mouth music (ghosts of my life)

RIP Diane Charlemagne

mouth music (and flute solo)

mouth music (Nordic)

mouth music (pomp and circumstance)

mouth music (breathscape)

"Cradle for the Wanting is the anticipated second album by vocalist Ian William Craig. It was recorded in the winter of 2014/15 in Vancouver, Canada, after the release of his acclaimed A Turn of Breath LP... Comprised of eight silken movements, Cradle for the Wanting is set aside from A Turn of Breath in that it was recorded in the span of a few months, as opposed to several years. This smaller count of production time tethers the pieces together, as multiple elements of a single entity. Here, voice is the only source laid to tape. Ian excels in inventing lush arrangements through this simplicity in instrumentation. The works rise and collapse in series, as Ian’s distinct repeating tape system comes into play. From the shivering hiss of “Glassblower”; to the deep curling hymn of “Habit Worn…”, large and small wings are explored. Ian crafts an aural home in this album; one can glide through its halls for days without blinking back to the modern age. The palace is at ease."

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also on Recital -Voooxing Poooêtre. "Originally released in 1982, this collection is comprised of voice works from the 1970s to the early 1980s, spanning a wide geography; Eastern Europe, France, Italy, Spain, and America.  Including text-sound staple Bernard Heidsieck, Dada artist Klaus Groh, Italian artists Agostino Contò and Adriano Spatola (Edizioni Geiger), along with more unknown sound recordings from artists Giovanni Bignone and Grupo Texto Poetico, in addition to works by Minarelli himself. An appealing showcase of some less-prolific sound poets. The recordings have been retransferred from the original 2″ tape, yet an inherent ‘home-recording’ quality is prevalent in most pieces, which in a sense adds character and becomes part of the art itself."

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mouth music (audio confectionery)

mouth music (source voice)

"There is perhaps a peculiar honesty to the human voice which has nothing to say - in the age of unspeakable horrors what truth is there of suffering than the pain of its incommunicability? The message, the content, which, under the weight of overdrivven fog, cannot even begin to articulate itself without being smothered, was the genius of How to Dress Well's Love Remains. But what is the result of content stripped of any content? What remains of the voice in this instance is the substrate of material suffering that Roland Barthes recognized as the "grain of the voice" - not just the texture of the voice, but also the material and historical body's instantiation and continuation as the voice. The grain of the voice is the texture is the voice below the level of semantic content (the "phenotext" versus the "genotext") and as such is the body materializing itself in and as voice. Adorno has located the material body, below the indentitarian perversions of rationalization, as the true site of suffering. Then the grain of the human voice - in its crying out as suffering - is the substrate of the substrate of suffering. It is the material imprint of suffering that will not even rise to the level of language's symbolic (and hence dangerously instrumental) rationality.


"The locus of the voice on Source Voice is everywhere circling around this grain, suppressing its content and thus "giving voice" to the tragedy that is suffering barred from linguistic expression. The deep, digital imprints with which AGF (Antye Greie, East-German composer and wife of Vladislav Delay's Sasu Ripatti) crafts her vocal textures and arrangements sets into the discussion of the grain of the voice a new contradiction. What voice it lets out bears in fact a digital grain. The body of the voices here are digital bodies, virtual bodies, and hence bodies without materiality, essentially non-bodies. And yet, for all this, their grain is all the more palpable. The fuzz, the glitch, the deep, sand-papery textures that pervade these voices are contradictory expressions of a material body that has, via the mediation of the digital, been removed from its materiality. It has transcended it only to produce the effects of its now-lost immanence.

"In this regard the tragedy of Source Voice is the tragedy - and the antagonistic capacity of this tragedy's future reconciliation - of voice in the age of its digital reproduction (more pertinently, production, for productions' sake). We are all bodies expressing the contentless materiality of expressing our materiality through digital means. If this is our soundtrack, its resolute content says this: that there is sublimity in the mimesis of this corporeal situation - the real virtualization of the corporeal as such. We are bodies without bodies (not organs!) who nevertheless bear within our voices the granular remnants of a materiality which has denied itself. It is this sublime tragedy which AGF expertly expresses in the voice (and its other) filtered through the indifferent monster if digital texture." -- Public Embarrassment Blues

mouth music (and beak, and mandible)

