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viewing 1 To 6 of 6 items
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OTRLP 007LP
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Once encountered, the exquisite, low-key charms of Craig Tattersall, Andrew Johnson, and Nicola Hodgkinson's band, Remote Viewer, leave an impression that lingers long after their records stop playing. A decade since departing with I Can't Believe It's Not Better (2008), Other Ideas recalls their lower case sound as you've never heard it, presenting ten previously unreleased songs drawn from minidiscs "before the last functioning MD player in Prestwich gave up the ghost", and pressed it to vinyl. Perhaps the greatest champions of drizzly, Lancastrian mood music ever known, Remote Viewer formed as a splinter group from Leeds-based Hood with their eponymous 1999 debut, taking the opportunity to pursue a fragile, downbeat strain of electronic song-craft and experimentation that quietly held steady against the grain of much electronica during that era. Over the course of four albums and four EPs, they addressed ambient pop music's barest essentials with a succinct blend of miserablism and refined, adroit technicality that they could safely call their own, and more or less sprang a whole scene of copycats in their wake. Us. In Happier Times is the Remote Viewer's typically ambiguous title for this collection; ten grainy and richly evocative pieces of haptic scrabble and jaded gestures as inviting as a warm brew and a two-bar heater on a piss wet night. It's the sound of glacial English valleys after-hours, finding them animating ambient embers and wilting pop hooks with clipped, Teutonic glitches, and subby pulses. The results form a curious and emotionally intelligent adjunct to then-contemporary dance or pop music, a sound best received on punctured sofas in small coffee shops and living rooms, one which will forever be reminiscent of wet mornings back at the turn of the century. With the flickering fizz of "Tonight It Feels Like Spain", you hear all three members in intimate dialogue, opening a session that variously takes in SND-like garage minimalism and what sounds like Muslimgauze fever-dreaming in two-step on "Complaining Of Feeling Unwell", or a pre-echo of autonomic D&B in the Arovane-esque nerve pinch of "The Sound Of Old Helmshore", whereas "This Old Face Dates Me" is like a prickly Arran to the suave, cashmere gentility of To Rococo Rot, and the crackling group harmonies of lullaby closer "When It Was Over" forms possibly the loveliest finale to any record you'll find in 2017. RIYL: Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto, To Rococo Rot, Hood. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton.
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OTRLP 011LP
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Andrew Hargreaves (The Boats, Tape Loop Orchestra) presents his striking first works for dance with Pose Plastique; the unrequited, roiling musique concrète score to choreography by Belgian dancer Anaïs Ureel. Pose Plastique marks bends and loops in time as the first release under Andrew's government name since 2010's Avant Garde for ONO, following a period of belligerent industrial rhythms and abstracted electronics with a much more refined sense of bio-kinetic movement captured within stark, echoic space. Pushing himself beyond usual comfort zones, and using a kinetograph score of movements which was effectively illegible to Andrew, the results of Pose Plastique reveal a keen sensitivity towards supple and super spacious sound design, eschewing any sort of "incessant pounding", as he initially feared he was supposed to, in favor of a series of diffused rhythmic triggers and physical gestures that mirror elements of Ostgut Ton's works for dance, Masse (OSTGUT 026CD, 2013), as much as Jeff Mills's most abstract techno navigations and the plonging, weightless meters of Bernard Parmegiani's seminal GRM works. As these things go, the commission never fully manifested. Anaïs ended up disenchanted by dance (not due to Andrew's music) and eventually moved to New Zealand. Fast forward a few years and Andrew made the decision to edit the recordings for this 31-minute release, simultaneously offering encrypted instructions for movement to any willing bodies, while its free-floating sequence of rhythmic and tonal structures act as a hugely absorbing listen in their own right. It's perhaps testament to Andrew's gifted, mutable compositional skills and musical vision that Pose Plastique works in its own right. By his own admission, Andrew's not really a dancer, but he's clearly attuned to what makes abstract dance music tick, and to the integral connection between living bodies and machines, and the way they've become conditioned by electronics ever since the explosion of avant-garde electronic music in the '60s, to the impulses of disco and new wave, and its contemporary application. RIYL: Tony Conrad, Demdike Stare, GRM, Emptyset. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton; Comes on green vinyl; Edition of 300.
