MUSIC

Discovered by Stapleton of Nurse With Wound, Robert Haigh, a famous British writer and pianist known for his work on United Dairies and his activities as Sema and Omni Trio, has released a new album from Seal Pool by John Podeszwa, one of the world's leading collectors of NWW. In 2007, Robert Haigh, a famous British writer/pianist known for his work with Omni Trio and Omema, released his first album on Seal Pool, a label run by John Podeszwa, one of the world's leading collectors of NWW. Through the use of many different names and participation in multiple groups, Haigh has returned to his early modern classical style from his post-90s worldview, which included house, drum 'n' bass, and even ambient, and has made a miraculous comeback under his own name for the first time since "A Waltz In Plain C" in 1989. This is a monumental work that marked his miraculous return under his own name since "A Waltz In Plain C" in 1989. This is a monumental album that marks his miraculous return under his own name since "A Waltz In Plain C" in 1989. It presents a unique worldview among Robert Hay's works, with a certain heat in the pretty sound that is connected to the post-minimalist lineage. Digipak edition. Limited to 400 copies.

Discreet Music (1975) is the fourth studio album by the British musician Brian Eno. While his earlier work with Robert Fripp (No Pussyfooting) and several selections from Another Green World feature similar ideas, Discreet Music marked a clear step toward the ambient aesthetic Eno would later codify with 1978's Ambient 1: Music for Airports. It is also Eno's first album to be released under his full name "Brian Eno" as opposed to his previous rock albums released simply under the name "Eno".

In the afterglow of her acclaimed 2020 album *Silver Ladders* (a year-end favorite of NPR, Pitchfork, The New Yorker, and others), Los Angeles-based harpist and composer Mary Lattimore returns with a culminating counterpart release, *Collected Pieces: 2015-2020*, out January 14, 2022. The limited-edition LP sequences selections from her two rarities collections, *Collected Pieces I* (2017) and *Collected Pieces II* (2020), bringing archive highlights and fan favorites to vinyl and CD for the first time. Lattimore has described the process of arranging these releases as akin to “opening a box filled with memories,” and here that box continues to populate, accessible for both the artist and fans. Evocative material separated by years, framed as a portrait of an instrumental storyteller who rarely pauses, recording and often sharing music as soon as it strikes her. Seemingly in constant forward motion for the last five years since her Ghostly debut, Lattimore glances back for a breath, inviting new chances to live in these fleeting moments and emotions; all the beauty, sorrow, sunshine, and darkness housed within. 

A familiar harp sequence opens the set, making its first vinyl appearance is “Wawa By The Ocean,” Lattimore’s ode to her favorite convenience store, Wawa #700 in Ship Bottom, New Jersey. “Twelve summers of solo trips to Ship Bottom and it hasn't really changed. I'll always visit it in my dreams,” Lattimore said upon its initial release, and surely that beachside landmark still appears each time this delightful pattern unfolds, hoagies and all. Next is a newer single, “We Wave From Our Boats,” which she improvised after walking her neighborhood during the early days of lockdown in 2020, and shared on her Bandcamp. “I would just wave at neighbors I didn't know in a gesture of solidarity and it reminded me of how you’re compelled to wave at people on the other boat when you’re on a boat yourself, or on a bridge or something. The pull to wave feels very innate and natural.” The heart of the track is a somber loop, over top which Lattimore’s synth notes ruminate, each a gentle shimmer of optimism in the most anxious and absurd of days. 

Also recorded in 2020, “What The Living Do” is inspired by Marie Howe’s poem of the same name, which reflects on loss through an appreciation for the mundane messiness of being human. The echoed, slow-marching track has a distant feel to it, as if the listener is outside of it, watching life play out as a film. “Princess Nicotine (1909)” scores actual footage, a dream sequence Lattimore imagined for J. Stuart Blackton’s surreal silent film *(link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UvG5ItVzxc&feature=youtu.be text: Princess Nicotine; or, the Smoke Fairy)*. She adopted the same approach for “Polly of the Circus,” explaining it was the name of one of the old silent films discovered in permafrost in the Yukon [featured in the documentary *Dawson City: Frozen Time*], “the only copy that survived and it kind of warped in the aging process.” 

“Mary, You Were Wrong” mirrors an author’s bout with a broken heart. “It’s about how you have to keep on going even if you make some mistakes,” she says. The bittersweet refrain cycles throughout, a little brighter every time, slowly, like the way time tends to heal. 

