8Sided Blog

the scene celebrates itself

Calming

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I’m tip-toeing through the day aided by light, calming music. Quiet tones to drown out the world’s turmoil and the grim news-blasts.

I’m alternating between two albums today. The first is the recent RVNG Intl. edition of Flore Laurentienne’s Volume 1, originally released in 2019 by Costume Records. Described by the press release as “the vessel of Canadian composer Mathieu David Gagnon,” Flore Laurentienne is an artful project based upon subtly texturized string and piano compositions. The tunes on Volume 1 are bright and nourishing, evocative of an incoming dawn’s welcome reset. Ranging from the structured beauty of “Petit Piano” to the sparse organ etude in “1991” (with what sounds like bowed cymbals droning tensely at the midpoint) to the kosmiche synth surprise of “Route” — the album feels warm and breathing, like an organism going through different stages of its life.

Mathieu has stated that the interactions of humans and nature (and their effects on each other) inspired Volume 1, so the organic sheen is intentional. Cementing the association is the alias Flore Laurentienne, named after Canadian botanist (and clergyman) Marie-Victorin Kirouac‘s guide to all species indigenous to southern Quebec.

Though the original release of Volume 1 dates to 2019, this new edition contains a fresh piece, “La fin et le commencement.” The song is quite pretty, using a string section and minimal piano to leisurely mimic the effect of a Shepard tone — that is, a musical progression that gives the illusion of a constant rise in pitch.

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The other album I’m turning to today for ‘calmness’ is the soundtrack to After Yang. I saw the movie over the weekend, and though I should rewatch it, I was immediately taken by the score. The music is composed by Aska Matsumiya save for an appearance by the legendary Ryuichi Sakamoto on a piece called “Memory Bank.” 

I recommend playing this album in sequence. However, I’d start with the third track (the video game-inspired “Welcome to Family of 4” is terrific in the movie but devoid of context here), and you’ll find hymn-like melodies and sparkling but restrained instrumentation. Like Flore Laurentienne, the music here has warmth and luminance though Matsumiya’s compositions have a pronounced drifting quality. Even the piano-led songs seem to ‘float away,’ and the stirring “Mizuiro” (featuring múm’s Gyða Valtýsdóttir on cello) is likewise buoyant. As for Sakamoto’s contribution, it says a lot that “Memory Bank” fits snuggly alongside the rest of this score —the song’s strings and piano are a little more pronounced than Matsumiya’s but complement and round out the overall musical intentions with grace.

Slippery Between Fingers

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The Web is Too Damn Complicated → Robin Rendle says, “The web doesn’t have to be this ugly and embarrassing thing … the web can be made beautiful.” He’s made a beautiful webpage to prove this case. Rendle has illustrated his scrollable essay with vintage woodcuts and metal engravings that are surprisingly effective in amplifying his points. And those points are about how the recent ubiquity of email newsletters is a missed opportunity for a blog renaissance.

Rendle is really asking, “how do we make the web for everyone?” He sees the rise of newsletters as an encouraging sign that people are moving away from social media’s grasp. But why not embrace blogs, which are capable of much more creativity than allowed in email? Because, ultimately, the open web is not as convenient. Website-building is not intuitive, nor is website-following (“RSS is for nerds.”). The creators of Substack know this and made a publishing tool that’s easy to use and receive. 

“If we could subscribe to websites easily,” says Rendle, “then the web itself might not feel quite so forgettable.” He suggests that browsers should include built-in RSS reading. In a way, I guess this would be like a global version of Facebook’s newsfeed. That feed is essentially an RSS reader, but one can only subscribe to feeds within Facebook’s prison camp. 

I do like newsletters. On second thought, I actually like that more people are writing and sending out personal essays. The email newsletter is merely the delivery method. Thanks to Feedbin, I read my newsletters in an RSS reader, living side-by-side with the blogs I enjoy. 

I have an email newsletter but, if I had to choose, this blog is my preference. It feels more open, free, and permanent (as permanent as something on the web can be). I do fear that newsletters may prove a fad — both Facebook and Twitter are jumping on the newsletter bandwagon, which hints that ‘peak newsletter’ isn’t too far off. Blogs remain that scruffy outlier, unpeggable and persistent, slippery between fingers of profit-hungry CEOs. Email’s okay, but blogs keep the web weird. 

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New Wave Eye Candy → That’s a tag on Simon Reynolds’ Hardly Baked blog, and there are three installments in the series (so far). These posts contain a long scroll of vintage graphics from album covers, adverts, and posters that exemplify the look and attitude of the post-punk new wave. It’s also a remarkable glimpse of cutting edge graphic design just before the days of Photoshop et al.

