CLIFFORDANDCALIX
Lost Foundling 1999-2004
AP002CD
Aparture Records 2010
13 Tracks. 50mins26secs

Amazon UK: CD | DLD US: CD | DLD Boomkat: CD | DLD iTunes: DLD

Over a period of five years, Seefeel’s Mark Clifford and Mira Calix irregularly got together to make music, with the intention to get back to the recordings at some point and finish them. Due to respective commitments, they were never able to complete the project at the time. With Andrea Parker showing great interest in releasing the result of this collaboration on her new label, Aperture, the pair reconvened some years later but found that the technology used to record had moved on considerably, leaving them with no real possibility to finally get these completed, and decided to present a selection of thirteen recordings in their raw state. Continue Reading »

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Warp20 (Box Set) / Warp20 (Recreated) / Warp20 (Chosen)
WARP20.0 / WARP201 / WARP 202
Warp Records 2009
– / 21 Tracks / 24 Tracks. – / 99mins13secs / 127mins18secs

Warp20 (Box Set)
Boomkat: BX

Warp20 (Recreated)
Amazon UK: CD Amazon US: CD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

Warp20 (Chosen)
Amazon UK: CD Amazon US: CD Boomkat: CD iTunes: DLD

LFO. Three metallic blue letters, straddled by a ghostly shape, set on a black background. Three letters that changed things forever. The year was 1991, I was browsing through the new arrivals in my local records store, and the Designers Republic artwork of LFO’s Frequencies was standing out from the blur, calling out for my attention. An hour or so later, I was left baffled by a record which I was struggling to understand. On one side, the lush flow and shattering bass of LFO or Simon From Sydney irresistibly titillated my appetite for crisp evocative electronics, on the other, I had never experienced anything quite as bare as Mentok 1 or We Are Back. This album bore its influences on its sleeve, literally, and it took a few listens to ‘get it’. But ‘get it’ I did. More than I could have ever wished for. I was hooked. Not only on LFO, but also on Warp.

The brainchild of Steve Beckett and the late Rob Mitchell, who founded the label twenty years ago in the former metallurgic city of Sheffield, Warp found itself at a crossroad between the dying acid scene and the nascent UK techno/electronica movements Continue Reading »

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Musique Pour Statues Menhirs
ARBOU026
Arbouse Recordings 2009
21 Tracks. 123mins59secs

The musée Fenaille, in Rodez, South of France, is an archaeological museum which has in its collection a wide array of ‘statues menhirs’, or carved stones which are the first known life-size representations of man. Local record label Arbouse Recordings commissioned a number of artists to create a soundtrack for the museum collection, each providing one track to the project, and three of them were later invited to perform live in the museum.

The panel of musicians and sound artists invited to take part to the project is extremely diverse, with the likes of Fennesz, Benoît Pioulard, John Hughes, Sylvain Chauveau, Greg Davis, Schneider TM, Mapstation, Mira Calix or Jasper TX, rubbing shoulders with less known contributors such as ww.lowman, Rafael Anton Irisarri, Astrïd, Serafina Steer, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma or Orla Wren to create a truly evocative and sumptuous document Continue Reading »

MIRA CALIX
The Elephant In The Room: 3 Commissions
WARP169CD
Warp Records 2008
09 Tracks. 56mins46secs

Four years after the first 3 Commissions EP, which collected a handful of site-specific performances recorded at London’s Royal Festival Hall and Barbican Centre, and a piece created for the Museum D’Histoire Naturelle de Geneva in Switzerland, Mira Calix returns to Warp with excerpts of two operas, Elephant & Castle and Dead Wedding, for which Chantal Passamonte was commissioned the music, and two movements of a twenty minutes video installation entitled Memoryofamoment.

For some time, Passamonte’s work has developed from her original overall electronic compositions, based on miniature found sounds collected in the English countryside around her home to incorporate more orchestral forms. Continue Reading »

MIRA CALIX
Eyes Set Against The Sun
WARP150
Warp Records 2007
10 Tracks. 62mins37secs

Hot on the heels of her collaboration with pianist Sarah Nicolls and arranger David Sheppard as Alexander’s Annexe and over three years after the stunning Skimskitta, Mira Calix returns with her most ambitious record yet. Building on her orchestral work with the London Sinfonietta and with Alexander’s Annex, she presents here a rather diverse and expensive collection of complex electronica. Continue Reading »