8Sided Blog

a zine about sound, culture, and the punk rock dream

Michael Bratt’s Tour of the Darkroom

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Michael Bratt is a D.C.-based composer with an impressive CV, having studied music extensively, conducted orchestras, scored films, and co-founded ensembles like Cleveland’s FiveOne Experimental Orchestra. His is a life enveloped in modern music, both as an enthusiast and a practitioner. The approach is academic — a lot of thought goes into his music, as you’ll discover below — but doesn’t ignore the visceral pleasure of a beautiful, meaningful recording. 

Michael sent his new album The Darkroom, a set containing one solo song and four collaborations. It’s “a collection of ambient electroacoustic works,” he tells me. “Many of the tracks are extremely personal in nature, and some of these collaborations have been three or four years in development.” The solo track opening The Darkroom, “Visions,” planted the seed for the project six years ago. 

This patience is refreshing in an age when we’re told to release nonstop music. It also results in an attention to detail, as heard throughout The Darkroom. Take the title cut as an example, where strings and flutes play off each other elegantly while a more abrasive electronic section sneakily rises from silence to dominance. Or the plucked piano notes of “As the Earth Grew Still,” spaced together with implied distance before gradually coalescing in harmonic layers. In other words, nothing here sounds hashed out.

Each of the collaborative songs features a different artist or ensemble. There’s Azerbaijani-American flutist Jeiran Hasan, the harp-viola-flute ensemble The Lynx Trio, guitarist Bruce Middle, and the double-u duo. With explicit intention, Bratt considers these compositions true collaborations rather than ‘guest spots.’ “When I work with someone, there is a lot of back and forth,” Bratt explains. “I rarely write something, hand it off, and that’s the end of it.”

Based on the weight of talent and intellect on The Darkroom, you might expect an album that’s heavy and impenetrable. But it’s a soulful listen, very human and reflective, with many moments that are gently disarming. “You Belong Here” comes to mind, with processed guitars and subtly droning electronics conveying a comfortable loneliness.

When Michael Bratt sent me The Darkroom, I asked for a few more details in my reply. He responded with a track-by-track tour of the album, outlining the methods and inspirations for each song. These notes are terrific and illuminate the thought that went into this project. It would be a shame to excerpt these explanations, so I’ll let Michael take it from here as I publish his comments in full:

“Visions” → “The inspiration for this piece came from the Bach cello suites (G Major Minuet 1). In that piece, Bach utilizes registers to create three independent lines of music to give the impression of polyphony. I wondered how I could accomplish the same idea utilizing technology. Instead of working with register, I chose to use the pan position. The majority of the piece is a simple square wave that’s panned fast enough to create a Gestalt effect in the brain, which gives the impression, or vision of polyphony.”

“Fire From Within” → “The title comes from Pablo Neruda‘s poem, “As if you were on fire from within, the moon lives in the lining of your skin.” Both Jeiran Hasan and I have known each other for years. We were part of the Cleveland new music ensemble, FiveOne Experimental Orchestra. The poem references this inner fire or desire in people, to the point where our skin glows and everyone can see it. That’s the imagery that I was after.”

“The Darkroom” → “Growing up, my father (an amateur photographer) had a darkroom in our basement. This work evokes those feelings of freedom through organic form. The piece gradually works on an idea that continually develops over and over. The music is minimalist and is monochromatic, much like the black and white photographs my father took as a child. While it’s compartmentalized, focusing on one idea, it doesn’t contain a form or separate sections. It’s meant to be taken as a whole idea.”

“You Belong Here” → “One of the teenagers at my church committed suicide two days before service. I ran the mixing board at the church that Sunday, and the pastor had everyone disperse into small prayer sessions around the church as the band serenaded. Everyone was devastated, trying to hold it together. I captured that recording of the band from the mixer and slowed it down 2000%. That became the basis for the guitar solo with Bruce Middle. The sermon from that day was titled ‘You Belong Here.'”

“As the Earth Grew Still” → “My original concept for ‘As the Earth Grew Still’ was a piece about intimacy (human connection). I knew that I would be collaborating with Robert and Melissa Wells and was looking forward to working with a couple who knew each other intimately. Unfortunately, much changed in our world during 2020, and it irrevocably disrupted my writing process. The piece grew to be a reflection of my isolation locked in social distancing with my family. It employs a visual cueing system I developed that allows me to synchronize pianos together in non-related meters and tempi. This is done through a computer application I wrote which creates a website that the performers visit on their mobile devices — replicating my experience in isolation when we were doing things separately — together.”

