Time and the Weather

Time and the Weather is an ambient soundscape mix of Bastard Island (Linear Obsessional, 2019). Dispensing with vocals the instrumental recordings redolent with spatial diffraction, signal refraction, small sounds, and distance communication, evoke the atmosphere of the island. Paid download includes a bonus track.

Abstract Vectoral Landscapes

Deep dreaming landscapes abstracted through song vectors. Animal, vegetable, and mineral. Above, on, and below the ground. In the past, present, and future. All at once in and out of place.

When Andy Wood from TQ zine tweeted a call asking whether anyone would be interested in releasing a CD/download on TQN-aut, I responded almost immediately. I had been an avid reader of the zine from the first issue, and had recorded a track for the Tone Quanta compilation album, so the idea was instantly appealing. At that time I was about to continue work on the larger project of which Bastard Island is the first manifestation, but this would entail embarking on a fairly lengthy reading, writing, recording process. As I knew that this was going to take a long time to come to any kind of fruition, I decided to postpone and work on something that could be quickly realised for TQN-aut and began to try out a few ideas. 

I started by constructing fairly rhythmic sequences in Ableton Live, with which I would then improvise along to with guitar and voice, record live to hard drive, build further layers of voice, guitar and drone tracks, until things started to take some kind of shape. Many of these tracks wouldn’t make it to the final mix, which means that there are orphaned vocal melodies, improvised lyrics, and guitar lines buried somewhere on the hard drive, and while they have been rejected, they still played a crucial role in forming the shape of the songs.

When it came to the point of working on lyrics, I returned to some notes I’d been making around imaginative figurations of landscape, following a trip that I had made to Australia earlier in the year. These responded to time spent in Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory, and my encounters with what is, in spite of the injustices of colonialism that both haunt the place historically and continue to be enacted, a profoundly present indigenous culture. More than many other places in Australia this place is managed partly in accordance with the traditional owners’ practices, and the presence of Aboriginal culture, both in contemporary forms and dating back hundreds of thousands of years, the latter particularly in the form of rock art, is everywhere evident; here the local Aboriginal communities maintain a strong connection to their country. So I was interested to try to evoke and meditate around some of the philosophical principles of that, influenced by and working through conceptual notions of the human as being as much an integral part of the landscape, part of the place, as any other flora or fauna, coming out of it, going back into it, in particular with the songs Grounded and Abstracted Vectoral Landscape. This was also worked through in the cover image, which came out of experimenting with applying ‘deep dream’ image processing to photographs taken in Kakadu, which seemed to me to suggest that every form in the landscape becomes mutable, animal forms emerge from flora, vegetation acquires animal or mineral properties, and so on. It is as though the entire landscape is under the influence of a powerful hallucinogenic which utterly reconfigures it as an assemblage, not simply as an image of a place, but also in how every part of that place might see every part of itself, become a vector for itself. Perhaps as a result the song recordings start to get a little psychedelic, maybe also reflecting the spatio-temporal dislocation of jet lag.

Sickness Country takes a more measured minimal musical approach, consisting entirely of guitar loops and voice. The title is the term used by the indigenous locals for the land that was mined for uranium, it is not only the effect of uranium poisoning on the human population that is described, it is also that the very country itself suffers illness. A great injustice is being done to country that is mined for such a toxic substance for profit.

The album starts on a long-haul airplane flight as Suspension speculates about where one might be in temporal and spatial relationship with the ground, while Polylingual is something of an Arthur Russell inspired jam with layered voices formed from pre-lingual utterances.

The album was made over two months, June and July 2019, from the first recording to the final mastering.

Sketches for a Decaying Island (mixtape)

This is a mixtape of instrumental and song sketches which were recorded during 2018 as part of the process of writing the Bastard Island album (Linear Obsessional 2019).

Some of the songs from Bastard Island appear here in early rough, sketchy, often improvised forms, other songs didn't make it onto the finished album. Electric Yellow Metal was originally written and recorded in Australia in 1991, it was a kind of initial imaginative reference for Bastard Island and was going to be included, but I decided against it at the last minute. The song is included here both in its 2018 version and the original recorded live to Portastudio cassette from 1991.

where will, it go, such song sung low... beyond right now, where will it go

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 

https://linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/subsongs

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.







Artwash

This arrangement of Artwash was recorded before the version that appears on the Surplus EP. It was recorded before I had decided to eschew the use of conventional 'spatialising' echo and reverb effects, and to mix all the songs to mono. The version of the song on the EP was also played and sung live, direct to hard drive, without any effects. It's been something of a characteristic of my song writing and recording processes that they often begin with more complex instrumentation arrangements before arriving at more minimal finished versions. This isn't so much an 'essentialist' exercise, I'm not attempting to get to the 'essence' of a song, it's more that complexity is an early stage in the compositional process, and simplification is a development of that process.

Surplus

genre vagrancy

from The Wire, April 2015
 
Steven Ball

Collected Local Songs

Bandcamp DL

Steven Ball is one half of Storm Bugs, a South East London duo who played a key role in the late 1970s/early 1980s cassette movement. Bending circuits, scratching vinyl, mutilating melody: they created a strangely liberated form of proto-industrial arte povera that, rediscovered and reissued over the last decade, has held up remarkably well. Loosely affiliated with that period’s DIY groups, Storm Bugs still feel uncaptured. Ball’s subsequent activities, moving across spoken word, video and installation, testify to his restless energy and genre vagrancy.

Collected Local Songs, while quieter in register, is equally intriguing. It's a drifting, sometimes aleatory assemblage of signs and signals encountered in South London's Deptford and New Cross. Ball sees the city as plunderphonic terrain, and this music is built up from layers of centifugal texts: ghost signs, ringtones, viral marketing skywriting, fragments of overheard speech. "Cloud Of Dreams" comes across like an old blues song written by conceptual architects Metahaven: "Woke up one morning/Singing phrases from a dream/Into his mobile phone".

