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

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.

from the shed roof, Wednesday morning, 6 May 2020

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

Storm Bugs - Table Matters (1980)

Table Matters is a super 8 film made in 1980 to accompany the Storm Bugs EP record of the same name. For many years it was presumed lost, but resurfaced recently and has since been digitally restored with a 4K scan by nanolab (https://www.nanolab.com.au), and reunited with its original soundtrack. The film, shot on location in Chatham, Kent, in early 1980, echoes the themes of grimy mundane consumerism explored on the EP through songs such as Eat Good Beans, Window Shopping, and Make Customers Matter.