Michael Bratt’s The Darkroom is available now on Bandcamp and various streaming platforms.

Undermining, Not Underlining

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Discovery vs. Intention → What a fun conversation between Brian Eno and Stewart Brand, promoting We Are As Gods, a new documentary on Brand’s fascinating life. The first half uses Eno’s soundtrack contribution as a topic launching pad. The conversation touches on the intersection of film scoring with ambient music, how multi-track recording brought music closer to painting, and how endless options are making us all permanent curators. My favorite part comes at 17:00 when Brand asks Eno to differentiate, in terms of the creative process, discovery from intention: 

I think the thing that decides that is whether you’ve got a deadline or not (laughs). The most important element in my working life, a lot of the time, is a deadline. The reason it’s important is it makes you realize you’ve got to stop pissing around. You have to finally decide on something. Whether I finish something or not completely depends on whether [a piece of music] has a destination and a deadline.

Eno goes on to describe his fabled archive of half-finished music — “6790 pieces … I noticed today” — most of which is created through discovery, i.e., “pissing around.” Then, when he gets an assignment (a destination with a deadline), he pulls something relevant to the project from the archive and finishes it. That’s an inspiring process and one I’d love to replicate. 

I wonder how much time Eno spends “pissing around” and building this archive. I imagine an ideal would be one or two hours a day. And I’m curious how he decides on and enforces self-imposed deadlines to move his own projects forward.

Oh, and this quote in the video from Eno is a keeper: “What I like better than underlining is undermining.”

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Etcetera → Seth Godin’s advice on how to make your Zoom calls better. Now I want a beam splitter. ❋ This 2015 compilation is a psychedelic overview of On-U Sound’s post-punk dub: Trevor Jackson Presents: Science Fiction Dancehall Classics. ❋ Writer Ernest Wilkins explains why he’s joining the parade of newsletter publishers leaving Substack. This part is especially eye-opening: “I’ve lost anywhere between $400 and $1100 in churned subscriber revenue due to paid subscribers not wanting to give money to this platform anymore. I need it to be clear that for the two years on Substack before this, I had a 0% subscriber churn rate.” ❋ I’m excited about this forthcoming documentary on ‘sound activist’ Matthew Herbert, A Symphony of Noise. ❋ Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine in The New York Times: “My nieces and nephews — they would complain to me, ‘Why are you so purposely obscure? You know, it seems stupid.'”

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Rachika Nayar – Our Hands Against The Dusk → I’ve been delightfully obsessed with Rachika Nayar‘s debut album over the past couple of weeks. The Brooklyn-based artist (in both visuals and sound) has accomplished some heavy-lifting with Our Hands Against The Dusk — the album is unabashedly experimental and uncompromising but somehow remains accessible and, yes, beautiful. Guitar is the main instrument throughout, but it’s looped, processed, and sometimes ‘glitched’ into unfamiliarity. The opening track, “The Trembling of Glass,” is an introductory window to Nayar’s technique, with layers of texture and manipulation swept away in the last half to reveal a bare acoustic motif. It hooked me in straight away.

Interviewed in Magnetic, Nayar explains her method: 

I see one aspect of my process on this album as tearing up an instrumental sample into a million pieces and then putting those fragments through cycles of recombination … these processes feel to me like exploring a single idea through multiple and multiplying perspectives — seeing one thing in all its different realities and selves. 

When one listens closely, there are many opportunities to identify what Nayar is up to, but her execution is nuanced and organic, despite the music’s inherent digitalness. One hears these ‘million pieces’ as a whole, as guitars ring with hopeful tones on “New Strands” and pianos and cellos combine and intertwine on “No Future.” The effect is mesmerizing — dancing somewhere between music that’s ambient, experimental, and influenced by modern classical — but, most of all, it’s affecting. The emotion that went into creating this album is anything but disguised. 

Our Hands Against The Dusk is the most impressive debut I’ve heard in a while. Don’t hesitate to open your ears and heart to it.