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Emily A. Sprague – Hill, Flower, Fog → “Mirror” is the unassuming third song on Emily A Sprague’s latest, Hill, Flower, Fog. As gentle as a shower of cotton puffs, the song lightly bubbles and pings in sensuous repetition for over nine minutes. The changes are subtle — a lonesome synth swell lingers in the background, pining for recognition, and stereo echoes increase patiently. “Mirror” is the best kind of unobtrusive, and it’s almost shocking when it ends. It feels like a sound that should last forever. 

It’s tempting to say the same about all of Sprague’s latest album for RVNG Intl. — its warm reassurance is a welcome companion. It feels real, and, over six sonic tapestries, Sprague turns a Eurorack’s cold toughness inside out and brushes its circuitry with earth, dew, and sap. Like mysteries of the natural world, Sprague’s electronics feel emergent.

Hill, Flower, Fog is a pandemic album, recorded last March as the world started to realize the trials to come. But these songs magically (and sonically) trade impending sense of loss and uncertainty for sonic intimacy and optimism. One could note that Sprague’s cyclic melodies and looping treatments reflect the imposed routines of lockdown. However, the music is encouraging, inferring these daily patterns as something cherishable, an opportunity for reflection and moving inward. It seems to say, “one day at a time.”

#Worktones: Autechre, Oliver Coates, Giadar

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Autechre – SIGN → Sasha Frere-Jones interviewed the legendary Autechre in one of his recent SF/J newsletters. It’s a lovely interview, with insight into the new album’s mechanics and how the duo manages to work together from different cities in COVID-times. But a highlight is the prose of Frere-Jones — I love how he writes about the music he loves. Check out his on-point description of Autechre’s album:

SIGN flirts with disintegration but only lightly, throwing its weight into a smooth ravine lined with translucent panels and reflective tape, a river of light running below the wind of turbines.

That’s a chilling reminder that I really need to work on my metaphors. But that won’t stop me from dropping some words of my own about this fascinating album.

Undoubtedly, there’s programming and coding involved in making this music. Numbers and figures set into a machine, then let loose to create tones and noises. How random are these tracks? Is this set-it-and-go music? Like Eno’s generative experiments, the process would border on ‘the joke’s on us’ if the result weren’t so lovely. 

I also like how this album can float in the background but is also open to deep listening. In other words, SIGN is a prime #Worktones candidate but also enjoys attentive ear-analysis. I haven’t immersed myself in Autechre’s back catalog in a while, but I can’t recall other efforts sharing these opposing qualities throughout an entire tracklist. 

SIGN has already received its fair share of accolades — and also criticism of what some see as a compromised sound. As the follow-up to an eight-hour album, SIGN won’t seem anything but a compromise to those critics. But, for me, the tug-of-war between the off-putting and the inviting is a sweet spot. Autechre’s done it, and, judging by how many times I’ve already listened to SIGN, it’s right in the pocket. 

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Oliver Coates – skins n slime → The new album from the innovative cellist finds Coates exploring his mesmerizing string-layers in forms halfway between compositional and textural. The music is also lightly confrontational, Coates’s instrument overdriven to excess and crackling with electricity. skins n slime appears separated into two sections, with the five-part “Caregiver” suite comprising the first half while the second half begins after a brief song ‘from The Bird Game soundtrack.’ “Caregiver part 2 (4am)” and “Caregiver part 5 (money)” are striking by how the strings take on the quality of either a distorted harmonium or Robert Fripp’s multi-layered guitar-tronics. Other moments resemble the cathartic plod of dark metal, a righteous feat for an artist working primarily with looped cello. The highlight for me is “Honey,” the penultimate track described in a RVNGIntl. press release as “tender, individual moments of pure cello beside decaying drone and the soaring planes.” It’s lovely, and I could listen to it all day.

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Giadar – Lost In My Underwater Unconscious → I recently watched this video essay about ‘the meaning of swimming pools in movies.’ The narrator tells us that filmic pools and bodies of water are often symbolic of a character’s subconscious feelings and thoughts. Dario Giardi, recording music as Giadar, captures this sentiment with his gorgeous EP, Lost In My Underwater Unconscious. The five tracks — each named after a different word in the release title — study ambient music’s melodic strain. The thematic inspiration and overall sound classify as ‘new age’ but lack the pomp and schmaltz often found in that genre. Piano’ed tones, embraceable synth pads, and iced gully reverbs pleasantly spill over these tracks. Dario tells me, “We have reached a kind of alienation from sound that has turned us into passive players without being aware of it. We are no longer used to paying attention to the features of what Murray Schafer has termed our soundscape.” Through his soundscapes, Schafer promoted the idea of acoustic ecology — understanding our relationship with the surrounding environment through the sounds around us. As Giadar, Dario explores this gentle power and its capability for healing — a welcome prospect in a year of turmoil. This EP, his debut, I believe, is a promising addition to a greater curative mission.