murmurations

I'm always interested in how artists portray their performance space, as it were, in their tracks. People often think this becomes irrelevant when you're writing electronic music – it's all inside the laptop, right? – but if anything the opposite is true. Experimental electronic artists often, intentionally or not, create imaginary performance spaces when they write a track, irrespective or whether they think their track doesn't really have a 'performer', as in a human being playing the instruments. Western listeners hear what sound like instruments and attach a certain agency to those sounds. At that point, the track stops being just a bunch of sounds, and becomes a landscape with some one in it. Once that 'performer' of sound is located, tracks can develop narratives based around the question of the performer's presence in the track. One of the tracks I've noticed this most clearly in is the beautiful 'Stagger' by The Sight Below. The...

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...