#Worktones: Ralph Kinsella, epic45, M. Sage

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It’s been a while since I rounded up some #Worktones that are inhabiting the home office via a pair of strategically placed desk-top speakers. Here are three albums that provide a calming concentration in these frazzling times.

Ralph Kinsella is a Scottish guitarist hailing from Dumfries and Galloway, a region primarily known to some (me) as the filming location of The Wicker Man. He reached out to the blog with a ‘check out my music’ email. I do listen when emailed (unless I’ve been bcc’ed, in which case I don’t), but I rarely receive delightful surprises like what Ralph had in store. His Abstraction EP is a gorgeous 5-tracker filled with soft, layered tones and subtle shoegaze moments. The guitar is front-and-center but awash in reverb and delay and accompanied by electronics and atmospherics. I’d describe Ralph’s EP as bright, gentle, and optimistic — as if Sarah Records released ambient music. I’m especially welcoming this sort of music into my life right now, and I can’t wait to hear Ralph’s future efforts. The Abstraction EP is a free download on Bandcamp, so there’s nothing to stop you from grabbing it. [LINK]

Continuing with more UK-based guitar ambiance, I was happy to discover We Were Never Here, the latest release from epic45. Rob Glover and Benjamin Holton, who make up the core of the band, started this project in 1995 while still in their early teens. epic45’s discography is a dozen-plus strong, and, sadly, I’m not familiar with any of it. But I take it this beatless and vocal-free album is a slight departure. A limited compact disc version of the album came with a booklet of photos of “familiar suburban and semi-rural ‘nowhere places’ that exist between large towns and cities.” The music matches this description, as these songs evoke vast, stumbled-upon locations — not the intended destination but compelling nonetheless. The sound is lush and memory-inducing, and, in addition to the occasional guitar, a menagerie of instruments, textures, and field recordings float from track-to-track. We Were Never Here is music for movies you watch with your eyes closed. [LINK]

M. Sage is a #Worktones veteran, and I previously remarked on the ‘happy accident’ spirit and sense of emergence I picked up from his music. Cattails & Scrap Tactics is his “collection of fragments, sketches, environments, and atmospheres,” compiled for Bandcamp’s June 5 artist-appreciation day, with all proceeds donated to Chicago’s My Block My Hood My City organization. I can hear the sound of an artist experimenting and wandering, but these are hardly rescued discards. It’s an album of thought bursts, welcoming attention and standing still as a complete document of the creative question. And it’s often beautiful and filled with exciting ideas. You’ll spot a guitar here, too, alongside a bevy of unidentifiable and mostly peaceful sounds to tickle the eardrums. If you’d like a download, you might be too late — the album was only available for purchase on June 5 as a special one-off. But it’s still streaming on the site — and that might be only temporary, too, so listen while you can. [LINK]

🔗→ Follow me on Bandcamp

Disintegration to Integration

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Green Gravel

The author Robin Sloan is fascinated with how art changes (and often deteriorates, but in a beautiful way) when transferred across mediums. For example, from physical to digital to physical to digital — he calls it a flip-flop.

Robin recalls the origin of William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, based on a melody recorded off the radio, forgotten, rediscovered over a decade later, and digitized from a corroded analog tape. A performance of the melody, broadcast on NPR, increased Robin’s obsession. He gives this recorded interpretation to a neural network that reinterprets the melody even further. It’s no longer disintegration — it’s integration.

Exploring further possibilities for this simple melody, Robin requested participation from his newsletter readers: “After I published the first version of this post in April 2020, I invited anyone reading to join me by playing or singing the melody once through using whatever instrument (including their voice) and recording device (including their phone) was closest to hand.”

Robin has released the outcome, a beautifully haphazard collaborative piece he’s calling “An integration loop, pt. 2” (part 1 was the AI-assisted interpretation). A number of people sent in renditions of the melody. That number included me, playing EBow guitar, heard just past the halfway point.

Robin: “In my imagination, each contribution is a rung in a ladder out of the pit of confusion and loss, all of us both (a) carrying the melody forward and (b) being carried by it, up towards something new, something whole.” So simple, and laced with so much meaning. Read more about this project and listen to the final (?) result at the [LINK].