There's drift and ambulation here. Memories, fragmented and not always lucid, act as bulwarks against capitalism's amnesia. The city is battered but not down for the count. It recalls the cussed melancholy of Jem Cohen’s films, or Stephen Dwoskin's Jesus Blood, the South London film best known for its Gavin Bryars score. Sometimes Ball’s vocals are a touch too measured, making "Deptford Flea Market lnterlude" - comprised of found sounds such as junglist beats and street stall patter - all the more potent. Collected Local Songs may be a discographic side swerve for him, but it's a resonant and very effective one.

Sukhdev Sandhu

Collected Local Songs

thanks to dubdog 

Collected Local Songs

Collected Local Songs is a new digital album of a collection of songs of quotidian and local reflection, mostly constructed from everyday language, observations, overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social life; from around and about the neighbourhoods of Deptford and New Cross in South London; using simple compositional structures, recorded with minimal instrumental setting.  A prelude to this has been the 23 minute long song Signs and Wonders, which I released as a single song digital EP in September 2014, and the Cloud of Dreams single released in January.  The former forms part of Collected Local Songs, while where the Cloud of Dreams single release breaks the song into its two constituent vocal and instrumental parts as separate tracks, it appears on the album in complete form.

The album is a selection from songs I’ve written over the past twelve or so months. In July last year I presented some other song recordings at a Domino Nights event at Banner Repeater, and wrote that a “...concern has been about what a song might be, their ostensible ‘content’ in the lyrical textual source and form.” This has been in part prompted by the fact that I find even the most ‘experimental’, interesting, or innovative of contemporary singer/song writing, often slipping too easily into convention and romantic poetic and lyrical tropes in form and language. Whether I’m succeeding in making something more interesting than this is of course probably best assessed by others. 

The songs are informed or influenced as much by concerns beyond the usual conventions of songwriting, as they are by other songwriters. For example, there is the abiding influence of the Oulipo writers, in particular, Georges Perec, whose notions of the infra ordinary and project of exhausting a place, have been close to Collected Local Songs. Also the language and approach of a number of modernist and contemporary poets, from Francis Ponge and J. H. Prynne, among others, through to more recent forms of conceptual writing as promulgated by Marjorie Perloff in her book Unoriginal Genius, and Kenneth Goldsmith’s Uncreative Writing, while wary of Goldsmith’s occasional totalizing anti-expression evangelizing.

The next set of songs to be released later this year will include those premiered in early versions at the Banner Repeater event; these do in some ways follow a more conceptual approach, being sourced from what might best be called ‘appropriated’ texts. And so to avoid the risk of over-analysing and giving too much away, I’ll leave it there...

Collected Local Songs is available to stream or purchase download from 2nd February 2015 at: https://stevenball.bandcamp.com/album/collected-local-songs

seasonal song 2

On the Wyrd, in which we plant the tree, drink mead and ale, and smear the hlaut... honour Odin, and Wudan the reborn great horned hunter, the goddess Berchta... belsnickel, banquet on herring and gruel, with kindred, hearth, our godhi and gydhja… we wear our valknuts hung low like a pendant, in the wheel of the year and the wyrd of community… 

Made for Xmas Messthetics from Radio FYTINI

seasonal song 1

 
I was almost too late with this. 

Last year Richard Sanderson invited people to make a two-minute piece for Button Box based on any element taken from his Air Buttons album, for which I recorded the song Polka Faith. 

This year Richard extended a similar invitation for a new compilation Two Minutes Left, with particular criteria:

My two rules were that the works had to be exactly two minutes long, and that at some point in the recording process a microphone should have been used - in other words, before the sounds presented here reach your ears they have, in some way, travelled through air. 

I made a new recording of a song from about twelve or so years ago which, titled Microphone, seemed a suitable choice. Originally written and recorded while I was jet-lagged, it has a vaguely melancholic lyric, which elaborates a pun on the words 'micro' and 'phone', and woozy melody.

I was almost too late with this, I recorded it the day before the deadline and submitted it just in time. Impressively Richard had 87 submissions, resulting in a substantial collection of two minutes, downloading now, and looking forward to hearing.

Two Minutes Left is available as a free download from Linear Obsessional Recordings on Bandcamp.

Signs and Wonders EP

Containing a single twenty-three minute song, the Signs and Wonders EP is the first release from a series of songs of quotidian and local reflection.

 

Signs and Wonders Song is constructed from overheard conversations, encounters, signs, community notices, announcements, phrases from historical texts about Victorian social life, from around about the neighbourhoods of Deptford and New Cross.

Now on Bandcamp

he's a Christian man because he's doing what he can, because he's doing what he can he's a Christian man...

I made this song last week following an open invitation by Richard Sanderson to create something responding to his album Air Buttons, which would then be collected into a complementary collection. I looped a section of one of his tracks, added some mouth percussion sounds, recorded myself singing a little lyric, and added a sample from Dear Black Eyes by Slim Doucet for good measure. The lyric was inspired by a conversation I had recently with an ordained Anglican minister, about his responsibility in an ostensibly secular community for helping people with matters of spirituality, whatever their own beliefs.

Richard has now compiled the responses, the astonishing number of 46 tracks, as the free download Button Box. 

Unspoken Word and Speakers

Following the release of the Storm Bugs back catalogue and new single on Bandcamp, I've uploaded the two mini-album collections of my sound works Unspoken Word and Speakers. As a sort of experiment in self-publishing it'll be interesting to see if anybody actually buys them, I'm not anticipating retiring on the proceeds!