Atmospheric new collection of field recordings, installations and area sonorities from Moniek Darge, all captured on the island of Crete and released by Graham Lambkin: "Kye is pleased to announce the release of Crete Soundies, the major new work by Moniek Darge, and the follow-up to last years Soundies (1980-2001) CD. Crete Soundies presents three new pieces -- Magnesia (2006), Anemos (2007) and East Crete (2008-2009). These works were born from two years of Levka Ori sound research, and an additional year in east Crete in collaboration with fellow sound artist Francoise Vanhecke. Moniek Darge was born in Bruges, 1952 and studied music theory and violin at the Music Conservatory of Bruges, painting at the Ghent Royal Academy of Fine Arts; Art History, Philosophy and Anthropology at the University of Ghent, Belgium. She is active as composer, violinist, performer and audio artist and has built light and soundsculptures, installations, musical instruments and for many years has been constructing a series of alternative music boxes, with which she also performs. Darge has specialised in both soundscapes and live-art performances in which visual and musical aspects are combined and in interactional improvisation on violin. Since 1970 she has performed around the world and has been active on stage, first with the Logos Ensemble, then with Logos Duo (together with Godfired-Willem Raes), and more recently with the M&M robot ensemble. She also founded Logos Women, a small group specialised in intermedia improvisations performing their own compositions for various instruments, voices and music boxes. Crete Soundies comes housed in 6-panel digipak, in an edition of 500, and is released with the support of the Flemish Government." - KYE.

It’s interesting to note the way that The Shadow Ring – in common with Whitehouse – became increasingly obsessed and – yes – perverted by language as their careers progressed. By the time of the strange, melancholy later Shadow Ring albums – Lighthouse, Lindus, I’m Some Songs - the earlier surrealist narratives were gradually being replaced by a discomfited Sebaldian grey and a focus more on word as sound and sound beyond meaning. Like Whitehouse they began to deliberately manipulate syntax and sense, corrupting words and smearing tones in order to illicit less defined reactions in the listener while moving further away from ‘vocals’ altogether. In many ways Elklink – the duo of The Shadow Ring’s Graham Lambkin and Adris Hoyos of Harry Pussy – take this tendency to its very extreme.
Last time I encountered Elklink they were being introduced by Heather Leigh at the legendary Brattleboro Free Folk Fest, with Lambkin and Hoyos accompanied by Matt Krefting of Son Of Earth and Scott Foust of Idea Fire Company et al. It’s not often remembered or remarked upon that Elklink played the fest but then their performance was so confusing, so defiantly arch – Foust grated carrots for most of the performance while wearing a trademark orange jump suit, Krefting sat on the floor and played cassettes, Adris faced away from the audience and played a single cymbal – that it doesn’t quite fit the overarching free folk aesthetic that was the festival’s main conceptual thrust. Now, this, a vinyl reissue in an edition of only 500 copies – inevitably immediately sold out at source – that restores their elusive cassette on Polyamory (James Toth’s aka Wand’s great early imprint) from 1999 alongside their contribution to the Colour In Absence Sound compilation from the same year. Recorded at the same time as The Shadow Ring’s Lindus, The Rise Of Elklink magnifies and implodes the early narrative style of The Shadow Ring with a heavy air of suburban ennui somehow transformed into a series of ghostly transports that move well beyond simple sound poetry and into a form of composition that is intimately tied up with the body and the space around it, forsaking the formal satisfaction of poetry and ‘sense’ for a sound with endless subliminal depth, rich with an almost occult sense of implication, suggestion and otherworldly power. Recorded at home straight to four track the songs are accumulations of variously treated monologues and sounds that dissolve into rich miasmic fields of chatter and non-specific drone/environments in a way that owes as much to the work of Robert Ashley and Walter Marchetti as it does to Michigan noise. Indeed, the degree of acoustic/electric confusion is immediately disorientating, as body sounds break down into machine patterns, extraneous domestic sounds take on the form of voices and microphones record the speech of empty rooms. The atmosphere is similar to Whitehouse at points, though paradoxically enough it’s the early Come Org recordings that it most resembles, where Bennett’s vocals were almost impossible to fully decode. The generally malevolent air – which the deliberate breakdown of sense inevitably seems to conjure – also brings to mind the darker Nurse With Wound material like “I Was No Longer His Dominant” or “Fashioned To A Device Behind A Tree” although a more contemporary reference might be the amazingly disquieting series of recordings released by Relay For Death over the past year or so. And of course it has an umbilical straight to the profoundly alienated lost-in-the-fog aspect of the last few Shadow Ring recordings. With a guest appearance from The Shadow Ring’s Tim Goss and some absolutely gripping performances from Adris and Graham, trading vocals, blurring roles until each seem to be a degraded reflection of each other, this is one of the most remarkable, disturbing, impenetrably deep broadcasts from some of the key figures in contemporary underground music. File it alongside Lindus, Put My Dream On This Planet, Total Sex, Automatic Writing, Let’s Build A Pussy, Crowley’s cylinder recordings and Coil’s ELpH workings in the part of your collection reserved for modern classics. Highly recommended!

