I am pleased to announce that my new full-length album subsongs is now available on CD and download from Linear Obsessional Recordings.
subsongs is a new collection of nine songs written and recorded between 2016 and 2017. The lyrics are plucked from various themes and sources, employing diverse, sometimes reflexive, often experimental approaches to writing. These are 'almost songs', never rhyming, and rarely forming a conventional structure, such melody as there is often relies upon repetition and reiteration, all set to a musical palette of guitars, software instruments, samples, and occasionally field recordings.
subsongs
Steven Ball
nine songs, 66 minutes
CD/download
released 19 September 2017
Linear Obsessional Recordings LOR095
download includes a PDF booklet of lyrics
available at
CD purchase includes unlimited streaming of subsongs via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
More about subsongs:
Unlike my previous collection for Linear Obsessional Life of Barrymore, there is no particular over-arching theme or concept to subsongs, rather it draws on something of a miscellany of subjects which preoccupied me during this time. The two 'title' songs are reflexive exercises; the first (subsong) is about what the song itself might be or become, the second (Subsongs) reflects more upon the album, and the songs on it as a whole. Other songs are concerned with a wide variety of subjects: of corporeal subjectivity and the inner voice (Inside), of mythologies buried in landscapes (Passing Place of the Seat), of the nostalgic mythos surrounding punk (Garage/Band), of post-extinction humanity (The Sixth), and two of the songs rework textual material from my early 1990s super 8 film work (Off Off On and Periscopic). The latter draws on themes of migrant isolation in Australia, through the filter of lines taken from the 1959 film On the Beach. Pivotal to the collection is Of the Yard (After Terry Ball), which is a setting of poetry sketches transcribed verbatim from my late uncle’s notebook, relating to his time working as a stonemason in the Middle East during the 1960s.
