a writer's notebook
my personal library
Happy new year! A bunch of wonderful-looking new things arrived from the kind people at Zoharum, and you can find and listen to them all for yourself at their Bandcamp page. I’m going to be getting into these tomorrow.
Previous care packages from Zoharum.
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Handy Xmas gift. I let the garden largely alone last year, but this year it requites intervention, sowing and planting, and I want a lot of flowers and edibles (both of which have been getting increasingly difficult to raise), so I’m hoping this will help.
EDIBLE AND MEDICINAL WILD PLANTS OF BRITAIN AND IRELAND (Amazon)
Comments closedI got gifted these two records by Such Sweet Records just before Xmas.
SUCH SWEET THUNDER is very much a chill-out record, improvised electroacoustic ambient. There’s quite a range in the three pieces on here, a collection of soundscapes that transition cleverly. I’m reminded of a few other people – there’s a flash of guitar work that made me think of Windy and Carl – but it’s very much its own thing.
FRUTIGER AERO is a shorter piece – I have to say, I’m usually allergic to saxophone, that most abused of instruments, the skronk criminal and soundtrack to every shit thriller from the eighties and nineties. But here it is pleasingly textural and carefully applied. I’m very pleased with both of these and very grateful to Such Sweet.
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Heard one track from this on the radio the other day (Deo) and had to have a copy. Shimmering and transcendent.
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Next year I will probably buy more music by different people, honest. But I love her work and collector’s mania has set in at this point, I imagine. It’s basically muscle memory to buy her new work on sight.
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I am generally being good and not buying new books but this was on sale and I’ve read the first two.
THE WOMAN WHO LAUGHED, Simon Mason (UK) (US+)
PREVIOUSLY: accessions 30may25
Comments closedA bit spendy for a digital album, but the third track is worth the price of admission all on its own. Those big grainy washes and slow movements that have that indefinable Philip Jeck like tone to my (tin) ear
Comments closedGoing to be breaking my physical-only rule a few times over the next few days, as there’s stuff I want to support and own that’s digital-only (or digital and tape, but I refuse to go back to the horrors of tapes).
Moletta’s NIGHT CAVES was magnificent, so this was an instant purchase for me. It’s a lovely, misty thing.
Comments closedDigital only, but I made an exception to my usual rule of physical-only, as it’s quite similar to the piece they played at Konsztrukting Soundz last month. Looking forward to giving this a go on earbuds. I remember the band telling me after the gig that their recordings somehow never seem loud enough to them, so it may not be as immersive as the live experience, but we’re going to give it a go…
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UNDERTONES is a composition for percussion idiophones, electronics, and variable field recordings, originally composed for four channels. It develops in four movements and is expressed through a graphic score which provides multiple instructions to the musicians and, simultaneously, requires their input and interpretation of the given instructions, including a particular part of the instrumentation.
Very immersive and meditative.
Parts of it vaguely remind me of something Hello Spiral did at Konsztrukting Soundz the other month, but in a more delicate and mindful way. Fragile.
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