New solo album from Luke Younger, one-half of Birds Off Delay, with a rigorous set of electro-acoustic works for piano, casio and guitar w/a surreal Industrial edge: “Helm is the ambiguous solo moniker of London-based sound architect Luke Younger. Although, perhaps best known as one half of the pioneering avant-drone outfit Birds of Delay, it is in the more esoteric work of Helm that Luke's art takes on its most radical shape. 2010's debut LP To An End confirmed that in an age of fleeting trends and fly-by-night fancies, there were still a few old souls prepared to knuckle down and deliver the goods that people want to receive. Cryptography carries forward that noble mindset, presenting a new five-part suite of expertly rendered electro-acoustic study. Using processed piano, Casio MT-40, cymbal and guitar strings Cryptography steers the Helm sound through a melange of fringe territories: glacial drone meditations, reconfigured gamelan clusters, and howling walls of organized feedback, all coalesced in classic UK post-industrial fashion. Indeed, had it been conceived of 30 years prior, it would be easy to imagine Cryptography winning a seat in the United Dairies, or Dom America catalog, such is its commitment to homemade exploratory zeal. Cryptography was recorded at Highams Park, London 2009, with additional recording at No Recording Studios, London. Co-mixed, edited and mastered by John Hannon at No Recording, 2010. Cryptography arrives in a full color sleeve, with insert, in a hand-numbered edition of 400 copies.” – Kye. 

More “I Am Driving In A Car” than “I Am Sitting In A Room”, Graham Lambkin of The Shadow Ring et al’s much-anticipated new solo album is as head-scratchingly brilliant and as confoundingly beautiful as anything he has released to date. First, the specifics: broken down to its basics, Amateur Doubles consists ‘simply’ of Lambkin driving around in a car with his family while playing some classic French oddball/prog from the legendary Pole cabal, namely Philippe Grancher’s 1976 album 3000 Miles Away and Besombes-Rizet’s classic 1975 Pole LP. So fucking what, you might ask? Well, uh, okay: if you know these records well it’s like hearing them in some kind of strange reverie, like a memory of hearing them, as the sonic space of the car gives them a weird, boxy distance, especially with the more floaty, melancholy flute and reed passages and the zoned organ sections. Indeed, Lambkin has radically re-thought the original recordings, remixing and re-editing them while adding details from other sources – the vocals of free improviser Amy Sheffer for one. Then there’s the environmental sounds, not chosen for their beauty or according to any aesthetic agenda - no fuggin’ fountains or bubbling water or expiring sheep - but the sounds of Graham and Adris Hoyos’s children in the back seat, the zoom of traffic, sometimes very apparent, sometimes engulfed by the Industrial scale confusion of the music, but always coming back to the quiet, protected space of the car, travelling through a particular moment in space/time. There’s something unmistakably melancholy about it, something nostalgic even, the quality of a family holiday remembered, complete with its own soundtrack and of course it also raises question about notions of listening and of listening to listening and whether, like Schrodinger’s Cat, the presence of someone else listening on a recording that you are listening to somehow changes or affects the recording or the relationship between ‘performer’ or ‘consumer’ or at least makes you hear it differently. But much more than any conceptual yucks that the piece may or may not have it’s uncannily powerful, very affecting and – in a way – the ultimate realisation of Lambkin’s long-running project to relocate mundanity, pointlessness and the everyday into a magical once-removed zone where it is re-presented in all its surreal and momentary beauty. Who would have thought that something so seemingly conceptual could be so intimately affecting? I know I’ll be living in this beautifully presented LP for a long time to come. Comes in a high gloss gatefold sleeve with a nice snap of Graham, Adris and their kids, pressed on clear vinyl in an edition of 500 copies, already completely sold out at source. Highly recommended!