Kayaka – Silence Walk

Ambient & Experimental, Field Recordings, Instrumental, Minimal // By: NoahcloseAuthor: Noah Email: noah@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (8) // 22/05/2013 // No Comments

Those of us who peruse the web looking for music share a common frustration: finding music worth listening to.  That’s an important reason why netlabelism exists: to hopefully save the readers/listeners precious time they might otherwise waste by fast forwarding through countless labels and albums of music hardly worth the effort.

For me, it’s the “experimental/ambient” genre that for one reason or another tends to leave me wondering.  99% of the time, I give netaudio tagged as experimental/ambient a complete miss. But sometimes I’m unaware of the genre and stumble upon a link and have a listen, and this week I’m very happy with what I found… at least partially.

Kayaka is a Japanese-born, European artist with a flare for the experimental.  She also performs live and really enjoys the use of field recordings and sound collage. Her album Silence Walk, off the Zero Moon netlabel, is comprised mostly of captured sound from the Amazon (in Ecuador, to be more specific).  The first track – as with most of this album – is mere sound collage, a day in the life of traveling where Kayaka is hearing new and old sounds again for the first time.  Even the familiar sounds of water seem to intrigue her as it is used heavily on “Twice a midwife” and “Just let your flesh be eaten” (the latter being a reference to piranha?).  “Colibri,” the last track, contains samples of hummingbirds feeding near her microphone while flutes pulse in and fade out in the distance.

But for all the experimentation, the one gem of this album is the second track, “They danced the Armadillo.”  It is like nothing else on the album and stands out for its keen rhythms and arrangement.  Kayaka also adds instrumentation of her own which to me is reminiscent of the dual-playing saxophone lead from the once famous band Morphine.  I could do without much of Silence Walk in my listening queue except for “They danced the Armadillo.”  Without this track, the entire album is mostly a miss for me, but I’m certainly glad I came across it when I did.

Kayaka – They danced the Armadillo

Link to the Release Page [zero145]

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Julian Winter – L’art pour l’art

Broken Beat, Downbeat & Downtempo // By: simiolioliocloseAuthor: simioliolio Email: simon@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (40) // 19/05/2013 // 1 Comment

Netlabels live and die. Download links vaporise. Sites go down in a flurry of ’404′. An already fragmented netlabel culture is hard to keep track of at the best of times, without entire virtual dwellings packing up and moving on to new horizons.

Petite&Jolie is one of many which have ridden the crest of the netlabel scene, and sadly ceased to exist. Their website now contains a polite ‘Au Revoir’, with links to archive.org, along with some special Thank you’s. A disappointing sight, but so nice to leave a happy memoir behind. Also, archive.org will take care of hosting their back catalogue for the foreseeable future. Archive by name, archive by nature…

‘L’art pour l’art’ was released in 2009. A cinematic, moving, cheerful album, fuelled with delightful French dignity and charm. Bizarre female vocal chops, gentle downbeat romance, uplifting textures and tender musicality make this a sure hit with fans of Psapp, The Books, and Four Tet.

The array of audio sources paired with a tidy and refined sound puts a spotlight on Julian’s musical and sonic discipline. He used a wide variety of instruments, including toys, old keyboards, and even household objects. To have such an array of sound-making tools, but keeping the character and continuity of his sound to a tight spec is highly admirable, without being too militant and tight with creativity.

This is such a special work. It is very listenable, and flourishes with personality. There is a lot of music which is music for the sake of being music. However, some electronic artists manage to crowbar open an unsuspecting soul, and they have my utmost admiration.

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Link to the Release Page [pj006]

Link to the Label Page

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lefolk – Isn’t this dangerous?

Ambient & Experimental, Review by Genre // By: alancloseAuthor: alan Email: alan@netlabelism.com
More Authors Posts (12) // 15/05/2013 // No Comments

I look forward to releases on the Resting Bell Netlabel as they seem always able to deliver a product that is a deep breath, an expansive thought, or a calming pill to my every day. One of the more recent releases available from Resting Bell, lefolk’s 8 track “isn’t this dangerous?”, made its debut in January. Since then I have found the release has made its way onto my iPod, home stereo, and multiple radio show playlists more often than many releases do. Whenever this happens I have to take pause and ask, “Why?”, as there is an exceedingly large amount of new music that comes across my digital doorstep every week and for something to take hold in my synapses and not be shaken free, to be soon forgotten, is not a simple occurrence.

lefolk (yes all lowercase) is audio/video artist Leif Folkvord of Ann Arbor, Michigan USA. He has released a previous album “intermitter” on NKR. The new release “isn’t this dangerous?”  is described, on the Resting Bell Netlabel website, as “a deep and moving 48-minute journey. A fading structure and slight beats in the back, layered with organic drones and soundscapes and melodic sprinkles, hisses and crackles on top. The album is inspired by the stories of the ‘lost cosmonauts’. Whether true or not, lefolk is fascinated by the idea of souls who gave their lives in the pursuit of expanding the limits of mankind’s reach, yet have been forgotten to history or ignored altogether.”

Now here is what I believe allows “isn’t it dangerous” to stand out a bit in the sea of organic drones and glitch ambient. Too often artists in these genres pour out tracks which could be easily interchangeable – the glitchy electronic clicks and pops and scratches, the single tone drone with wave after wave of slight shifting wind blowing in my empty head, the “ambient” recording that is really just a slowed down techno release (that is a whole other rant I’ll save for another day or drunken tirade which you may all hope to avoid). Many of those releases lack variety and depth. The inability to feel each track as a separate entity processing a soul of its own, and at the same time an entire release of these tracks lacking a cohesive “story” or emotive thread to tie them all together, allows them to too easily become a collection of seemingly unfinished  studio experiments.

Leif Folkvord has managed, with this release, to find a story that ties his tracks together. The drones of equipment and inner thoughts, as these cosmonauts hurtled through space or floated alone in emptiness, coupled with the glitched call and response of circuits and support aboard their craft or inside their suits give the listener a feeling for the vastness and reflection of their experience. The subtle beats carry the drone and glitch compositions forward, or outward, into the universe, supplying the tracks with movement and a path rather than just leaving them to roil in on themselves, becoming self-consuming emptiness.

The cosmonauts hailed in each track seem less lost or desperate, with their lives emptied of earthly bonds. Their souls seem to have become more expansive and limitless, united with the universe,  through lefolk’s compositions.

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Link to Release Page [RB116]

Explore more of lefolk’s audio and video releases at http://www.lefolk.com

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