HOMECONOMICS

HOMECONOMICS is a compilation of tracks from albums that I have released over the past six years. This is something of a selective survey, a sampler, of the work I’ve produced since starting to write and record songs in earnest. In part it functions to draw a line under things, a pause before I embark on whatever the next six years might bring. Who knows how that might turn out. As ever there are ideas, but as yet no solid plans.

One important intention of this compilation is to draw some attention to two of the labels that have aided and abetted me in my work: Linear Obsessional and TQN-aut. Both are DIY, non-profit, non-commercial operations, run from people's homes, and as such two examples of the plethora of such labels currently operating solidly outside of the mainstream.

These labels are the cottage industries of the digital age, performing labours of love, unfettered by the capitalistic concerns of the entertainment industry, operating economies of micro scale, without aspirations to achieve fame, fortune and whatever it is that goes with them, harbouring few expectations of sales or audiences. They do represent artists who have something to say, with or without words, directly, literally, or obliquely, abstractly, who are mostly unconcerned with the competing hegemonies of critical consensus or the tussle for cultural recognition.

These labels provide thousands of artists like me with a context and the possibility of an outlet, and occasionally a track might receive airplay on a programme on Resonance FM in the UK, WFMU in the US, or perhaps one of a myriad of web-based shows globally, the release may receive a review, on a small online or paper zine, or in a more mainstream publication like The Wire.

These labels do it because they are enthusiasts who value the artists’ work in and of itself, holding to the possibility that a few others might also like it, even if there's only half a dozen or so of them. Through downloads on Bandcamp, complemented by limited run CD and cassette releases, and when possible gigs in parks and the back rooms of pubs, a self-determined ‘scene' of sorts has coalesced around this activity, the "no audience underground", as Rob Hayler wryly terms it.

Of course if you are reading this it's more than likely that none of it is news to you, so think of this perhaps as more of a gentle reminder of what we value, and a suggestion that if you like what you hear in this collection you might be interested in buying the physical albums or the downloads from which they come, and not only mine but also those by the many other artists you will find on these labels, and many others like them.  

The tracks on this compilation are drawn from the following albums.

Some tracks differ from those on the original albums: there are alternative mixes of Cloud of Dreams, Without Movement, and Pattern Accumulating, a live version of Sickness Country, and in the case of subsongs a recent new recording of the song.

subsongs 
CD/download, 2017
linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/subsongs

Bastard Island
CD/download, 2019
linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/bastard-island

All Living Can Anyone Be Here 
audio cassette/download, 2020
linearobsessional.bandcamp.com/album/all-living-can-anyone-be-here

Abstract Vectoral Landscapes
CD/download, 2019
tqn-aut.bandcamp.com/album/abstract-vectoral-landscapes

Collected Local Songs
download, 2015
stevenball.bandcamp.com/album/collected-local-songs

Surplus
download, 2015
stevenball.bandcamp.com/album/surplus  

"...as local as it gets..."

I'm very pleased to note two positive reviews of Collected Local Songs within a few days of each other.  The first by a singer/musician whose work I greatly admire (and one-time local), Sophie Cooper writing for Radio Free Midwitch 

"The songs are like perfect postcards picturing small details of everyday life seen through an appreciative eye."

and the second from local Deptford/New Cross blog Transpontine

"...an album that is as local as it gets..."

Thanks people!

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