Issue 20b / 31 May 2024
In part two of this week's serving of DIY electronic goodness... Track Of The Week: The Heartwood Institute + Good Stuff round-up featuring new albums from quiet details, Beak> + much more...
Previously on Moonbuilding Weekly. In this morning’s issue we had a lovely chat with the very excellent Annie Hogan about her new album, ‘Depths Of Disturbances’. You’ll find it all here… moonbuilding.substack.com/p/issue-20a-31-may-2024
How I see it is Part One is something good to read while you get settled for the day, but Part Two is the stuff the weekend starts here is made of. I bring you this week’s Part Two by the very skin of my teeth, but here it is all the same. Next Friday will be here before we know it. Better get cracking.
Neil Mason, editor
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The Heartwood Institute ‘Ashridge Theme’
Seems there’s more and more of this kind of work popping up (see Mulgrave Audio) and I really tend to notice when one of our congregation offers up the soundtrack. And when that’s Jonathan Sharp’s The Heartwood Institute you pay double attention, right?
‘The Rabbit Man: Ashridge Episode 1’ is presented as a spooky 40-minute radio play by Tony Walker, the brains behind the Eerie Cumbria events and the ‘Classics Ghost Stories’ podcast. “Nestled just off the historic Ridgeway in Wessex”, Ashridge is a charming village that effortlessly blends picturesque beauty with a hint of mystery” where “rumours of secret, abandoned bunkers and a rich rural folklore add an intriguing layer of enigma to this idyllic setting”.
Check out the full production…
The soundtrack is available via The Heartwood Institute’s Bandcamp page at theheartwoodinstitute.bandcamp.com
Got an upcoming release? We’re all ears. Find us at moonbuildingmag@gmail.com
Words: Neil Mason
GOOD STUFF #1
WHETTMAN CHELMETS ‘A New Place’ (quiet details)
quiet details have been going about their usual business of sticking out consistently excellent ambient releases, month in, month out. I seem to have missed qd17, which was ‘En Sten For Solen’ from Copenhagen-based collage artist and musician øjeRum, for which I do apologise. It translates from his native Danish as ‘A Stone To The Sun’ and it creates a dense, immersive world as he tends to do. The latest offering is Oklahoma’s Whettman Chelmets with ‘A New Place’. He sticks in my mind thanks to his biographical ‘Long Read Memories’ album from 2019. When he was nine, his 17-year-old brother was found guilty of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His brother is almost 50 now and remains in jail. It’s a record very much worth investigating. As is this, although it’s not nearly so dramatic. The label says he’s “largely guitar-focused and broadly covering drone/shoegaze/ambient, yet deconstructing each of those generic terms into something truly unique and purely his own”. Which, you know, sounds great, while Whettman describes it as “three longish slabs of office, kids, trumpets, guitars, and whatever else. Mainly guitar.” The guitars are definitely sneaking in round here aren’t they?
GOOD STUFF #2
BEAK> ‘>>>>’ (Invada)
Beak> dropped a new album without warning this week. Their fourth, it’s called ‘>>>>’ (Invada), of course, and it’s been getting a proper hammering at Moonbuilding HQ. A relentless live act, the trio say that they felt touring was starting to affect their writing “to the point we weren’t sure who we were anymore”. What do you do in that situation? You get back to basics. “We decided to go back to the origins of where we were at on our first album. With zero expectations and just playing together in a room.” It truly is the good stuff. It took me a while to get past the epic eight-minute opener ‘Strawberry Line’ that has such a delicious slow build you have to listen to it several times before you can move on. The whole thing gets a bit like that. Oh, you think, that one needs another listen. Really enjoying the Can-ish ‘Ah Yeh’, which has that Jaki Liebezeit swing to it, and the spooky ‘Bloody Miles’ intro that suddenly lets the track explode with some lovely pots and pans drumming and growling bassline. It’s all sounding pretty good even streaming, but it’s one of those I’m looking forward to hearing on vinyl. You can tell they’re having fun again. You can almost feel it. The cover is excellent too, featuring their furry friend Alfie Barrow and some doggy death rays.
GOOD STUFF #3
‘LUDDITE 3 HEXHAM WOLF’ (Luddite Tapes)
The third installment from my new favourite label, this is just as mysterious as the first two. The idea, as I’m sure you’re aware, is the label only releases home-dubbed tapes and the contents of which are recorded with equipment available in or before 1983. Here we get two sides of electronic experimentation and there’s a equipment list. Roland SH-2, Boss KM-400 Mixer and 2 x Sony TCM-737 Cassette recorders. You need to look up the cassette recorders. Those kind of of rectangle block machines were total staples in the early 80s. The sort of thing you’d plug a microphone into and record the good songs off ‘Top Of The Pops’ making the rest of your family be quiet for duration of course. As we’re getting used to with Luddite Tapes, we have no idea who made this recording. There’s a lot of “Hexham” about at the moment, which makes me suspicious. The Night Monitor released ‘Horror Of Hexham Heads’ not so long ago. Hm. So there’s two tracks, ‘Side 1’ and ‘Side 2’, both 20+ minutes of extreme electronic experimentation. Lots of squiggles and squibs and great noises. The sort of thing you’d very much do if you had some kit to muck around with. There are some sleevenotes too. “I initially recorded this in 1990,” the mysterious artist reveals. “I was setting up a small and (very) limited bedroom studio. My friend had a word with one of his relations who was similarly interested in music making and subsequently lent me the equipment listed above.” Flipping love this label.