#WorkTones: Mileece, Laraaji, Roedelius

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As I toil away in the home office, I often listen to quiet, experimental music from artists found on Bandcamp. I’ve started collecting and writing about these albums in a series I’m calling #Worktones. Here’s the 2nd installment:

It’s rare to hear something as simultaneously captivating and gentle as the series of staccato ‘pings’ found on Formations. Mileece — an artist who happens to be the granddaughter of the man who programmed the first computer-generated song — is fascinated by seemingly random processes in nature: the patterns of a snowflake, or the leaves of a fern, or rain’s gradual effect on a landscape. Applying this obsession to music construction creates rules within randomness, and we’ve taken to calling this ‘generative music.’ 2003 was an early time to purposefully dabble in generative electronics but Formations sounds seasoned, assured, and surprisingly organic. The album closes with “Nightfall,” revealing Mileece’s breath and soothing voice, reminding us of her guiding human influence on Formations’ otherwise arbitrary systems.

Laraaji, who of course we originally know from Eno-aligned collaborations, joins English musician Merz and multi-instrumentalist Shahzad Ismaily for, in Merz’s words, “a type of music that could co-exist in sanctified temples and in city urbanism.” Dreams of Sleep and Wakes of Sound might veer close to that lofty description, blending unmapped sounds of a heavenly nature with the hustle-and-bustle of layered treatments and aural tension. Each of the three participants isn’t present on every track (Laraaji contributes to just a few) but the sound and techniques remain unified. Just when you think you’ve got a handle on a song, shimmering washes of instrumentation build and surround what was once a simple structure. Titles like “That’s Your Blue Home” hint at introspective inspirations, apropos of how the music often suddenly expands as if soundtracking an epiphany.

It was an honor to see the legend that is Roedelius a couple of years ago at Orlando’s wonderful Timucua White House. The music was experimental and quiet, not at all jarring, and serenely transmitted the artist’s feelings in a tumultuous world. After Roedelius’s reassuring performance we left the venue calm and satisfied. Lunz 3, his latest collaboration with the equally prolific Tim Story, is no different. It’s pretty, but not so pretty as to hide a subtle agitation underneath. But that’s what makes this music so comforting — the impression that there’s room for beauty and contemplation in spite of the burning hum that encircles us.

#WorkTones: Bana Haffar, Nicola Cruz, Ditherfix

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Rather than whistling while I work, I listen to weird music. Cleverly (?) labeled worktones, here are a few office selections from the past couple of days.

The venerable Touch label has issued a live set from Asheville synthesist Bana Haffar. Described as a Saudi-born ‘life-long expatriate’, Haffar has worked to distance herself from the musical discipline learned as a classical violinist and electric bassist, presently opting for the unrestrained dialogue of modular electronics. This release captures the 33-minute “Genera” as performed at AB Salon in Brussels. Haffar’s modular wizardry is on full display, accompanied by gentle field recordings to shift the listener’s imagined landscape. The result is adventurous, though also hypnotic and warm. I’m pleasantly lost in this.

Nicola Cruz’s Siku takes its name from an Andean panpipe and, if I’m not mistaken, you’re hearing it played throughout this promising album. These tracks are an example of ‘fourth world music‘1And ambiguous ‘fourth world’ music is my favorite kind of music, it should be noted. that not only blurs worldly genres but mixes these styles with contemporary electronics. Not completely liminal, the cuts retain an ethnicity and the electronic elements — mostly focused on the rhythms — often hover away from the primary focus. But the experiment is rewarding and there are moments when the collision is of its own category. The final track, “Esu Enia,” is the most intriguing, pivoting back-and-forth from traditional-sounding tuned percussion to dark, synthesized responses. Siku could have pushed further, but I anticipate Cruz will continue to explore these fascinating combinations.

