Looking After the Duck and All Living Can Anyone Be Here reviewed by Neil Kulkarni in The Wire, September 2020

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all about Crumpsall Riddle - Looking After The Duck

Looking After The Duck, the album recorded by Jude Cowan Montague and me under the name Crumpsall Riddle, is attracting quite a bit of attention and some critical praise. I'll dedicate this post to reviews of and other news about the album and update it as and when there is something new.


Here's an interview we recorded with Andy N for Spoken Label:

Reviews:

Joined by Matt Armstrong on bass guitar, also acting as engineer for the recordings, the duo turn in an array of quite minimal / sparse instrumentation including guitars, drum machine, and moog, but it’s the voices that are showcased. Singing voices, spoken word, and an odd form of song-speech…the distinctive taste of this Crumpsall Riddle is the combination of these vocal larynxes... 

- Ed Pinsent, The Sound Projector 

          

…Crumpsall Riddle are a duo formed by Ball and Jude Cowan Montague, who improvised the songs on Looking After The Duck in three live sessions during August and September of 2019. The results are beautifully strange; there's an end of the night feel here, as shattered and deathly as Richard & Linda Thompson at their bleakest or Alex Chilton at his most blearily broken, but the recording is crystal clear, almost unforgivingly so. The melodies and words here could almost be folk, but this is folk taken to non-convivial extremes, the lo-fi instrumentation and droning keyboards like Suicide with all the aggravation sucked out, replaced by a despairing English resignation, gently dazed humour and an abstract sense of demise and decay. The highlights are where Montague dominates the vocals - this seems to give Ball space to explore more musical textures, and Montague has a voice that's disarmingly direct, real and intensely moving. Looking After The Duck is perhaps the most engaging of these releases, but all four contain delights.  

- Neil Kulkarni, The Wire, September 2020 

 ...a masterful craft, spilling an abundance of emotion without superimposition or myriad sound designs; rather seizing the breath of the listener through an adventure of minimal instrumentation: structuring scenic palpation’s.  

- Anti: Music Review 

 If people just had ten percent of expressive freedom as Crumpsall Riddle have accumulated over here, the world would be already a much more fascinating and wonderful place!
- Yeah I Know It Sucks 

 

...like speed reading somebody else’s book collection whilst listening to the Bagpuss soundtrack as whistling Jack Smith rifles through your girlfriend’s knickers drawer just out of view...  
- Monolith Cocktail  

 

What a triumph of beauty! One of my albums of the year and comes with the highest possible recommendation from TQ zine.
- TQ Zine issue 30

"He’s like a landscape painter, painting in sound, while simultaneously describing his own actions, and the very canvas he’s working on..." Ed Pinsent reviews Bastard Island

http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2019/08/14/intire-of-itselfe/

Ed Pinsent reviews subsongs in The Sound Projector

"Steven Ball continues his mission to reinvent the song form on his own terms..." he says, it's a bold claim! Read all about it: http://www.thesoundprojector.com/2018/06/02/underground-map/

Radio Free Midwich reviews subsongs

"The missing link between reductionist improv and the intimate breathy song cycles of a Robert Wyatt."

read more here:
https://radiofreemidwich.wordpress.com/2017/10/18/dense-as-blood-rfm-on-maalem-mahmoud-gania-baccamchayer-and-broken-shoulder-ij-grey-guides-and-steven-ball/

The Sound Projector: what's the point of Life of Barrymore?

Life of Barrymore receives a thoughtful review from Ed Pinsent in The Sound Projector blog here

In the review he writes:

Steven Ball may be asking pointed questions about celebrity and the media, or implying some critique in amongst all this, though I’m not sure if that is the point of the work. Personally I find celebrity culture banal, and shows like those of Jeremy Kyle and Matthew Wright to be extremely destructive and damaging to the national psyche. But I am being judgemental.

The question of the 'critique', intended or otherwise, that the work may or may not make, is a question that has exercised me in relation to this and other projects which have appropriated forms of articulated text as re-articulation. It is a question which I have attempted to address in various ways elsewhere, but prompted by Ed's speculation about the 'point' of the work, it is one that I hope to address soon, here.

"...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