:PAPERCUTZ
Do Outro Lado Do Espelho (Lylac Ambient Reworks)
AB029
Audiobulb Records 2010
12 Tracks. 57mins53secs

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Originally the project of Porto-based musician Bruno Miguel Pereira Pinto, :Papercutz soon expanded to incorporate vocalist Melissa Veras, with other musicians joining the pair for live performances. Released two years ago on Canadian imprint Apegenine, Lylac, the band’s first album, bridged the gap between stark atmospheric electronica and elegant contemporary pop music to create a superb hybrid, served by Pinto’s delicate blend of acoustic instrumentation, electronic textures and beats on one side, and by Veras’s softly ethereal vocal tones, occasionally reminiscent of Anneli Drecker, on the other. The album was followed by a single, Ultravioleta, which featured remixes by The Sight Below, Neotropic, Spandex and Signer. This is partly what encouraged Pinto to let other musicians give their own vision of his work. The resulting collection of remixes, published on Audiobulb, features reworks by Helios, Simon Scott, Taylor Deupree, He Can Jog, Autistici, Astroboy, Chris Bissonnette, Jasper TX,  Rameses III, Emanuele Errante and Feu Follet.

Expectedly, the tone is somewhat subdued and, occasionally on the verge of reflective here, but, despite involving artists from very different horizons, this album is extremely consistent all the way through, and actually sits comfortably next to Lylac by complementing it rather well. Indeed, while each artist interprets a given song in their own way, bringing their own universe into that of :Papercutz, they all do so very respectfully of the original work by retaining much of the layered aspect of songs. These are however for the most part radical reworkings, which see soundscapes developed into lush new ambient forms or retract into spacious drones, while the voice is in turn wrapped in textures and treated as just another sound source, or isolated as primary organic element to increase its impact.

On The Gift Of Self, Simon Scott focuses on expanding just a fraction of guitar tones into a rising drone around which circles distant voices, while Taylor Deupree turns the somewhat stripped down Do Outro Lado Do Espelho into a rich and vivid soundtrack above which Veras’s voice appears as in suspension. He Can Jog brings things back down to earth for a moment with a stabbing distorted electric guitar on A Way To Emerge, but soon the tone softens again and allows for another dreamy space to develop, away from the marimbas and percussions of the original. Perhaps the most striking remixes are found toward the end, first with the breathy Astroboy version of Lost Boys, which retains the rhythmic pattern of the Lylac version, but dips it into a much hazier sound setting, while he pushes the voice slightly deeper in the mix, then with Jasper TX’s magical take on Broken Treasure. Building on a single looped chord progression by slowly adding delicate piano lines, then burying them under layers of sound, Dag Rosenqvist delivers here a truly magnificent version.

Remix projects can be difficult to carry through without impacting in one way or another on the original versions, especially when an entire album is concerned. In the case of :Papercutz, the great respect with which each of the contributors treat Bruno Miguel Pereira Pinto’s delicate arrangements and Melissa Veras’s soft interpretation ensures that both original and remixed versions can exist side by side, complement each other which retaining their own identity.

4.5/5

:Papercutz | :Papercutz (MySpace) | Audiobuld Records
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Lylac (He­lios Remix) from Audiobulb on Vimeo.

VARIOUS ARTISTS
2 | Favourite Places
AB026
Audiobulb Records 2009
10 Tracks. 56mins30secs

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The concept is pretty simple: take a number of contemporary musicians with a taste for moods and atmospheres, task them with recording sounds from their favourite places in the world and use them in a composition. This is exactly what David Newman, head of Audiobulb, did two years ago, and the result was compiled in the first instalment of Favourite Places, with contributions from Biosphere, Taylor Deupree, Claudio, Leafcutter John and John Kannenberg amongst others. The second volume in the collection brings together musicians from the UK (Michael Santos, Icarus, Autistici, Calika), Australia (Lawrence English), Belgium (Yannick Franck), Japan (Sawako), USA (Jeremy Bible, He Can Jog) and Canada (Michael Trommer), giving them each a chance to introduce their very own favourite place. The booklet accompanying this CD contains photographs and a description of these spots, providing concrete complements to the recordings.

The locations selected vary greatly here, ranging from the South Downs between London and Brighton (in two instances), a derelict concrete factory in Ohio, a forest near Brisbane, to a suburban Belgian town, a public walkway in North London, a bedroom in Brooklyn, or the Peak District National Park near Sheffield, yet, perhaps due to the very nature of the project and of the artists involved, there are great sonic consistency throughout the record. Apart for He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster who uses his bed as his source location, the other nine artists use outdoors settings as the starting point for their respective contributions, feeding sounds ranging from wind sweeping though landscapes or birdsongs to running water, rain or distant traffic noises into densely atmospheric collages where music often occurs as an impressionist counterpoint.

