Ambient Curation #5 ~ flutes in hot springs, cinematic microtones, bass guitar drone loops

Editor Ruben van Dijk providing wonderful recs this edition of the newsletter. Including our most recent release by Lishes, previous compilation artist M. Sage and hot spring induced flute playing.

Lishes - Music for Bass Guitar

AMBIENT CURATION
DRONE / LOOPS / TEXTURE

Lishes‘ flatmates may not have noticed that he was recording his debut album in their shared living room, your flatmates will undoubtedly notice when you put on Music for Bass Guitar, the latest release through Ambient Curation. The drone on track 1, ‘17’, is absolutely, terrifyingly thudding. The rest of the album, too, maintains a low and piercing hum, as the Amsterdam-based composer layers bass on bass on bass, with the occasional electronic micro-adventure. Much like guitarist Jeff Parker’s ‘loops’ record Forfolks, Music for Bass Guitar seems, at first, to simply shroud your brain in a thick fog, but repeated listening might reveal some form of auriculoacupuncture.

Meitei - Sen’nyū / 泉涌

KITCHEN.
KANKYO ONGAKU / LOST JAPAN / FLUTE

Ever since the Kamakura shogunate (1185-1333), when it was used as a health resort for wounded samurai, Beppu, a city on the island of Kyūshū, has been defined by its hot springs (onsen). Meanwhile, the discography of Hiroshima-based composer Meitei has long been defined by “extant sites of longing still quietly breathing within contemporary life”. And so he wandered through the many sacred sites of Beppu, and recorded the bubbling mud, the hissing vents, the natural breath of the baths, and the quiet disruption of visitors moving in and out. It resulted first in a public sound installation inside Takegawara Onsen, and now an album, Sen’nyū / 泉涌, on which Meitei’s flute-playing becomes a ghostlike protagonist, in a cityscape that’s hushed and only somewhat forlorn.

M. Sage - Tender / Wading

RVNG
SERENE / AMBIENT JAZZ / CLARINET

Earlier this year, M. Sage paired up with Lieven Martens to protest the lawnmower and the epidemic of clean-cut lawns, to which “biodiversity has become an aesthetic casualty”. On Tender / Wading, the multi-instrumentalist returns home to his presumably wild and overgrown ranch in Berthoud, Colorado, where he finds great comfort. Centred around piano and clarinet, this is Sage’s most soothing effort in a good while, akin to his work with ambient jazz supergroup Fuubutsushi. Of course, there is still plenty of Moog-based twiddling, no mowers, but definitely some rusty pruning shears.

Filip Leyman - Soft Light

POMPERIPOSSA RECORDS
DRONE / MICROTONAL / CINEMATIC

Soft Light may be Filip Leyman‘s solo debut, but the Swede is by no means new to music production. A frequent collaborator with Anna von Hauswolff (who has released this album through her label Pomperipossa Records), Leyman is in his own right a prolific composer for theater and film. And there is certainly a cinematic quality to Soft Light, whose seven tracks tend to start on a low hum, but become increasingly panoramic, until you are entirely enveloped by Leyman’s ever-soaring ‘wild electronics’.

Weston Olencki - Broadsides

OUTSIDE TIME
AMERICANA / HAUNTOLOGY / NOISE

Weston Olecki is one of several artists working in the American South today (e.g. William Tyler, Daniel Bachman), that are drawing from the region’s blood-stained (musical) traditions and aeruginous americana, to push not only their chosen field but their country forward, especially now that America seems more than ever haunted by a past it thought to be buried. Olencki’s latest epic, Broadsides, is at times deeply harrowing – especially on ‘all my father’s clocks’, which samples… the ticking all of their father’s clocks – but as a meditation on death, also surprisingly full of life: insects are buzzing, storms are raging, locomotives are chugging by, and on ‘Foggy Mountain Breakdown // Ground Speed’ a banjo finds a deep sense of euphoria in rapid motion, wherever the hell it is we’re moving towards.