Back in the fall of 2014, Nick Zanca joined us in the Newtown Radio studio, armed with a sophisti-pop-filled mix in advance of his last Mister Lies album, Shadow (Orchid Tapes). In the five years that followed, he put Mister Lies on ice to explore collaborative work with the project Quiet Friend and otherwise settle into a personal hiatus, simply letting life happen in New York.
The new Mister Lies album, released last week, is a self-titled, self-released, and self-assured reset that was shared alongside an essay by Zanca at The Talkhouse. It finds the artist returning to his home-recording roots, embracing the power of memory and the present, and adding depth and subtlety, through dynamic field recordings, to his evocative and fluid late-night pop improvisations.
Like his last mix, Zanca taps into influences, only this time he’s dived below the surface of compositional work, headfirst into the textural and fragmental documentations of audio. Phonography opens with a recording of Pauline Oliveros outlining one of her deep listening exercises and then proceeds to flow through sound and music generated by, as he says, “sculpture, conversation, repetition, improvisation, travelogue, and natural phenomena.” Presented in this format, the mix offers a sprawling opportunity to exercise focused listening techniques, and to find nuances in the tonalites of the world, both here in this encapsulated selection, and in your everyday surroundings. A fascinating and erudite two-hour aural diorama (ending in our favorite lakeside scene), accompanied by a handmade collage cover by Nathaniel Whitcomb. Zanca adds:
“Field recordings and found sounds have always been a fundamental aspect of my musical practice, but I never consciously placed the origins of my interest in capturing the audible illustration of environment until revisiting my solo project after some time away. I found myself immersed in musique concrète and electroacoustic composition in the studio — sonic artworks that generally revolve around and build upon landscapes both natural and invented. This mix is an attempt to gather the fruits of these discoveries, blend excerpts into a dense collage and posit deep listening as an altogether meditative pursuit.”
Pauline Oliveros – Tuning Meditation (The Kitchen, NYC 1979)
Harry Bertoia – Clear Sounds (Sculpture, 1973)
Sarah Hennies – Foragers
David Hykes / The Harmonic Choir – Multiplication des voix au cœur du corps sonore
Costin Miereanu – Musique Climatique
Ernest Hood – From The Bluff
Wendy Carlos – Sonic Seasonings: Fall
Scott Fraser – Communiqué
Hiroshi Yoshimura – 小川にそって (Air In Resort)
Alvin Curran – Fiori Chiari, Fiori Oscuri
Nuno Canavarro – Untitled excerpt from ‘Plux Quba’
Annea Lockwood – Tiger Balm
Koichi Shimizu / Apichatpong Weerasethakul – Reverberation (Syndromes And A Century)
Luc Ferrari – Petite symphonie intuitive pour un paysage de printemps
Pit Piccinelli / Fred Gales / Walter Maioli – Amazonia 6891
Pat Metheny / Lyle Mays – As Falls Wichita, So Falls Wichita Falls
Egberto Gismonti – Maracatu, Sapo, Queimada & Grilo
Joni Mitchell – The Wolf That Lives In Lindsey
Yasuaki Shimizu – このように詠めり (その二)
Carl Stone – Shing Kee
Vanessa Rosetto / Matthew Revert – Everyone Needs A Plan
RIP Hayman – Dreams Of India And China
Tetsu Inoue – Inter Link
Aksak Maboul – Scratch Holiday
Jan Jelinek – Lady Gaga, you once said in an interview that you write music for the fashion industry. Is fashion as important to you as music?
Derek Bailey / Min Tanaka – Rain Dance
Satsuki Shibano / Yoshio Ojima – Caresse (3eme partie)
Holger Czukay / Rolf Dammers – Boat Woman Song
Julius Eastman – Gay Guerrilla
Moniek Darge – Turkish Square
John Martyn – Small Hours
S&S Radio broadcasts every now and then on Newtown Radio.
From their home near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Adrian Burns aka Baltic Noise makes escapist music fusing found sounds with washes of static and melody. Released in July, their debut full-length Mourning Shore humbly extends a set of synth and guitar meditations made in the memory of a loved one. Songs perry grief and anxiety with warmth and beauty; for some, catharsis requires an unleashing of aggression or disruption as a way of coping, but as heard here, catharsis can envelop and glow in tranquil solitude, flowing, rather than erupting, in and out like a noticed breath. This new album is the first of a two-part companion record, and soon receives an addendum featuring reworkings by Teen Daze, WMD and more, out August 30th.
Burns’ guest mix for S&S Radio continues down the path of processing loss through placidity. The sequence features three Baltic Noise recordings in seamless company with tracks by a few artists whose work has inspired and comforted them in recent days. Burns adds, “music has been a channel for me to express these emotions and I hope this mix offers others a chance to recontextualize the sounds they hear to fit their own needs of working through something.”
Sarah Davachi – hours in the evening
Dedekind Cut – Equity
Autumn Pool – Love is not Enough
Baltic Noise – Pingvellir dreams
Baltic Noise – 40 winks
Gigi Masin – The Word Love
Baltic Noise – Untitled
Geotic – Troperens
S&S Radio broadcasts every now and then on Newtown Radio.
Still beaming after a run of shows in Japan celebrating the release of Catch A Blessing on Geographic North, our own Matthew Sage circuit-bends Episode 68:
“This past March I traveled to Japan for the first time. It was something else. This mix features music by Japanese artists (prominently featuring some records I got at Meditations in Kyoto [the first international supporter of Patient Sounds])…it also features other sounds that feel how Japan felt on my trip there. Lots of excerpts from travelogue style musicology documents, field recording archivists, and ambient new age treasures. Lots of cross fading, overlapping, and palimpsestic blurring happening here too. Surreal is a word, but Kansai and Kanto are places.