A trove of pieces are collected here, most recorded in the moment, just Lattimore and her Lyon and Healy Concert Grand Harp, contact mics, and pedals. There’s the one about the late Twin Peaks actress Margaret Lanterman (“We Just Found Out She Died”), the American astronaut’s homecoming (“For Scott Kelly, Returned To Earth”), the joke about the cannibal’s wife (“The Warm Shoulder”), the Charlie Chaplin-like character who lost their glasses (“Be My Four Eyes”), and the high school kids driving their shiny cars in a parking lot (“Your Glossy Camry”). Like her most affecting work, these songs showcase Lattimore’s gifts as an observer, able to shape her craft around emotional frequencies and scenes. Her power as a musician is rooted in how she sees the world: in vivid detail, profoundly empathic, with deep gratitude for nature and nuance. 

Modern Obscure Music turns to Japan for inspiration. Suemori debuts on the Barcelona based imprint with an album of striking textures and sounds. From the first track, you can feel the influence of the Far East in both the melodies and rhythms created by Suemori. The music is complemented by Mayte Nicole Esteban’s impressive artwork. Suemori’s real name is Yoshinobu Hoshina. He previously recorded as Hoshina Anniversary. Under this alias, Hoshina released music on labels such as Boysnoize Records and ESP Institute. As Suemori he released the Maebashi album earlier in 2021 on Elena Colombi’s Osàre! Editions imprint. Tawamure is an album of richly textured compositions. Pianos and electronics are equally important. Some tracks are beatless and others have an unorthodox approach to percussion. We begin with the playful yet sombre pianos and strings of Mou Aenaindesune もう会えないんですね. Honshin 本心 has a magical beauty and Konton 混沌 Chaos is as chaotic as you would expect. There is so much to explore on this wonderful album from Suemori.

Everything Pale Blue is the first collection of ambient music by New York City-based composer and Au Revoir Simone keyboardist Annie Hart. Performed on analog synthesizers and processed through daisy chains of delay, reverb and loop effects, Everything Pale Blue’s warm, sonorous tones and trance-like, minimalist arrangements recall the work of pioneering electronic music composers Wendy Carlos, Éliane Radigue and Brian Eno, as well as German Kosmische Musik groups of the 70’s like Kraftwerk, Cluster and Tangerine Dream.

Throughout Everything Pale Blue, Hart’s gentle arpeggios and playful melodic figures echo the harmonies and rhythms of our natural world, from the cycles of flora, fauna and weather patterns to the orbits of celestial bodies. Everything Pale Blue’s four gorgeously expansive instrumental tracks reward patient listeners seeking calm, melody and meditation.

Annie Hart explains:

“I began composing Everything Pale Blue in November 2020 at an artist’s residency near Oneonta, New York called Aunt Karen’s Farm, which was funded through a grant from the Sustainable Arts Foundation, whose mission is to support arts created by people with children. Normally, it’s a hub of activity, but due to COVID, it was just me, and for part of the time, my family, sharing an open, empty farm space; a true retreat. At first I was a bit bored by the same scenery every day in such a gloomy, wet, gray season, but after a while I started seeing the minute daily changes in the nature around me. Every day I went on walks through fallow fields spiked with mown straw, sometimes wet with mud, sometimes caked with snow, and on some magical days, encased in crystalline ice. I started seeing the trees around the farm as individuals, with their own personalities. I saw the leaves change on the ground from yellow and brown, to dry brown blowing ones, to wet, dark brown precursors to soil that would then nurture the same trees they came from. Obviously, in New York City, we see trees every day, but it is incredibly rare to witness their symbioses with each other and the soil and animals. I started noticing the differences in the bird songs of each species and their various moods.

“At the start of my residency, I visited Green Toad Bookstore in Oneonta where I was drawn to the 33 1/3 book on Another Green World by Geeta Dayal. She’s a great writer and laid Eno’s processes and philosophies out in an incredibly tangible way. I savored that book and bought AGW on iTunes and would listen on repeat while I ate my suppers. I had intended to use my time at the farm to finish recording a pop record, but I soon started sliding out of the typical song structure mentality and sliding into a playing/listening mentality. And I mean “play” in the childish sense. I brought my Oblique Strategies cards that I got for my birthday and I started just going to the recording studio I’d set up in the farmhouse’s living room and doing wild experiments.