Ditherfix (or [ d i t h e r f i x ]) is creating horror-movie drone ambiance mainly on iOS. That means he’s on an iPad — or maybe even an iPhone — conjuring these cinematic noises in settings that include “in the woods, on a train, at the kitchen table, a corner chair, or at times operating from an ironing board in the bedroom.” I love the idea of this mobility and it’s exciting to see iOS gain traction as a production tool. Just as the walkman changed how we listen to music, an untethered yet sonically capable portable electronic studio undoubtedly produces music directly influenced by the surrounding environment. In the case of the seven thunders, that must have been an incredibly spooky ironing board. (h/t Daniel Fuzztone)

Shoving from the Margins: Pop Music and the Fringe

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Mat Dryhurst for The Guardian:

I believe that those on the margins would do well to shift focus on to more ambitious and untested fund-generating efforts that emphasise the interdependence of musical communities of place and purpose. We need technical and economic concepts that reflect what working artists have long known to be true: an artist creating challenging work is dependent on resilient international networks of small labels, promoters, publications and production services to facilitate their vision. A vision of interdependence acknowledges that individual freedoms thrive in the presence of resilient networks and institutions. It asserts that even pop stars, and the streaming services that prioritise them, significantly benefit from those on the margins market-testing ideas so that they don’t have to. {…}

We need to acknowledge that those communities, and the sounds they foster, generate value that is impossible to quantify on a spreadsheet. The artist and writer Jon Davies recently invoked the ideal of interdependence to emphasise the role that social music spaces play in combating epidemics of loneliness and depression. As well as enlivening commercial culture with a trickle-up supply chain of new ideas, music on the margins offers many a sense of shared purpose.

As noted in my post about the closing of Red Bull Music Academy, independent music communities — especially those operating on the fringes — may need to adopt collaborative and communal strategies to maintain relevance, rather than relying on corporate patronage. Dryhurst smartly suggests that the health of the experimental edges of the music community is vital for pop culture’s continued evolution. I see his point — current hit songs by some of the biggest names obviously draw upon production techniques that were underground and radical ten years ago. Culture becomes stale without the experimental margins giving it a shove.

🔗→ Band together: why musicians must strike a collective chord to survive

Limpid as the Solitudes

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I’m fascinated by the album Limpid as the Solitudes, a collaboration of collagist-composer Félicia Atkinson and multi-instrumentalist Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. If there were a record bin nearby, this would probably get filed in the ‘ambient’ row. That would be a mistake. Limpid as the Solitudes is too restless to be background music; it asks for a piece of your attention, sonically waving to remind you of its presence if you happen to consciously drift away.

There are found sounds, environmental sounds, sounds that keep us guessing, all accompanying pensive drones, far-away splashes of guitar, sparkles of piano, and other melodic snatches. I’ve played around with environmental sounds that create an imaginary space, a mental movie that fills the listener’s head. But while my music movies used one long take, Limpid as the Solitudes practices quick edits, jump-cuts, and sudden changes of setting. That may sound jarring or disorienting, but the masterful random-but-its-really-not placement of the sounds unexpectedly soothes. It’s like our thoughts, falling from one memory to another, haphazard but oddly reassuring.

The album’s press release mentions film as an inspiration, naming Chungking Express, Tarkovsky’s The Sacrifice, and Antonioni ’s The Passenger (by the way, those latter two films each feature a famously long shot as opposed to quick cuts). Brion Gysin and his book The Third Mind (co-written with a William S. Burroughs) are also name-checked. The Third Mind offers that when two people collaborate they create a third presence, a creative partner that didn’t exist before. Its reference is probably not just pointing to the duo of Atkinson and Cantu-Ledesma, but also to what’s summoned by the combination of disparate sounds. The ‘third mind’ is also evoked in the manipulation of communication, including sound, visuals, and the written word. It’s important to note that Gysin saw a hidden truth resulting from these mash-ups in words and art. The occasional addition of Atkinson’s whispered, often unintelligible, voice anchors the collage in this human language.

Back to memory, these ‘cut-ups’ (as Gysin called them) might resemble the processes of our brains. One memory leads to another, leading to another, leading to another until we have no idea where it started. There’s an inspirational chain leading us on, with the intersections as blurry barriers hiding how the combinations connect. To me, that’s the sound of this album.

In an interview, Félicia Atkinson says, ”I want to make music that makes people dance, but in their dreams, or in a state of slow moving.” Last night I listened to Limpid as the Solitudes in bed, with headphones, and quickly fell into that slow-moving dream dance. The uninitiated may think this album is too filled with distractions or too experimental in appearance to be ’sleeping music,’ but I found it calm and comforting. It felt like an inventory of someone else’s thoughts while putting my own aside. That’s an acceptable description of a dream if I’ve ever heard one.

Listen now to Limpid as the Solitudes on Bandcamp or all the other places.