GOOD STUFF #4
ANDREW BRENZA ‘LF19 / Tree Frogs’ (Mortality Tables)
Following the label’s Album Of The Week gong for boycalledcrow’s ‘Kullu’, Qatar-based duo of producer and artist Erika Tsuchiya and sound and video artist Josh Rodenberg step up to the LifeFiles plate with ‘LF18 / Infinity’, which is based on recordings made by label big chief Mat Smith. Here the sources are two post-lockdown moments. The first is of Queen Square, London, on the first day Mat returned to working in the office after months of working at home, the second is a “pre-concert chatter and applause” from a Royal Festival Hall matinée performance of Steve Reich's ‘Music For 18 Musicians’ by the Colin Currie Group. It’s such a great little idea and the results, which come across as snapshots, are always an interesting listen. ‘LF19 / Tree Frogs’ is something a little different for this most creative of labels. There’s three recordings of tree frogs, made in LA and Bermuda, like you do. But the response isn’t musical. They comes as “a visual poetry response” printed on three postcards. The dimensions of the postcards are on the Bandcamp page.
GOOD STUFF #5
KUMA ‘I Grew Up In Spectral Places’ (Frosti)
And last but very much not least today… After two quick-fire releases last November and December, Thomas Ragsdale’s Frosti label has been quiet for a while. He’s a busy man is Thomas. The label springs back into life with Vancouver-based Kuma’s ‘I Grew Up In Spectral Places’. And music this lovely should never be rushed. “We are living in a golden age of luminous darkness,” say the accompanying notes. “Haunted times require haunted sounds, and this is your soundtrack for 2024.” It’s funny how some labels develop a kind of house sound. Clay Pipe has one and, while we’re only three releases in, Frosti seems to be developing one too. Spectral is a really great word, the music radiating out from Frosti is spectral. And talking of good words, there’s talk too here of “dreich”, a Scottish word for that dull, grey, gloomy weather *looks out window, not even in Scotland* like today. Vancouver specialises in the stuff. You know, rain clouds at shoulder-height. It would appear that Kuma’s studio is even called Little Black Raincloud. And yet it isn’t gloomy music. Out of melancholy comes a great joy and all that.
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DOT’S MATRIX
I lost a fair amount of time this week exploring the work of The Crow Hill Company. If you know who people like Spitfire Audio are, you’ll probably be aware of Crow Hill or at least the kind of work they do. Although what they’re up to is different and I think it’s going to really appeal.
Spitfire was co-founded by Crow Hill’s Christian Henson, a Bafta- and Ivor Novello-nominated TV, film and games composer, and his new Edinburgh-based company takes the idea of sample libraries that little bit further. And quirkier. Which is a big win in my book. Their philosophy is “if it’s been done before then it’s not worth doing again” and the small team do seem to be thinking on their toes when it comes to plugins.
There’s half a dozen products so far starting with Vaults Beta, which is a totally free and is regularly updated with new sounds. So far it features an alt-rock 90s style drum kit, a shimmering guitar, a Celeste blended with a worn-out Dulcitone (they’re big on broken machines), a string section, an attic grand and an 80s-style chorus synth. Make use of those how you will.
Their sample libraries also include standalone plugins like Circuit Drums, which collects a whole raft of electronic drums form analogue and modular sources. There’s Small String Gestures, which stars “a small ensemble of 12 players to showcase their unique bowing and vibrato style”, String Murmurations, a full-on blast of great-sounding strings, and Vertical Piano, a recreation of a Steinway piano that was designed, complete with iron strings, for a tour of duty during World War 2. The interface comes with a bunch of effects, which includes a tape reel setting that allows for looping as well as age and wearing of tape. And yes, it does slurs. I know, right.
The interface design across their products is really lovely, think Teenage Engineering if they were virtual, the extensive video walkthroughs they provide as support are so watchable, and the pricing of their products is pretty keen.
Their latest library was what really caught my attention. The Dot Allison Dulcet Voice package features vocal samples made by Dot herself. You’ll know the sort of thing if you know her work. She talks about “creating a sonic ‘photograph’” her voice and here you get the full range.
"I’ve described my voice as an instrument,” says Dot, “like a flute or a violin, where I can sing plaintive textural lines, absent of lyrics, creating harmonic layers to then deconstruct and process in order to create dissonant clusters, sweeping washes, loops, and rhythmic motifs.”
And that’s exactly what she’s created here. The interface is super lovely, each control is hand-drawn by Dot and there’s a kind of “dotty” UV meter which is very cute.
If you make music, this is a company worth keeping your eye on. If a ever sample library was made for the Moonbuilding world eh?
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The latest issue of MOONBUILDING is full to the gills with the good stuff. On the cover, star-in-the-making Maria Uzor, we profile label-of-the-moment quiet details, there’s an incredible interview with Captain Star creator Steven Appleby, and Ghost Box’s Jim Jupp gets busy with our There’s A First Time For Everything questions.
We review a big pile of releases from labels including Castles In Space, Woodford Halse, Persistence Of Sound, Assai, Ahora, DiN, Werra Foxma, Ghost Box and many more. There’s a column from The Orb’s Alex Paterson and the world-famous Captain Star cartoon strip.
This issue’s CD is ‘The Moonbuilding Miscellany – Volume One’, which is put together by CiS supremo Colin Morrison. It’s a belter featuring tracks from the likes of Lo Five, Lone Bison, Twilight Sequence, Ojn, NCHX and more.
Moonbuilding Weekly is a Castles In Space publication.
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cracking edition as always neil, thanks for including qd17 and qd18 x