Tobias Fischer & Lara Cory Animal Music - Book + CD 01 September 2015

info here

1. Tikal Dawn - Andreas Bick, Germany
2. hermetica – Daniel Blinkhorn, Australia
3. Amazons & Parrots – Rodolphe Alexis, France
4. Grand Canal Springs – Tom Lawrence, Ireland
5. seals – Martin Clarke, United Kingdom
6. BOTO – Artificial Memory Trace, Ireland
7. Adélie_penguins - Craig Vear, United Kingdom
8. Pilot Whales - Heike Vester, Norway/Germany
9. Brame, septembre 2011 - Marc Namblard, France
10. formica aquilonia, sweden - Jez Riley French, United Kingdom
11. Schwebfliegen - Lasse Marc Riek, Germany
12. central mongolian high mountain range habitat - Patrick Franke, Germany
13. Otus spilocephalus - Yannik Dauby, France
14. untitled#292 - Francisco Lopez, Spain
15. Summer Sunset 01 - Eckhard Kuchenbecker, Germany
16. Waldkauz-Balz - Walter Tilgner, Germany
17. What Birds Sing - David Rothenberg, USA


"Do animals speak to each other? What do their songs mean? Will we ever be able to understand them and talk back?

Ever since the accidental discovery of whale song in 1967, the idea of complex animal sentience has been gaining strength within the scientific community. A growing number of researchers and academics are exploring the idea that animals enjoy music on a similar level to human beings. 

Animal Music is the first anthology to present an overview of the current state of this vital debate. Tobias Fischer and Lara Cory, the editors of online platform 15 Questions, have spoken to the leading scientists, researchers and musicians in the field to uncover hidden meanings and new perspectives. They visit the world’s largest library of animal sounds, hack into the mysterious sonic world of shrimps, travel back in time to the point where animal and human songs diverged, and decode the latest neuroscientific findings about animal music and communication.

The book includes exclusive interviews with Chris Watson, Jana Winderen, Yannick Dauby, Slavek Kwi and Geoff Sample as well as features on Bernie Krause, David Rothenberg and Olivier Messiaen and many more."

mouth music (neugrime)

moments in time

Ghost Box is 10 years old.

Today they release a commemorative compilation, In A Moment... Ghost Box

27 tracks (on the vinyl double) or 31 tracks (on the double CD and download versions), pulled from across their discography.

Go here to buy it and inspect the track list 


                                         


I was really delighted to contribute the liner notes to In A Moment.. Ghost Box. Pure joy to write.

Ghost Box is my favorite record label of the past decade. 

I'm not sure I can think of any other labels over that period where I've had the same consistent eagerness and curiosity to hear the next thing they do. 

Sure, there have been labels during that time who have put out a lot of good or interesting stuff, like Pan, or that had a hot streak, like Not Not Fun... or maintain a highly considered, defined aesthetic, such as Blackest Ever Black... 

But  (not counting labels-as-outlet-for-a-single-artist, like Gecophonic Productions)  in terms of labels where I've wanted to have everything they put out....   really, there's only been Ghost Box. 

And Creel Pone. 

(A revealing pairing. Revealing of where my head's been at, if nothing else)

(And of course Creel Pone is ten years old this year as well)

One of the most enjoyable things about the first two or three years of the label's existence was the way that Ghost Box - alongside their small but growing cluster of kindred artists and labels - became the focus for collective discussion.... a kind of collaboration of minds...  a back-and-forth that took place primarily between blogs and writers at webzines, although it spilled into print magazines too.

Ghost Box  & company had a catalyst function, rather like grime in the early days of this particular neighbourhood of blogs.  You had a similar sort of passing the baton of thought.  

So in homage to that moment I thought I would collate some of my favorite bits by other people talking about Ghost Box and its ungenre.

(In a few cases, they are talking about Ghost Box et al quite a few years before it and they came into being, but then the linearity of time is an illusion, agreed?)

