Audio Journal : 01/02/2011

Vinyl Corner



Richard Youngs Atlas Of Hearts (Apollolaan Recordings LP, 2010)

The Dorset-based Apollolaan label issued their first vinyl release in December 2010, on the day of the Solstice. Previous Apollolaan releases have been made available as highly limited CD-Rs in hand-made packaging, and Richard Youngs' Atlas Of Hearts marks something of a departure, though the hallmarks are still there – an oil painting by Matthew Shaw adorns the sleeve, which was designed by Brian Lavelle, whose collaboration with Alistair Crosbie and Andrew Paine as Space Weather I covered a few weeks back. Lavelle has also collaborated with Youngs in the past.

Youngs is a looming presence on the Glasgow experimental music scene, with output ranging from acoustic guitar work through to the abstract electronic hinterlands, often created with other figures in the fertile territories in which he operates. One such collaborator, some of whose work provides a good reference point to Atlas Of Hearts, is the outsider songsmith Jandek, upon whom a similar level of underground cult mystique can be assigned.

Releasing this on the Solstice seems appropriate given the seven Youngs songs on this LP. There is a firm, simple spirituality and delicate references to nature crop up consistently in the lyrics and titles. I want to call this 'folk' music but somehow that doesn't seem enough. All I know is that its layers of guitar – mostly gently strummed or plucked but occasionally delivered backwards ('What Day Is This Day') or with stuttering, restrained distortion ('Heart In Open Space') – and overlapping vocal interweavings are absorbing and uplifting by turns. Sporadic use of subtle electronics, such as on the hypnotically sparse 'Joy Ride', augment the atmosphere perfectly.

Tracks like the opener 'Haze I' further highlight the blending together of guitar, unfathomable vocals and lightly-deployed electronics; the guitars have a detuned quality, a wobbly sound with the odd mistake left in. One of the most captivating songs is also the shortest – 'Sussex Pond' clocks in at just a minute but with its introspective guitar and mysterious vocal the song is a useful distillation of the rest of the album.

This was my first Richard Youngs album and, despite having read about him a fair bit over the years, I still didn't know what to expect. I also still have no idea if this is indicative of his usual style; further investigation is therefore clearly necessary.

Audio Journal : 19/12/2010

What's not to like? Take five compositions by John Carpenter for his quintet of cult psychological horror films – Escape From New York, Escape From LA, Assault On Precinct 13, Halloween and The Thing – and let two French electronic music wizards (Étienne Jaumet and Cosmic Neman, aka Zombie Zombie, named after a 1984 ZX Spectrum game) re-record the tracks with a contemporary edge. Well, I say 'contemporary'. Electronic music has had a tendency to always try and sound like the golden age of analogue synthesis, and this EP has a tendency to sound simultaneously retro and bang up to date as a consequence.

The point is that these soundtracks were good to start with. Carpenter wrote and performed most of his scores himself, or with collaborators – The Thing was a collaboration between him and no less a luminary than Ennio Morricone. Zombie Zombie add beats and other signal flourishes that simply add to the drama of the originals. The main theme from Halloween still makes you hold your breath in anxious fear-induced excitement, but a track like 'The Bank Robbery' (from Escape From New York) is given an urgent beat and frantic synth breakdown at the very end, making it ideal for minimalist dance floors; like a remix of the Airwolf theme tune, only with more drama. The Escape From LA main theme becomes an hard-edged, industrial jack-booted synth-fest, not unlike Deutsch Amerikanisch Freundschaft circa 'Sex Unter Wasser' or Nitzer Ebb circa 'Let Your Body Learn', a sort of cinematic Electronic Body Music as that genre became known. Fans of Carpenter and electronic music generally should definitely look out for this.

Two highly limited edition CD-Rs, in hand-made packaging, from the Apollolaan label fell on my doorstep in the last week. The first, a 3", single-track CD-R from Space Weather (Alistair Crosbie, who has graced this blog before, on electric guitar; Brian Lavelle on electronics and Andrew Paine on bass) is entitled The Weather's Maiden. It was an edition of 100 and is now all sold out. This is a release that sounds markedly different at different volumes; at low volumes it sounds like a bleak, distant sonic landscape of hissing radio waves and transmissions from some frozen, desolate, abandoned world. For some reason it sounded to me like a soundtrack to the film Hardware, a British film from 1990 that painted a very bleak picture of the future, wherein savage death robots were unleashed on the populace to control the population growth. Listened to at louder volumes reveals other aspects of this sonic stew; heavily-processed, looped guitars (I think) dominate the background and deep bass tones and drones offset the spiralling, whining electronics. It is something constantly shifting, rarely static, and could have extended far longer than the fifteen minutes we have been gifted here.

The other Apollolaan release was Peter Delaney's live set from Amsterdam's VPRO festival in May 2009. This 5" CD-R is again an edition of 100 and comes in a cardboard Muji CD sleeve adorned with the white outlines of houses. I had never heard of Delaney before being sent this. He is an Irish singer-songwriter whose songs are frankly a delight for the ears. These are delicately-rendered acoustic folk ballads, occasionally dark and mysterious and evoking the vastness of the sea; but mostly these songs are uplifting affirming in nature. Delaney's perfect live set proves him to be an accomplished lyricist and his guitar playing is intricate and finely-wrought, gentle and enveloping, his voice having remarkable range and a subtle emotional intensity.



There is much that I could say about this, but to write further wouldn't ever come close to doing these songs justice. So I will just say that I honestly don't think I've ever heard a more beguiling record in my life. Higher praise than that I honestly can't find. There are a few copies left at apollolaan.co.uk; you would be wise to buy one quick.