Learning to Draw - Review

A well deserved review for a great album - Scott McKeating gets out the wax crayons and learns to draw for foxy digitalis.

"Alistair Crosbie is a musician better known for soundscapes and guitar dronework, and rightly so as he does them well. So when he releases something that he claims as being ‘the most experimental album I've made’, the big money might well be on that album being something utterly bizarre and industrially heavy. Instead, Crosbie has recorded an album of his own songs, y’know guitar, chorus, melodies and lyrics stuff, which is not something you might readily expect for a dabbler in aural alien art. There are a few deviations throughout (acapella and post-punk kraut vibery), a few sparks of other sound but the central elements are always voice and guitar. No need to worry about how Crosbie handles the gulf between these disciplines though, “Learning To Draw” is an unqualified success and in no way does he get (or need) any kind of pass for being an artist more well known for being from a different musical world. While Crosbie’s songs here work within a certain structural formula, relatively brief songs (17 songs in 38 or so minutes) relying on limited pedal fx, acoustic guitar and keyboard, these are not the fumblings of a beginner.

The blurb that accompanies “Learning To Draw” mentions its origins in some snowbound and electricity-free sessions, but it feels like the record’s true origins are in something deeper and more internal. The whole record feels deeply personal, and its fairly bare bones style really supports its tone and manner. This is definitely heartfelt, lyrically downbeat and personal pop, its lack of a wide instrumental palette not affecting its melodies. Many of the songs seem to fit in with the idea of Crosbie talking/confessing/advising someone, in many places seemingly himself, and lyrically he's singing about personal confusion, loss and moments of occasional redemption. Things do turn a little chilling with some of the disturbed and empty imagery on “Husk”, but it’s followed immediately with “Summer” and the title track, the record’s most positive moments, so this fuller descent is short-lived. “Learning To Draw” is a principally melancholy pop record, but Crosbie’s shaft-of-light optimism comes over loud and clear. Take the gorgeous minute-long piece of positivity “Chinese Handcuffs, one of several slices of simple Glasgow/Creation guitar pop, which rivals any of the usual suspects with its “more you struggle the tighter it becomes” line. As an overall concept and album, this is a very brave, very personal record and reveals Crosbie as having a talent for both the abstract and the traditional. 10/10"

Fougou - Atlantis (for John Michell) - Reviews

Wonderful Wooden Reasons reflect on the Fougou:

"Fougou is the collaborative project of Brian Lavelle and Matthew Shaw. It's my first exposure to Shaw but Lavelle is a regular to these pages and a very welcome one at that. Atlantis is an introspective and ephemeral listen filled with melancholic sighs and slow washes of breathy sound. It's dedicated to John Michell who is described in the sleeve notes as a 'writer & dreamer'. I cannot comment on how the former noun is referenced in the music but the second is all pervasive and the music maintains a satisfyingly oneiric character throughout that I'm sure he would have approved of."

Writing for foxy digitalis, Scott McKeating reviews the latest Fougou release on SOR:

"Fougou make journeys. The kind of journeys that see the owner sinking into a soundscape. And while it’s certainly not uncommon for experimental music to seek to take its listener somewhere on a journey, Fougou make the Fantastic Voyage movie look like a paper boat sightseeing trip in six-inch puddle. Starting with the measured swell of waters, like waves through alloy aqueducts, there’s an underpinning of delicate structures ringing – picture the construction of aural sugar cages through fog (if you know what I mean). Fougou’s subtle sunken psychedelia is a descent into, and through, the watery world of this 3”s title – moving through a society that’s unaware of the listener’s presence. This, only their second release, is truly a halcyon slice of music and layered like dust mites in intermittent sunshine. Their blending together of denseness, visual/aural trails and finger dab rushes beckons the kind of worlds usually found on new age/SF book covers - a world of verdant green and silver crystal. Their sound id anything but new age though, there's a gracefulness and an obscurity that's far beyond that sonic garishness. Atlantis is a interswirling of the normally disparate ‘istics’ – the mystic and futuristic. 9/10 -- Scott McKeating (2 June, 2010)"

Book of Shadows - Tea in the Sidhe... SOLD OUT

Well done everybody... onward!

Buddha on the Moon - Between Seasons - SOLD OUT

Nothing else to see... move along, please

Buddha on the Moon - Norman Speaks!