"Songs are like lopsided Victorian automata, instruments mismatch in incongruent tempos... and sequences frequently crumble into soft-edged bliss before one's ears. It is almost as if the very action of their exposure is the agent of their collapse. Stranger still, though plainly audible, occasionally the music seems to disappear from earshot, becoming proverbially invisible, sinking into the netherworld of the unconscious. Recurrent themes serve as mnemonics luring the listener’s attention to the surface. Pieced together from the mustiest samples - children’s exercise records, vintage BBC drama, clunky Brit jazz and (most pertinently) library records, this is an archaeology of emotion, a philosophically motivated exploration of the power of not just one's childhood memories, but of the collective unconscious. In the work of The Focus Group and House's partners Belbury Poly and Eric Zann... memory is a theoretical portal to the phantasmal kingdom, not a trivial exercise in retro stylistics" 
- Matthew Ingram, The Wire, 2005  


"Ghostbox artists deal in a very British style of sound manipulation; perhaps it could be called music-hall concrète.... Sketches and Spells by The Focus Group reveals them as non-idiomatic cratediggers searching for the bits other than the beats, for the reflective moments that the headz miss. This is music by and for shoppers who come home with dirt ingrained deep into their fingerprints from flipping through stacks of old books and records at jumble sales and charity shops. It is as refreshing as the cup of hot tea served by the church bric-a-brac stall where you’ve failed to find anything interesting among the Sven Hassel novels and stained flannel shirts. Sketches and Spells is as warm and strange as a clockwork sunrise accompanied by a dawn chorus of steam driven birds. Super-dry jazz hi-hat work mixes with offhand synth-bass and slivered chirrups of sound sliced thin enough to be just impossible to place. There’s a lot of percussion but it’s the click-clack sticks, spacious triangles and tentative, carefully considered woodblocks of primary school rather than the dense free-for-all of the hippie jam (you can almost smell the wood-shavings covering childish vomit.)" 
- Patrick McNally, Stylus, 2005 


"The affect produced by Ghost Box's releases (sound AND images, the latter absolutely integral) are the direct inverse of irritating PoMo citation-blitz. The mark of the postmodern is the extirpation of the uncanny, the replacing of the unheimlich tingle of unknowingness with a cocksure knowingness and hyper-awareness. Ghost Box, by contrast, is a conspiracy of the half-forgotten , the poorly remembered and the confabulated.... Ghost Box releases conjure a sense of artificial déjà vu, where you are duped into thinking that what you are hearing has its origin somewhere in the late 60s or early 70s. Not false, but simulated, memory. The spectres in Ghost Box's hauntology are the lost contexts which, we imagine, must have prompted the sounds we are hearing; lost programmes, uncomissioned series, pilots that were never followed-up"
 - Mark Fisher, K-Punk, 2005

"The artists on Ghost Box treat their historical fetishes-- British occult texts, science and informational films, the loose hokum of 60s counterculture, and the straight fits of academia and bureaucracy-- as clues and suggestions. A typical Ghost Box record might sound like it was recorded 30 years ago, but like it was being mixed as you listen; a sound so minced, collaged, and disjointed that it takes on crude animation--a museum come to life. They're historically obsessed, but completely nonlinear-- laser guns smuggled into a Civil War reenactment.....  I keep coming around to comparing the music to early hip-hop. In 2008, sampling is de riguer. It's lip gloss. But I listen to Ghost Box back-to-back with, say, Stetsasonic because both linger in the post-traumatic shock of The Sample--in the shock of the sampler's ability to distort history, the ability to disembody, the ability to completely destroy the traditional image of time and space in music making. Grooves in Ghost Box's music, then, are constantly disrupted, disjointed. All players spectral." 
 - Mike Powell, Pitchfork, 2008

"Of course, fairy-stories are not the only means of recovery, or prophylactic against loss.... There is .... Mooreeffoc, or Chestertonian Fantasy. Mooreeffoc is a fantastic word, but it could be seen written up in every town in this land. It is Coffee-room, viewed from the inside through a glass door, as it was seen by Dickens on a dark London day; and it was used by Chesterton to denote the queerness of things that have become trite, when they are seen suddenly from a new angle...  The word Mooreeffoc may cause you suddenly to realize that England is an utterly alien land, lost either in some remote past age glimpsed by history, or in some strange dim future to be reached only by a time-machine; to see the amazing oddity and interest of its inhabitants and their customs and feeding-habits; but it cannot do more than that: act as a time-telescope focused on one spot." - J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy Stories", 1939. 