“I’d brought along a few of my analog synthesizers (a Minimoog Model D, a Sequential Prophet-6, a Yamaha CP-20) plus some delay, reverb and loop effects. I started to think about just how meditative, playful and creative I could be within small parameters. I composed “Somebody Moves, Nobody Talks” like that, with the idea of how to make my own version of Eno’s studio with tape going around the room, looped on pencils.

“It was incredible to see the shift in my mentality over the time at the farm. To go from gripping and holding to just playing; allowing myself the freedom to create without guilt or responsibility, to see the shifts in my abilities as a composer and musician. It was absolutely magical and I consider that month an incredibly formative one that I am so lucky to have been able to attend and appreciate.” 

The 2014 debut solo collection by French wind-walker Baptiste Martin aka Les Halles remains a masterpiece of soft light and subdued yearning, woven from grainy panpipe samples, tape hiss, and spectral delay. Recorded late at night in a tiny room in Montpellier, Invisible Cities quivers like a candle by the sea, its fragile illumination flickering against an expanse of sky, silence, and sorrow. The pieces feel both ancient and immediate, glimpsing currents behind the veil, at the threshold of presence and absence. The track titles evoke similarly transient states of echo, memory, and negative mirrors. This is music of solitude and devotion, of empty streets and unremembered dreams, fleetingly captured via the eternal alchemy of FX pedals and a 4-track. (Britt Brown) All tracks recorded by Baptiste Martin, in Montpellier (France), in late 2013. This collection of tracks is named after Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

The long-awaited repress! The world's first compilation that covers the miracle of Spanish NEW WAVE-ambient-progressive music, the masterpiece of Finis Africae, and the footprints of 17 years!
This is a must-listen work with a number of spiritual, deep, afro and ambient spiritual organic grooves!

Spiritual Afro, NEW WAVE, Ambient Dance Music! A number of miraculous sound sources that include African music, contemporary music, natural sounds from NEW WAVE and field recording, and even jazz and folklore tastes from Spain. It seems that he was influenced by many music genres, but the music is a beautiful combination of ambient and spiritual extracts, and the track with the synthesizer has a new age that is similar to that of IASOS! Great content that would not have been possible without an aesthetic eye for sharp music. 16P booklet included. Commentary posted in Spanish / English / Japanese.

Originally released in 1978, Music By William Eaton is a private-press album from the accomplished experimental stringed instrument builder. The atmospheric recording techniques, mixed with a hint of Fahey/Takoma-lineage make for a listening experience akin to the mountainscape drawing represented on the album cover. The experience may seem simple at first, but like any great trip in nature, new details consistently reveal themselves upon each listen.

“When I started building instruments, playing guitar took on a whole new dimension. From the conception to the birth of each instrument, new layers of meaning unfolded. Cycles, connections and interdependencies became apparent as I contemplated the growth of trees from seed to old age, and the transformation from raw wood to the building of a musical instrument. I sought out quiet natural environments to play and listen to the “voice” of my 6 string, 12 string, 26 string (Elesion Harmonium) and double neck quadraphonic electric guitar. Deep canyons contained a beautiful resonant quality and echo. A starlit night with a full moon provided all the reflection and endless space by which to project music into the cosmos. The sound of a bubbling stream and singing birds added a natural symphonic tapestry to a melody or chord pattern. As I perceived it, everything was participating in a serendipitous dance. Everything was part of the music.

During this time, I decided to record an instrumental album of music. The idea was simple; it would be a series of tone poems with no titles or any information attached, only the words ‘Music by William Eaton.’ While some of the songs evolved out of composed chord progressions, most of the songs were played spontaneously, only on the occasion of the recording. These improvised songs haven’t been played since.” -- William Eaton

Around 1967, mysterious music began to play in my head, and I heard that I began to listen to it naturally. The beautiful music that emerges from within him uplifted, healed and exhilarated his spirit. He called it "paradise music", referring to this type of music that he had never heard before. (From the commentary) -Yassos, who was born in Greece and raised in the United States, began to feel the light called Vista (the existence of light near the forehead), and from the records of communication and telepathy with them, human beings. I created a musical piece to help lead to the next stage. This album, which is the 1st album of 1975, makes you feel free, profound, spiritual, and even beyond the galaxy, so that the image of the word New Age (80's etc.) changes 180 degrees. It's a magnificent and very visual album. A truly true spiritual mix of electronically modulated flutes and steel guitars, spacey electric pianos, and natural sounds such as waves and animal calls, taking you to an unmeasurable world.・ The monumental tower of cosmic music. Close your eyes and keep listening deeply. You will have access to new visions and locations.