All Living Can Anyone Be Here forthcoming album on cassette and download

'Even on a Wednesday' is a song from my forthcoming album All Living Can Anyone Be Here which is now available to pre-order from Linear Obsessional. The pre-order includes one song download now, the full album is on cassette and download released on June 25 2020.

All Living Can Anyone Be Here contains four songs and one instrumental. All but one of the songs were written and recorded during April and May 2020, two of those ('Even on a Wednesday' and 'Private Ambulance’) reflect the coronavirus situation of that period, concentrating in particular on the attendant shifts in the subjective experience of space and time. The album’s title track is an abstracted meditation on what might more broadly be called 'the state of society’, a bewilderment of news reports and the author’s own observations. ‘And on the Heath’ was written and recorded before the crisis, and considers spatial and temporal dislocation in attempting to evoke the place known as Blackheath in South East London as a ‘landscape’, wherein the song’s narrator is resigned to admit that ...we can’t observe the boundless heath, all we do is point to things.

recorded January, April, May 2020 
cover image by Nigel Ball @_nigelball

subsong

subsong 45:00, 2012

[download mp3]


subsong started life as an audio cassette tape found in Bermondsey on Tower Bridge Road. The tape contains music recorded from the radio and dates from, I would guess, the mid 1990s or thereabouts. The main section of the piece was captured with the tape playing on fast forward/cue. The digital audio was then incrementally slowed down to produce continuous sound with a duration of 45 minutes, the capacity of one side of a C90 cassette tape. This extreme processing transforms the base materiality of the analogue tape. The off-speaker microphone recording, the wow & flutter, the tape noise, and the songs of daytime radio, become auratic affect as a continuous slowly changing ambient drone piece, a distant chorus of ghostly voices and sustained (dis)chords in an uneasy false stasis.

A 30 minute version of subsong was made for the 128kbps objects project by or-bits.com presented from 22 – 28 October 2012 at Basic.fm.