ost
Istanbul's drone-pop producer Ekin Fil turns her sites to the big screen for the first soundtrack in her impressive catalogue of recordings. Inflame (2017) is a psychological thriller laced with paranoia and nightmares, directed by Ceylan Özgün Özçelik and was showcased at the Berlin International Film Festival and the SXSW Film Festival, amongst others. In making her cinematic debut, Ekil Fil turns synths and electronics, in building the score that in part is brimming with tension and c…
Ghosts Inside
Ekin Fil is the acclaimed drone-pop chanteuse working with the sparest of materials in her ethereal, shoegaze deconstructions. Her sound developed out of a healthy obsession with Cranes, Cocteau Twins, Slowdive and many other bands that she discovered in the tattered back issues of NME and the home-dubbed tapes that were passed around when she was growing up in Turkey. Upon a fortuitous invitation to perform alongside Grouper in Istanbul in the late oughts, Ekin Fil (nee Ekin Üzeltüzenci) began …
Natural Incapacity
Relay For Death are the twin sisters Rachal and Roxann Spikula, whose noise mantras transcribe the harsh realities of urban blight that complicate and threaten their own survival. It was in the context of two month medical study that the Spikulas composed their debut album in 2009, amplifying the emptiness of hospital rooms into a ghostly pall worthy of the classic works by Maurizio Bianchi. Natural Incapacity sprouts from a similar research and development, manifesting from the sonic pol…
Throttle & Calibration
In 2015, Jim Haynes accepted a residency at MoKS in the village of Mooste, Estonia to collaborate and contribute to Simon Whetham's Active Crossover series. For this particular incarnation of Active Crossover, well over a dozen international artists were invited to this region of Estonia to collect field recordings and engage in a cross-pollination of ideas, strategies, and concepts that spawned from those recordings. The refuse from Soviet-era industrial farming complexes, the droned blur of ae…
Being Near
Had the titular contest in guy maddin's "the saddest music in the world" not been rigged from the onset, turkey could have delivered an impeccable contestant in ekin fil. for many years now, her spectral dream-pop deconstructions hold a thousand-yard stare of an unconsolable melancholy; and she's drawn the highly favorable comparisons to grouper and lovesliecrushing thanks to her understated yet beloved catalogue of releases on root strata, students of decay, no kings, and sacred phrases. helen …
Revisionist History
The first Fossil Aerosol Mining Project audio recordings were made 30 years ago this year. In the observation of three decades of obscure, faked resurrection, we are pleased to announce the release of the new CD Revisionist History. The recordings on this album are hybrids, created by the grafting of old artifacts onto new material using recently devised studio processes. New sounds of the past, articulated through the devices of an unimagined future. In addition to the 69-minute CD, each packag…
Surrender, Render, End
First and foremost, Surrender, Render, End is an electro-acoustic dialectic, unremittingly engaged in a pugilist conflict between art and accident. The Swiss noise-composer Francisco Meirino began working on the skeleton for this piece in 2014 as a multi-channel, modular synth patch, which has been in an ongoing state of modification through public diffusions and private rumination. Meirino posits the album as a metaphysical puzzle of manipulated tape, atonal synthesis, and concrete sound. He is…
60' Cassette
Crude electro-acoustic strategies are at work in the tape-on-tape monolith that is Richard Garet's 60' Cassette, with the Uruguayan born resident of New York declaring his intentions as such: "100% treated audio cassette material. some blank. some erased. some demagnetized. etc." The conceptualization of this work as a reframing of one particular medium through its applied / accelerated disintegration is only the album's beginning. There is an implied history in this form destruction, as Garet p…
It Was A Time Of Laboured Metaphors
The field recordist and lucid-dream composer Kate Carr conjures a liminal art, seeking to articulate the remembrances, the concrete fact, and the deliberate exaggerations of detail, all in the pursuit of addressing the human interaction with the environment. Psychology, history, politics, geography, storytelling, fantasy, the notion of the self, and the disintegration of these rigors at their transect all come into play in her ongoing work. She has set herself on path to make these investigation…
Brittle