Norman Records writes:

"Buddha On The Moon were about when I was obsessively buying 7"'s back in the
mid-90's. Back in the heydays of Wurlitzer Jukebox and Earworm etc.... Buddha On The Moon were tinkering around then, tackling the world with small low-key releases and a name to worry Buddhists. Here they are with a brand new album on Sonic Oyster, limited to a paltry 50 copies and it's their 1st album for 12 years. Craziness! It's pretty immense sounding stuff and I'm sure by the time you read this they'll have all gone. Beautiful drones and ambience mingled in with proper instruments and proper songs. Remember all that drifty space rock from the late 90's ala Windy & Carl, Fuxa etc?? There's elements of that here but it's well epic-sounding in scale. I can't believe there's only 50 of these!"

Richard Youngs & Andrew Paine - Collodion Error

Richard Youngs and Andrew Paine have a free download available courtesy of the good people at Workbench Recordings. http://www.workbenchrecordings.com/

Daniel Spicer writes:

"Just how close to the edge is it possible to get? Zeno's paradox would suggest that no matter how hard one tries, it can never be reached. Achilles spends eternity trying to catch a tortoise but only ever getting part of the way, the distance between the hero and the reptile shattered into an infinitude of tiny spaces to be traversed first one then another, with no ending in sight. Just the same, there's a whole universe to be travelled before we get truly close to the edge.

Glasgow-based musicians Richard Youngs and Andrew Paine keep on trying to reach that edge - separately and together. Youngs is a humble bastion of UK experimental music: as a solo artist of dizzying diversity, as an erstwhile member of underground free-music originals The A Band and, more lately, as bassist in Jandek's live trio with drummer Alex Nielsen. Paine is a quietly determined generator of avant-sounds, documented and distributed through his CD-R label Sonic Oyster. The two have recorded together since the end of the 20th century, sometimes under their own names, and sometimes as Ilk, a project that takes the baroque narrative stylings of classic British Prog as a starting point from which to explore psychedelic Noise, drone and Improv.

With Collodion Error, it's as though they're trying to sneak up on the edge, pretending not to look as they spiral round, trying to catch it on the outswing, the outer arm of the Golden Mean. The galaxy spins down into a beach-stranded mollusc shell, into an atom of stone, down further into a galactic supercluster, You can hear the energy thrumming as your identity slips away. A minute and a half can be enough to see it all. Time enough to get close to the edge, anyway."

Tea in the Sidhe - Reviewed by the One True Dead Angel

Book of Shadows -- TEA IN THE SIDHE [Sonic Oyster Records]

More whole-grain psychedelic drone goodness, this time featuring two lengthy workouts and three shorter ones. "Terrastock Tea Party," clocking in at over 31 minutes, is one of their more chaotic offerings -- the bedrock drone and ghostlike, wailing vocals are present as always, but there's a lot more activity happening in the background, in the form of springy guitar lines that come and go, erratic bursts of percussion, and a plethora of strange, usually unidentifiable noises that point the song perilously close to the land of improv free jazz... except this is the slowest and most sporadic free jazz you'll ever hear. Some of it sounds like a free jazz combo workout that's been slowed down to half speed and swaddled in gauzy sheets of drone. Screeching, wailing noises that might be a saxophone or something sampled from a keyboard rise up through the fog now and then as well. The density of sound ebbs and flows over time, as does the intensity. The considerably shorter five-minute title track is one of the most peculiar tracks I've heard from the band -- what sounds like a kazoo or wheezing keyboard provides a sawtooth drone over which discordant voices babble while squeaks and skronks abound. "Midsummer w / Verdi" is another long one (over 27 minutes), and this is closer to what most would expect from the band -- long, swirling drones, beatific disembodied vocals, and pulsing waves of cosmic sound. The volume increases as the piece goes on and the playing activity grows more restless as well, but eventually gives way to a more languid sensibility that continues to the end, with a sound that's still heavy on the cosmic vibe but far more spacious and restrained, at least up until the end (where there's a brief burst of electronic frippery designed to roust you from your tranced-out bliss). "Ion" is another short one -- just four minutes exactly -- and one of the more esoteric ones, filled with bass-heavy rumble and sci-fi noises, like a snippet from a soundtrack to an obscure science fiction B-movie; the twelve-minute "Major Cerridwen" continues the sci-fi theme, sort of, with the occasional bits that sound like alpha waves bouncing off satellites, but this is rooted more in their traditional affinity for dreamy, floating dronescapes. This is certainly one of their more enigmatic and unusual albums, but fans of the band (and of cosmic drone-rock in general) will nevertheless find this a worthy addition to their album collections.