"Herein is the whole secret of that eerie realism with which Dickens could always vitalize some dark or dull corner of London. There are details in the Dickens descriptions - a window, or a railing, or the keyhole of a door - which he endows with demoniac life. The things seem more actual than things really are. Indeed, that degree of realism does not exist in reality: it is the unbearable realism of a dream. And this kind of realism can only be gained by walking dreamily in a place; it cannot be gained by walking observantly. Dickens himself has given a perfect instance of how these nightmare minutiae grew upon him in his trance of abstraction. He mentions among the coffee-shops into which he crept in those wretched days one in St. Martin's Lane, "of which I only recollect that it stood near the church, and that in the door there was an oval glass plate with 'COFFEE ROOM' painted on it, addressed towards the street. If I ever find myself in a very different kind of coffee-room now, but where there is such an inscription on glass, and read it backwards on the wrong side, MOOR EEFFOC (as I often used to do then in a dismal reverie), a shock goes through my blood." That wild word, "Moor Eeffoc," is the motto of all effective realism; it is the masterpiece of the good realistic principle - the principle that the most fantastic thing of all is often the precise fact. And that elvish kind of realism Dickens adopted everywhere. His world was alive with inanimate objects." - G.K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, 1906

“... Something that has obsessed me personally for a long time, is the idea of eternalism and non-existence of time. It’s the notion that everything that has happened and will happen and all parallel world outcomes are superimposed in one block time” - J.B. Priestley, Man and Time, 1964

"And then, what about that curious feeling which almost everyone has now and then experienced - that sudden fleeting, disturbing conviction that something which is happening at that moment has happened before? What about those occasions when, receiving an unexpected letter from a friend who writes rarely, one recollects having dreamed of him during the previous night? What about all those dreams which, after having been completely forgotten, are suddenly, for no apparent reason, recalled later in the day? What is the association which results them?....  Was it possible that these phenomena were not abnormal, but normal? That dreams - dreams in general, all dreams, everybody's dreams - were composed of images of past experience and images of future experience blended together in approximately equal proportions?"  - J,W. Dunne, An Experiment With Time, 1927 

"Time is only an illusion produced by the succession of our states of consciousness as we travel through eternal duration....  If you mistake the hybrid thing of which I am speaking for real time, you will come inevitably to the conclusion that everything in the universe is transient and rushing to destruction. In real time the exact contrary is the case. Everything which has established its existence remains in existence. A rose which has bloomed once blooms for ever." - J.W. Dunne, The New Immortality, 1938 

"Tell me what you see vanishing and I
Will tell you who you are"
                                                            -  W.S. Merwin, "For Now"

mouth music (gutter garridge special)

Grime's been in the news this year a lot - more than it's been in a while. Nu-grime obviously (still ticking along two years in - Visionist new album getting some good reviews). But also grime-grime, proper grime, today's continuation of back-in-the-day. Stormzy, Novelist et al  getting lots of buzz. Visiting rap megstars like Drake and Kanye giving props to Skepta et al.  The Grime Proms. 

I check some of this stuff out - somewhat dutifully -  but I dunno.....  can't feel the fire in it. But I'm sure that's just me, having shot my excitement-wad so excessively the first time around

Probably I'm just one of those who finds genres most thrilling in the emergent phase...  before the sound is fully formed. .. before they even have a proper name sorted.

The stuff below, what I gave the placeholder name "gutter garridge" for a while - was all taped by me during the summer of 2002. Exception is 'Black Man Freestyle' (not it's real name, if it even has one) which is off a tape someone sent me early 2003. All of it is rough and ready, and doubtless a bit crap technically - as MC-ing, writing -  compared with the accomplishment of mature grime. And certainly in terms of the sentiments, mostly it's ugly - nasty, malevolent, indefensible.

But sonically -  and as a blurt of social energy -  it's still got, still gives, that first-flush rush - the astonishment of hearing the New come into being.

All titles approximate a/k/a imaginary!




Horra Quad, "Life Is Not A Game To Play" + "Imagine (You Had A Crew Like This)"

"Too gutter! Too gutt-ah!"






Black Man Freestyle Pulse X 2003 - this is Durrty Goodz, right?

Black Op's on Ice FM July 2002 - Mentazm Death Riff + DubSubLo Freestyle

Tough Chick, Horror Squad jingle, 2002

"Separate!"





Horra Squad July 2002 freestyles KD + Tough Chick + Lady Thugsy





Horra Squad - "Strings Of Death" a/k/a Jammer "Army" / "Alpha Male Bizniz" / "You're A Lady" / "Feels Like An Overload"

Black Ops summer 2002 Carmina Burana versus Britney Spears
 + Cocaine Freestyle

to make your heart invincible

never knew this video existed


did know about this one - not a classic, to be honest.




video director knowledge: how to get round the fact that the leader singer can't dance (at least on camera)

mouth music (digikitschadelia)