Frost's Bitter Grip

About this time last year, influenced by all those end of year lists, I posted ten examples of landscape musicreleased in 2010, along with accompanying YouTube clips (nine of which still work).  Here isa similar list for 2011 and once again it is not supposed to be definitive; I'd certainly be interested in any additional comments and suggestions.  I did a post earlier this year on Toshio Hosokawa's Landscapes so am not including that. And, as I have discussed it before, I'm excluding RichardSkelton's Landings, another version of which appeared this year (the expansionof this project reminds me of the way Robert Burton kept adding material to TheAnatomy of Melancholy). 

(1) The obvious place tobegin is with Chris Watson, whose El Tren Fantasma, based on recordings ofthe old Mexican ghost train, has been widely praised.  Thesoundscape is not restricted to the railway tracks, as you can hear from theSoundCloud extracts below (sections 3 and 5, 'Sierra Tarahumara' and 'Crucero LaJoya').  A BBC review describes the wild countryside throughwhich the train passes: 'brushwood and tall grass sway beneath the breezecrossing canyon slopes, while constant cicada chatter is punctuated by thedistinctive calls of woodpecker and crow.'  This was not the only ChrisWatson release this year - Cross-Pollination, also on Touch, includes 'TheBee Symphony', created with Marcus Davidson, and 'Midnight at the Oasis' - recorded out in the Kalahari desert and nothing to do with the 1974 Maria Muldaurhit.


Chris Watson - El Tren Fantasma album preview


(2) WaterBeetles of Pollardstown Fen, was released by Gruenrekordershortly before they announced the premature death of its creator, soundartist Tom Lawrence.  This is a very specific take on a landscape; as onereviewer says, 'Pollardstown Fen is an ancient, 500-acre,spring-fed alkali marsh in County Kildare, 30 miles west of Dublin, but tolisten to these hydrophone recordings by Irish musicologist Tom Lawrence, you’dthink it was a well-stocked video arcade circa 1985.' Whilst Chris Watson's ElTren Fantasma was directly inspired by Pierre Schaeffer's musique concrète,the sense in which a record like this qualifies as 'music' is quite debatable.  Richard Pinnell has writtenthat 'aside from some tastefully simple crossfades there isn’t any editing,enhancements or attempts to sculpt these recordings into anything more than theremarkable audio photographs that they are.'

(3) On adifferent scale entirely, I think it is relevant here to mention Björk's Biophilia,a multi-media project of cosmic ambition based on elements ofnature and the landscape, like the sound of thunder and the cycles of the moon.(I think it would be too much of a stretch to include in this list KateBush and her fifty words for snow...)  Björk's live shows have featured new instruments devised for the project - the track 'Solstice' for exampleevokes the rotation of the Earth through the rather beautiful sound of a pendulumharp. The accompanying iPad apps makes me wonderhow far these could be used to develop new genres of landscape art.  But despite the involvement of SirDavid Attenborough, no less, these still sound limited: the app for'Crystalline' for example comes with 'a game, in which youcollect crystals in a tunnel as the song plays.' We just stuck to buying theactual album.

Björk's Biophilia app introduced by David Attenborough

(4) Earlier this year I wrote here about J. A. Baker's book The Peregrine but had not then listened to the Lawrence English album inspired by it. Matt Poacher reviewed it for The Liminal and identified the way the music seeks to imitate the movement of the hawk: 'the roar of the surface drones do have the feel of the upper air, and the granular detail becomes like the murmarations of desperate starling or lapwing flocks, banking and swarming in the viciously cold winter wind. ‘Frost’s Bitter Grip’ and ‘Grey Lunar Sea’ also manage to portray, using a mixture of high thin metallic and broader cloud-like drones (not dissimilar in texture to some of the sounds Basinki captures in the warping tape recordings of the Disintegration Loops), the shattering cold of the winter of 1962/3, during which countless birds died and significant parts of Essex’s North Sea coast froze for months on end.'

'December 24 - Frost's Bitter Grip' by Lawrence English

(5) Canadian ambient composer Scott Morgan (who records as Loscil) has named allthe tracks on his new album after features of the Coast Arc Range.  Although he uses field recordings the music is mainly built up from slow waves of synthesiser.  Appropriately enough it was released by the GlacialMovements label, whose mission statement may sound better in theoriginal Italian but certainly makes clear what they are aiming for in their artists' 'glacial and isolationist ambient' music: "Places that man has forgotten...icy landscapes...fieldsof flowers covered eternally with ice... Icebergs colliding amongstthemselves..The boreal dawn that shines upon silent white valleys in the GreatNorthern lands...an explorer lost among the Antarctic glaciers looking for theway home..."

Loscil - Coast/ Range/ Arc album preview 

(6) Guitarist Jon Porras records drones with Evan Caminiti as Barn Owl and has put out solo recordings as Elm.  Undercurrent is the first release under his own name and is described as 'California Gothic set to the tidal rhythms of the Pacific and tuned into the metabolic pathways of the northwest coast ... a love poem to the mist, a prayer cast in ghostly reflected guitar and deep pools of distortion'. Opening with 'Grey Dunes' (clip below), the album moves on to tracks with titles like 'Seascape', 'Shore' and ends gently with 'Land's End' and 'Gaze'.

