SIMON SCOTT
Navigare
MIACD011
Miasmah Recordings 2009
10 Tracks. 47mins59secs

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Once a member of early nineties daydream shoegazers Slowdive, for whom his manned the drums for four years, Simon Scott has since worked on a variety of projects, including, in recent years, atmospheric pop/electronic outfit Televise, and, more recently, Seavault, a collaboration with ISAN’s Antony Ryan. He is also at the helm of experimental imprint Keshhhhhh Recordings, which he runs from his native Cambridge.

For his first release under his own name, Scott couldn’t have found a label more adapted to the vast atmospheric stretches of Navigare than Erik Skodvin’s bleak house of Miasmah. Continue Reading »

KRENG
L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu
MIACD010
Miasmah Recordings 2009
18 Tracks. 55mins19secs

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Miasmah’s ill and sombre hinterlands welcome their latest dweller in Belgian artist Pepijn Caudron. When he started as Kreng some years ago, Caudron’s work was entirely sample-based, his music borrowing from classical, jazz, electronica or improvisation. Over the years, Caudron developed a more cinematic feel to his work, leading him to work on soundtracks for films and theatre, and in particular with a company named Abattoir Fermé, based in Mechelen, half way between Brussels and Antwerp, where Caudron resides. While he is credited with a number of original pieces for both film and theatre, the ambitiously titled L’Autopsie Phénoménale De Dieu is his first official release, and follows a couple of digital EPs.

Dark, haunting and unsettling, this album is undeniably at home on Erik Skodvin’s Miasmah, yet its theatricality gives it a certain grandeur that is new to the label. Continue Reading »

ELEGI
Varde
MIACD009
Miasmah Recordings 2009
12 Tracks. 53mins46secs

Elegi’s Tommy Jansen returns to the contaminated shore of Erik Skodvin’s Miasmah with the follow up to his 2007 debut album Sistereis, and adds another shade of noire to an already sombre catalogue. In the ten years the label has been around, in one form or another, Miasmah have carved a perfect niche for themselves by releasing some of the most haunting and dark music around, from artists such as Greg Haines, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Gultskra Artikler or Encre. Continue Reading »

GULTSKRA ARTIKLER
Kasha Iz Topora
MIACD006
Miasmah Recordings 2007
18 Tracks. 66mins48secs

Isn’t technology beautiful? Now that even the cheapest PCs are capable – in the right hands – of sophisticated sound manipulation, the way is open for ever more peculiar people to realize the sounds in their heads no matter how far outside normal musical frames of reference they might be. No longer does a Captain Beefheart need to capture, imprison and brainwash talented young musicians in order to create a Trout Mask Replica. Instead, people with a unique vision need only lock themselves away with a computer and tweak and twist and warp whatever sounds are around them until they have an album’s worth of the sounds that will allow others access to their soundworld. Burial – if the myth is to be believed – is one such visionary, sat in his room with the TV on and an old PC with a fan so knackered it smokes, editing sound without even recourse to a sequencer in pursuit of the perfect aural painting of the fears and joys of the South London night time; and Siberian-born, Moscow-dwelling Alexey Devyanin is without doubt another. Continue Reading »

RAFAEL ANTON IRISARRI
Daydreaming
MIACD004
Miasmah Recordings 2007
07 Tracks. 34mins07secs

Since Norwegian duo Deaf Center deployed their voluptuous blend of Gothic electronica back in 2004, there has been a pretty regular stream of associated releases related to Erik Skodvin, from his solo project (Svarte Greiner) to that of Miasmah, the imprint he set up (Greg Haines, Encre). Sound artist Rafael Anton Irisarri hails from Seattle, where he curates the Kupei Musika imprint. He has released minimal electronica as Luken, but this is his first album under his own name, and here, he explores radically different forms of music. Continue Reading »