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OTRLP 008LP
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Blue vinyl. Limited to 300 copies. Beppu aka Andrew Hargreaves (The Boats) ratchets up the industrial levels with the second part of an album trilogy that started with Coercion in 2014. On Persuasion he allows the machines to lead the compositional process, letting himself be taken into the red by unrelenting, Vainio-style noise pulses and four-to-the-floor kicks with rail-gun 16ths side-chained to near-oblivion with a bone-head momentum. Sonically, one can trace the record's roots back thru the narky grooves of Spanish industrialists Esplendor Geometrico, while the album name and track titles pay tribute to James A.C. Brown's 1963 book on brainwashing, Techniques of Persuasion, with names and notions like "Institutional Neurosis" or "Subliminal Perception" firmly backed up by spirit-crushing drums and vicious synthetic atmospheres. It stomps on the fine line between anger and catharsis, freeform atonality and melodic sleight of hand. RIYL Shapednoise, AnD, Throbbing Gristle, Esplendor Geometrico, Pan Sonic. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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OTRLP 12001LP
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Abstraction continues The Boats' industrial cycle with a remorseless installment. Quite possibly the most potent of all three slabs, it finds the usually gentle souls of Andrew Hargreaves and Craig Tattersall revealing what they get up to when no-one is listening -- you'd think they're out bothering fields and folding paper until the candles run out but no, they're actually cranking out thunderous industrial beat-offs and dry stone walls of noise. This one is a meaty beast, piling the kicks and distortion higher than a VIP plate at Toby Carvery but not without glimpses of their vulnerable selves, chore jackets on and faces fixed on the machinery. From the glancing bass drum blows and grunting noise of opener "P Versus NP" they sustain a stoic resolution thru the blitzed pounding of "Section Conjecture" and acidic bog monster roil of "Parabolic Type" on the A-side, before allowing the machines to cool off on the B-side; "Inverse Galois Problem" flushes the system with a swill of industrial fluids precipitating a proper piece of death-techno necrophilia, and "Lonely Runner Problem" arches up from clammy fuzz to an excoriating expanse of noise techno that would scare the shit out of Huren on a good day. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton. Pressed on transparent red vinyl and housed in wrap-around artwork and PVC jacket. Edition of 300.
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OTRLP 003LP
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Following a trio of hard-to-obtain releases for his own Cotton Goods CD imprint, Craig Tattersall (The Boats/Remote Viewer/Hood) returns with his first-ever vinyl transmission as The Humble Bee. The project makes subtle use of field recordings and analog overlays in a manner that anyone familiar with Tattersall's work over the years will know and love. On Henrietta, recordings made in Cornwall during November 2011 are enhanced by the warm fuzz of a vinyl pressing, in places reminding us of Pole's seminal first album with its loose adherence to broken fidelity. Sharply contrasting with Other Ideas' relatively radical aces from The Mistys and The Boats, it offers quieter, more contemplative sentiments, capturing and playing around with the autumnal atmosphere of rural Cornwall. Scuffed, sepia-toned field recordings are filtered through Tattersall's patented fuzz boxes and rubbed like leaf drawings against music box tinkles and keys that dapple the surface like fading, late afternoon November light on a fresh puddle. If Bellows came from Lancashire and holidayed in the south west, this is the sort of music they might make; haptic, melancholic, just-out-of-focus, like hearing musical composting in action. Edition of 300 copies pressed on yellow wax and housed in a custom-made sleeve in a PVC outer. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy.
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OTRLP 002LP
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Redemption Forest is the beguiling debut album of recombinant pop from Andrew Hargreaves (The Boats/Tape Loop Orchestra) and Beth Roberts' new duo, The Mistys. The project serves as a vehicle for Andrew and Beth to explore concepts of pop as a subversive medium; a way to communicate ideas other than the usual messages of love and other such frivolities, but in a context that means the listener could still "jitter bug along," even if they missed the point. It's a potent medicine served in the sweetest, even sickliest, sonic syrup, taking inspiration from the classic EBM of Front 242 and Nitzer Ebb, the garage art-pop of Devo, Can's motorik Krautrock, early Yello and Mute singles to create a Neue Burnley Welle ov post-punkish, multi-perplexing pop. Beth's vocals are incredibly saccharine, like Diane Vickers suckled on Eccles cakes and nothing but, and the arrangements almost nauseously overdriven, working infectiously effective hooks, dizzying harmonic developments, and driving industrial noise rhythms. As with Leyland Kirby's best, there's a deeply-rooted sincerity at play and a genuine, abiding love of pop music at its core, refracted thru a complex and ambiguous emotional flux bound to evoke the strangest feelings. Mastered and cut by Matt Colton at Alchemy. Edition of 300 copies pressed on blue wax and housed in a custom-made sleeve in a PVC outer.
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