With a detached curiosity, Grant Evans drops us into his petri dish of mud, bacteria, and fetid slop. At first, we have no roadmap to the drowning noise that slowly trickles down the throat and presses against the ear drums; but Evans is no sadist. Yes, volatile coagulations and conflagrations abound with malaise at the beginning to each of the side-long works to Brittle -- itself a vibrant landmark in the Evans\' rhizomatic back catalogue that slips through harsh wall noise, kosmische explorati…
Relief
Our man Millis is a Climax Golden Twin and a noted curator of globe trotting / time traveling esoterica, amongst other accolades.ÊIn the former category, Millis and Jeffery Taylor steadily release some of the most headscratching amalgamations of avant-rock, decontextualized temple music, heightened-state minimalism, and collaged field recordings this side of the Sun City Girls (including the soundtrack to the cult film Session Nine); and in the latter, Millis has published a number of acclaimed …
Ocean On Ocean
Ass-flatteningly great duo cosmo drone visions from Barbara Kinzle and Birch Cooper of Portland, Oregon that takes dream-pop and devotional choral ascensions to the very edge of euphoric body/gnosis: originally issued as a CD-R in 2010 this beautifully presented vinyl set upgrades the album with two LPs mastered at 45rpm for maximal immersion. Ocean On Ocean feels like the logic of Blinda-era My Bloody Valentine pushed to true post-rock limits, with song-forms exploded in favour of a profound, c…
What Are The Roots That Clutch
It was a cavernous tone that broadcast from a ventilator duct that inspired Patrick McGinley to begin collecting field recordings and working them into his slow-arc compositions. At the time when he heard that particular tone in that particular city at that particular time, he had no gear to recording device on hand. Over the next fifteen years (and counting) McGinley has eased into a peripatetic lifestyle, wandering the European countryside and forests (but never straying too far from th…
The Decline Effect
Parapsychology introduced the notion of the decline effect as a statistical phenomenon of diminishing results whilst investigating extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis. Where initial findings might substantiate proof of such abilities, further studies would almost always demonstrate the contrary. As such, this ontological disappearing act stands in allegorical parallel to the entropic art of Jim Haynes and frames his 2011 opus of the corroded drone and a compacted disintegration of …
Big shadow Montana
"After producing their frozen trilogy of intoxicated dronemuzik for the Agency, these Scandinavian gentlemen have ventured into more absurdist territories through fictionalized soundtracks for imagined Mondo films and science fiction serials. It is in this context that BJ Nilsen & Stilluppsteypa present the apparitional Big Shadow Montana, an album of slow-motion delirium manifested in occluded smears, nocturnal gasps, and arcane tones from a variety of analogue synthesizers. Amidst the n…
Ananta
**Highly recommended!** Hitoshi Kojo (aka Spiracle) professes to have some difficulties in falling asleep. When sleep comes to him, it can often arrive at dawn, when the colors of the sun begin to break through the darkness of night and when some are just rising after their own good night's sleep. ananta is a twin set of compositions that urge the listener toward a dreamless sleep-state, while reflecting the glowing warmth of a blossoming sunrise. In constructing the two variations of ananta, Ko…
Interceptor
Clinton Williams is never a man of just a few words. He doesn't release that much (anymore?) under his banner Omit, but when he does it's usually a 3CD or a 2CD set, and 'Interceptor' is not different. For this release Williams did something other than his usual musical routine. Two suitcases where filled with drum machines, effects, analog synths and a portable studio and in stead of looking for job, which he was supposed to he create this music. The line up of instruments may seem like somethi…
The Otolith
The recordings of Loren Chasse and Michael Northam begin and end with the great outdoors. Yet, the well-documented wanderlust of these two kindred sound artists is only part of the equation. Field recordings of wind, water, and stone intertwine and hybridize within private rituals of droning psychedelic ragas that return as a folklore reiterating the mystery of the natural world around us. Through his numerous contributions to the multi-faceted Jewelled Antler as well his solo work, Chasse has l…
The Sleeping Moustache
This curious quintet makes sounds that recall the glory days of Nurse With Wound: long, shapeshifting collages of psychedelic murk interrupted by random outbursts of industrial clatter, nightmarish drones, deeply bizarre audio mutations and tangible masses of sticky audio goop of impossibly vague origin. The Sleeping Moustache consists of five ten-minute tracks interspersed with five brief interstitial tracks. Everything blends together well because nothing blends together well; forced juxtaposi…