murmurations

[Part 3 of a series on sleeplessness in music - see parts 1 , 2 ] Sometimes sleeplessness need not mean no sleep. Twisting and turning feverishly, you find yourself able to drift away for a few moments. But it only takes the creak of a wall against the wind, or the weight of an image as it falls into your head - often you, falling, feeling the rush of air against your limbs - for you to open your eyes again to the dark. Those possibilities show how sleeplessness can blur the boundary between wakefulness and something else, as you lose a sense of how long you have been staring at the ceiling, if in fact you were dreaming a second ago, whether this place you call your room is exactly as you remembered it. The guitarist Eivind Aarset revels in this floating uncertain state in his 'Dream Logic' (2012), together with our old friend Jan Bang and Erik Honoré. Like Biosphere's 'Insomnia' , Aarset relies on copious fade-outs to silence to indicate the night's expa...

I've been wanting to write about Jan Bang for a while but despite having it in the pipeline for weeks there's still more I'd like to explore before drawing strong conclusions (plus it turns out university requires work too!). In particular there's been some academic work on musical ontology recently that I think might be relevant. But for now, some thoughts on Bang's ...and poppies from Kandahar . (Have a listen to bits of the album here ) What I find so exciting about this album is Bang's collective approach to sampling, field recording and found sounds. First off, there's a real physicality to the snatched recordings in each track, achieved largely through an emphasis on or 'sounding' of the production process of the recordings. So the layering of samples/recordings is made quite obvious to us, with different elements having quite different EQs, volumes and spatiality. The nature of their recording is also seemingly-deliberately man...