Extremely offline, but a new Paleowolf record arrived and I needed to record it. It’s actually from 2017, but was important to own this on physical media.

The Paleowolf stuff is great thinking music for me.

I used to have a lot of Eliane Radigue on mp3, but I looked the other day and it all seems to have vanished somehow. Digital rot, right? So now I’m starting a collection rebuild on CD. Decided to start here. Hugely important composer.

(Same went for Pauline Oliveros, which repair is also now commenced.)

The phrase Selva Oscura draws its root from Dante’s Inferno. Literally translated as “twilight forest,” it metaphorically speaks to both those who find themselves on the unfamiliar path and more explicitly the nature of losing one’s way in place and time.

Each of the extended pieces on this record maps an acoustic topography that draws on the concept of drifting into the strange familiar. The works each dwell in an ever shifting, yet fundamentally constant state of unfolding. As one sound fades away, another is revealed in its place, creating a sense of an eternal reveal.

I’m in haunted hyperspace with the mist and the trees and life is good

Does what it says on the tin.

From Mark Williamson, who, as Spaceship, made the recent marvellous OUTCROPS. I tell you, if I ever go north, it will be purely because of the music coming out of the local affiliated New Weird Britain of late.

I have a few of this exceptional series from Unexplained Sounds Group. This is a particularly good one.

I do love their packaging. Good start to the week.

It’s 2020. Why would you not want to start the week with clanging, chanting and, I quote from the back cover, “self built piezo ritual devices”?

Yes, seriously. It’s amazing.

Weirdly minimal, weirdly massive.

And, yes, I realise that buying a recording of speakers and a vacuum cleaner may be Peak Me.

Yes, reader, you’re just going to have to put up with this now. It’s your own fault for telling me you liked the shelf posts last year. This is what my very quiet hermit world looks and sounds like.

This year, I am rebuilding my Philip Jeck collection; which was never complete, but somehow over the last few years I lost most of what I had on CD. I know I still have AN ARK FOR THE LISTENER and SOAKED in the house, and Jeck’s THE SINKING OF THE TITANIC.

I didn’t fully “get” Philip Jeck until I heard him perform at the evening portion of a hauntology seminar – the same evening I heard Kode9 and the late Spaceape perform. The performance was in a large chapel space, and instead of sitting in the main room, I sat in a wooden pew on my own in the open hallway about twelve feet away, and closed my eyes. He haunted the room. It was one of the phenomenal sonic experiences of my life, and it revealed to me the true power and import of his work. I’ve seen him live a few times since, with similar effect, and my office is haunted by recordings of him and his collaborators on a regular basis. I’m not particularly of a completist collector mentality, but it is time to store whatever I can find of his work.

Of course, now I write that, can I find my copy of AN ARK FOR THE LISTENER anywhere? I cannot.

pantheophania.bandcamp.com – another of my treasured suppliers of ambient, field and haunted sounds curated from Russia. Very important to work process you know