murmurations

I just got my hands on the new Kane Ikin record, ' Sublunar ', out on 12k. Knowing and loving some of his earlier work, in collaboration with others and as part of Solo Andata, the record held a surprise in the form of slow, sparse drum parts. Added to Ikin's worn-out analogue whirls and unfolding gongs and bells, the overall sound strikes me as heading toward the same musical landscape as some dance music artists but coming from a different, more ambient direction. To start from the dance musician's perspective: for a while now, I've been noticing a shared aesthetic among some more experimental artists that I like to call 'decayed dance music'. This is electronic music that takes house and R&B musical elements, tampers with their recording fidelity and then filters the results through a heady dub techno atmosphere which itself has been rendered less pristine in some way. For an aesthetic that is, as one reviewer recently noted , relatively limited i...

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...