(7)Following last year's round-up, Matt Poacher (whose blog Mountain 7takes a particular interest in landscape and music) left a comment referring me to TheLowland Hundred.  I was therefore interested to read hiscomprehensive review this year of Diffaith, a project by The LowlandHundred's Tim Noble. 'East of Aberystwyth is a tract of wild country, windblown and empty.Colloquially it is known as the desert of Wales – not because of a lack ofrainfall but because of this character of emptiness...'  Diffaith (Welsh for 'wilderness') comprises sixtracks and three complimentary short films (you can explore it further on Tim Noble's website).According to Matt,the album's centrepiece 'is a vast, monstrous thing, named for the blastedvalley floor of ‘Llawr-y-cwm-bach’. The track is dominated by long periods ofnear-silence, punctuated with huge walls of Stephen O’Malley-like guitar thatthreaten to tear the fabric of the track apart. If Noble’s aim was to make itsound as if the very land were voicing some primeval shriek then he hassucceeded. Christ alone knows what went on down there, but this sounds like ahowl from the void.'


'Llawr-y-cwm-bach' by Tim Noble

(8) Tim Noble , The Lowland Hundred (whose new album Adit has just been released) and Hallock Hill (whose music Matt locates 'at the intersection between landscape and memory') release their records through Hundred Acre Recordings.  Another small label whose name would lead you to anticipate music with a landscape theme is Wayside and Woodland Recordings, run by epic45, who been recording pastoral indie pop for some years now and this year released an album called Weathering.  Tracks like 'With Our Backs to the City' (below) have reminded reviewers of Mercury Rev's Deserter's Songs - 'yet where Mercury Rev seemed to find what they were looking for in the Catskill Mountains, the best epic45 offer is a fleeting glimpse of salvation; the occasional burst of sunlight through a blackened sky.'

(9) It is now five years since I first discussed the Ghost Boxlabel on this blog and excellent new releases continue to appear - this year's highlight was As the Crow Flies, an album by Jon Brooks (The Advisory Circle). Also this year, Jim Musgrave, who works with Ghost Box's Belbury Poly, put out an album as Land Equivalents called Let's Go Orienteering which he describes as 'half-remembered educational films, imagined landscapes, foreboding woodland trails and a last minute dash towards a promised utopia'.  This combination sounds very familiar now but there are still more musicians wanting to follow these foreboding woodland trails.  The Ley Hunter's Companion by Sub Loam for example is packaged as another piece of aural psychogeography and described as 'two extended synthesiser and sequencer tripsover the summer countryside.'

Sub Loam - Ley Hunter's Companion album preview

(10) As I reach the end of this post I realise it's as much a list of record labels as artists, and the final label I want to mention is Another Timbre.  Their recent releases featuring field recording include Tierce, with Jez riley French, and a CDr from Anett Németh ('A Pauper’s Guide to John Cage' and 'Early Morning Melancholia Two') which Richard Pinnell praised highly on his excellent website. But the album I'm highlighting here is Droplets by the trio of Dominic Lash, Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes because it includes a performance of Maria Houben's 'Nachtstück' recorded out in the landscape (a wood near Hathersage in Derbyshire to be precise).  Dominic Lash says that they didn't anticipate in advance accompanying the sound of a rainstorm: 'The plan was simply to record the piece outdoors; we were hoping for a rain-free window. But when the rains came, some way into the piece, they weren't especially heavy so I decided to keep on playing, hoping it would just be a brief shower. It turned out to be a little bit more than that...'

Threads Across the River

Richard Skelton is interviewed by Clive Bell in the latest issue of The Wire, talking about landscape and loss and photographed on Anglezarke Moor, standing alone by a dry stone wall near a recumbent (dead?) sheep. There is a fascinating discussion of Skelton's music making en plein air, as they walk the moors and visit places that feature on Landings - an album I discussed here in an earlier post.  The clip below features 'Scar Tissue', which was 'the result of a single encounter with a particular place', and 'Threads Across the River', 'an accretion of different times and different places ... a weave of sounds recorded in the two ruins which straddle the river Yarrow: Old Rachel's and Simms.'

The interview moves on to talk about ways in which the landscape has permeated Skelton's musical instruments - grasses and leaves intertwined around a fretboard, balsam leaves threaded into the sound hole of a mandola, bits of bark used as plectra.  "Because I was using really cheap instruments, I could leave them out in the wood and cover them in leaves.  It didn't matter if they got knackered.  I was coming to terms with a process of decay."  I've written here before about Ross Bolleter's pianos, left exposed in the landscape until 'all the damp and unrequited loves of Schumann, Brahms and Chopin dry out, degrading to a heap of rotten wood and rusting wire'.

The article also touches on a third way in which Skelton makes direct connections with the West Pennine Moors, in addition to exposing his instruments to the elements and recording himself in the wider soundscape (you can hear birdsong at the end of the clip above - 'Pariah', another track from Landings).  Discussing Box of Birch, Skelton says he has sometimes tried to play the environment directly: bowing barbed wire and playing trees to get a 'grating, rattling undercurrent'. "The barbed wire stretched across the landscape was like the strings on an instrument" he says, a comment that reminded me of my recent post on the aeolian telephone wires of Australia. I suppose the trouble with attempting to 'play a landscape' is the risk of seeming to possess and use it, rather than amplify its natural sounds. Of course it should be possible to making sounds from a living tree without harming it, and yet I wonder if the clip below (which I came upon via Twitter) would seem less acceptable if it involved a tree located out in some 'wild' location. 

Finally, I should return to Richard Skelton and mention his latest release, Wolf Notes, which was 'inspired by the landscape, place-names, flora and fauna of Ulpha, in Cumbria'.  There is a useful review at The Liminal which describes Skelton's use of 'the place names, the roots, of Cumbria ...  Wolf Notes derives from the etymological root of ‘ulpha’, understood to mean “the hill frequented by wolves,” from the Old Norse ulfr, “wolf”, and haugr, “hill or lound.”' The limited first edition (now sold out) came with a book of poems, a glossary and a 'phial of specially prepared, hand-mixed incense made from birch leaves, yarrow, wild grasses and a selection of resins.'

Wolf Notes by *AR