“Consider this mix an impression, a story; fresh fine tuna, smoke filled basement clubs in Koenji playing obscure outsound over juiced PA systems, sakura girls taking cherry colored selfies on the palace grounds, ice cold asahi and seafood salad, passing cash with two hands at the neon 7-11 adjacent to the ancient shinto shrine, vertical life in a fabricated bamboo forest, matcha from a clay cup in the arcade quarter. It was all lovely and it was all disorienting. Here is a little stream on Nihon time, wabi sabi wandering in a circuit garden.”
Excerpt from ギター民謡をあなたに/津軽じょんから節 (Tsugaru Jon to the guitar folk song)
Excerpts from 日本野鳥大全集（1）野鳥の生活 (Japan Wild Birds Complete Works (1) Life of Wild Birds)
Samuel Baron – Excerpts from Music for Flute and Tape
Music of the Mountain Provinces Recorded by David Stifler – Plucked Bamboo Zither
Sosena Gebre Eyesus – “ባየነውም ጊዜ – Bayenewem Gize”
Excerpt from Music for the Guardhouse by Lieven Martens Moana
Manik Varma – Raga Bihagda (Mandirwa Aye Nahin Pritam)
Takashi Kokubo – A Dream Out to Sea – Scene 3
Haruomi Hosono – Original BGM
Excerpts from Edward Norbeck’s Folkways Library: Folk music of Japan
Excerpts from Fanafody: Recordings from Madagasikara
Excerpts from Dreams of India & China by Rip Hayman
Tomita – Venus, Bringer of Peace
Foodman – Uoxtu
Excerpts from 日本野鳥大全集（1）野鳥の生活 (Japan Wild Birds Complete Works (1) Life of Wild Birds)
Excerpt from ギター民謡をあなたに/津軽じょんから節 (From the Tsugaru Jon to the guitar folk song)
Melodia – The Rise of Early Morning
Excerpts from Edward Norbeck’s Folkways Library: Folk music of Japan
S&S Radio broadcasts every now and then on Newtown Radio.
Episode 67 transmits two parts aligned on a single purpose: emphasizing soft sounds of a late winter, 2019. The first collects a few weeks off-the-air into an hour of miscellaneous modes and moods. The second arrives from the bunker of Chicago-based private press record label and book publisher Patient Sounds (intl), who’ve been as deep in their work as ever, putting forth a consistent series of timely projects and releases, many of which are previewed in their set.
In the opening freeform portion, of particulate note is the tender folk of Montreal’s Jean-Sebastian Audet, formerly Un Blonde, now Yves Jarvis, once tuned to morning yellow, presently true to midnight blue for his ANTI- Records debut The Same But By Different Means. That LP was released last Friday, as was the hypnotic first album from Irish musician Maria Somerville.
Detroit sleeper Swartz et, last heard on one of our favorite albums of 2014, returned with A Living Thing, a visceral modular synth work limited to 30 ruby red cassettes. Out this week in a screen-printed jacket via RVNG Intl. is the 6th record from our friend and newly titled United States Artists Fellow in Music Roberto Carlos Lange aka Helado Negro. He presents the piece in focus:
“‘Running’ is a poem. In it, I’ve buried sentiments and personal histories. Most of it is just for me and some for you. The song started as a voice memo recording I made while on a trip to Mexico City in 2016. I was waiting outside of a restaurant to eat dinner, and I was feeling awkward and anxious, so I decided to be still and listen to everything around me and come up with a melody to sing into my phone.”
Under the moniker Nivhek, Liz Harris (aka Grouper) recently surprise-released a slow spiraling stunner, recorded during and after residencies in Portugal and Russia. At the end of that walk is a just a glimmer from Light in The Attic’s essential new archival compilation Kankyō Ongaku: Japanese Ambient, Environmental & New Age Music 1980-1990.
Onto Patient Sounds’ hour, which Vamps in near-silence, courtesy of Will Long aka Celer, a minimal meditation on repeated acoustic piano phrases recorded to tape. After those scrambles an improvised jaunt from Francesco Covarino (percussion) and Matthew Sage (guitar and keyboards), from their recent collaborative CD. A curve in the set saunters past the entire A-side of a plunderphonic honky tonk beat tape from Regarding the Music of Others’ latest, Shank Trilliams. Waves of dense electronic atmosphere follow from A Crushed Rose (aka Apollo Vermouth’s Alisa Rodriguez) as well as two other tracks from Sage via his 2015 pseudonym Free Dust and a motif he composed for Patient Sounds’ annual Open Window listening period.
Hour One
Montedoro – Riflessi acquatici, Pt. 1
ssurfacing – i thought it was enough
Yves Jarvis – To Say That is Easy
Dave Harrington Group – Dreams Field
Maria Somerville – Brighter Days
Ogeon – Botos
Swartz et – A Living Thing
Helado Negro – Running
Teen Daze – Endless Light
Arrangement – Coconut Mango
Julian Lynch – Floater
Arp – Love Theme (Epilogue)
Natsukashii – Dunes
Nivhek – Walking in a spiral towards the house
Masahiro Sugaya – Umi No Sunatsubu
Mary Lattimore – Never Saw Him Again (Julianna Barwick Remix)Hour Two: Patient Sounds (intl)
Celer – Vamps Side A excerpt
Francesco Covarino & Matthew Sage – A Knocked Urn
Regarding the Music of Others – Shank Trilliams – Side A
A Crushed Rose – Ocean Itself
Free Dust – Cruiser Lights
M. Sage – Open Window 2019 motif
S&S Radio broadcasts every now and then on Newtown Radio.