This especially the case on Lawrence English’s opening Quiet Planigale, which originally seems to catalogue all sorts of birdsongs but eventually gives way to a sombre drone over which lighter fragments of hazy melody take shape, or on Michael Santos’s Perfect Pitch, where field recordings, collected along Parkland Walk, between Finsbury Park and Highgate, occupy solely the first segment of the track, before outstretched chimes come in, arranged as to evoke light playing through branches and leaves. Autistici’s Winter Heather, Frozen Breath works on a similar concept, David Newman originally focusing on a walk through the vast spaces of the Peak District National Park before bringing in gently shimmering sounds to convey an element of the wide open space serving as inspiration for the track. It is also the format adopted by Michael Trommer on his portrayal of Toronto’s underground pedestrian network for TD Path 6. To complement the urban setting of the opening two and a half minute, Trommer distils a haunting and dense series of soundscapes in the remaining section of the track, crystallising the transient aspect of the paths network and its anonymity in a surprisingly vivid way.

Icarus take the concept into a different direction by intricately linking the sounds recorded on the South Downs (football commentaries on a portable radio, human voices, insects, car noises) and the music they extract from them, articulating these two phases against each other. This is also partially the case with He Can Jog’s extremely clever Woodbine Entwist, although producing a radically different result. Here, the bed, and by extension the bedroom, is integrant part of the song, not so much through the sounds used as through the low-fi approach to the colourful electronically-tainted folk that develops from the experiment, a reminder that the music was recorded in his own living space.

Like its predecessor, this second volume of Favourite Places collects sounds and impressions, and reflects the choices made by the various contributors. Frequently characteristic of their usual work, these tracks are like open windows into the inspiration of musicians, giving an interesting, if often highly unusual and personal, insight into their intimate spaces.

4.4/5

Audiobulb Records
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HE CAN JOG
Middlemarch
AB017
Aubiobulb Records 2008
09 Tracks. 43mins06secs

The strangely named He Can Jog is one of the many projects of Brooklyn-based sound artist Erik Schoster who focuses primarily on textural sound explorations. Originally from Madison, Wisconsin, Schoster spent his formative years studying composition and improvisations. In the last four years, he has released a handful of MP3 EPs and his work has also been featured on a few compilations, including on no less than four from Sheffield’s excellent Audiobulb, which have been nurturing his talent for some time. It is therefore only fair that they got to release Middlemarch, the follow up to his debut album, New Ground Has Not Broken, Soil Last Week And Dirt Today, released in 2004.

Right from the onset of Suite Part Four, which opens, Schoster establishes an elegant laptopestry made of interferences, glitches and statics upon which he builds subtle little melodic pieces which often develop into gentle layered miniature symphonies, usually contained within three-to-five minute compositions. The album seems articulated around the four Suites, beginning, as mentioned above with Part Four, Suite Part Three following a couple of tracks in and the epic Suite Parts One And Two, which closes the album. The remaining compositions stand very well on their own however, whether it is the short interludes Dials, with its minimal drone-like setting, or A Small Thing, with its bubbling statics and embryo of melody which originally fails to develop, but finally comes to life on Contractors And Architects, the only vocal track on the album, or with more fully formed tracks. Surprisingly upbeat and clearly defined against the rest of the album, the refined Suite Part Three is in part reminiscent of Four Tet circa Pause, but this is in no way a criticism as Schoster does this kind of things rather well. My (Mother’s) Records, which follows, combines processed acoustic guitars, found sounds and sliced vocal samples into a much tightly woven ball of sounds.

The album then veers toward slightly darker and colder grounds with Agnes (After Woodland Pattern) and Pan-Fried Fern, which, although remaining sonically close to the rest of the album, appear to echo the foggy atmosphere of the cover photograph, which shows a young girl, bare feet, walking in a wintry woodland. The piece de resistance of Middlemarch comes with concluding piece Suite Parts One And Two, which develops over twelve and a half minutes and two distinct sections, the first one appearing like a stripped down version of the second, where Schoster deploys the richest soundscapes and melodies of the record.

With Middlemarch, He Can Jog’s Erik Schoster has created a rather beautiful and intimate record which delights and charms all the way through, thanks to carefully crafted sound formations and melodies which continuously grow and develop. Middlemarch is one of these records that procure continuous listening pleasure by somehow giving the impression of never sounding quite the same twice.

4/5

He Can Jog | Audiobulb Records
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