Works For Loudspeakers is a platform for emerging and established composers working in the field of electro-acoustic music.
This is the 24th edition, featuring works by:
BJ Leo
Kraus
Andrew Reddy
Jessica Robinson
Tyrone MacIntosh
Ryan Smith
Skymning
notv
Ivan Clayden
Matt F
& Fern
Many thanks to the composers for their work! Click through to listen & read more.
Check out this profile of Ana Chaya Scotney, aka Kōtiro, featuring her ocean swimming, hanging in the studio with Thomas Arbor and jamming a new song with Ben Lemi.
“[I really like] figuring out how we can use contemporary technology to bring forward sounds that are inspired by Te Urewera, by the experience of being in places that really put our smallness, our youth as a species into perspective.” – Ana Chaya Scotney / Kōtiro
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“Hosted by DJ & music journalist Jess Fu, Amplified spotlights artists who use music to embrace, connect & explore their cultural roots.”
MOTTE is touring Aotearoa in celebration of her newest album ‘Cold + Liquid’. She will be joined by Luke Scott (Admiral Drowsy) to fully capture the aural expansiveness of this new work, and to create a very special listening experience.
Anita Clark’s new Motte album, Cold + Liquid, builds glacial atmospheres, frozen moods and isolated impressions. Portraying New Zealand through socio-geological sound, breathing in Christchurch cultures and locales, the album embodies an artistic simulation of the Kiwi environment. Motte borrows from an array of sound sources to create an immense entity, with each piece situated precisely along the path. Cold + Liquid offers this rich sensory experience, transporting the listener into a world of Clark’s imagination.
As a master violinist, Clark is a favourite of the NZ music scene. She’s been employed by the Renderers, Nadia Reid, Lawrence Arabia and Delaney Davidson for her skills. Currently, she plays with The Phoenix Foundation, Luke Buda and Don McGlashan and the Others. Her skilful reach across genres fuels her popularity both with the rock under and overground, and she has also built a rich CV of film soundtracks and contemporary dance compositions.
Listening to Cold + Liquid is a fulsome experience of articulated sound and specific place. Anita Clark dances around the shining candescence of her culture like a night insect, always seeking a better vantage point to the light.
It’s designed as an immersive experience and does sometimes feel like the aural equivalent to caving as Motte’s strings swoop and trill around you…Often this kind of music aims for warmth and comfort, it’s nice to hear something so purposefully chilly – Tony Stamp
Here there are beautiful songs, drifting soundscapes, and monstrous head-twisting bouts of discordance that nonetheless remains somehow mellifluous (no matter how murky the water). You will be the judge, but to me this music sits in a zone of conditional beauty, equidistant from the work of Coil, Kate Bush and Danielle Dax. That location is a latitude at which tall drinks and tiny paper parasols become obligatory. So, spin this disc, pour yourself a Shirley Temple, and hit the floating sun loungers with me. This water’s warm. – Bruce Russell
LINKS
Having tested the waters with a tour in China and a handful of shows in Kirikiriroa as ‘Umbrellas’, Nicholas Joseph (former frontman for Deer Park) is ready to lose the moniker and stand on his own two feet – taking on his first and middle name with a collection of songs that are stripped back, personal and raw – a far cry from the hazy beat driven soundscapes of his former band Deer Park.
Joseph’s new music is arresting and melodic – taking cues from the likes of Big Thief, Unknown Mortal Orchestra and Nick Hakim – often favouring electric guitar over keyboard (his usual weapon of choice).
Nicholas Joseph features Arden Tanner-Dempsey on drums and Kirikiriroa by way of Portland folk musician Brandon De La Cruz on guitar and keyboard.
A debut release is fourthcoming via Te Whanganui-a-Tara based collective Sonorous Circle (home to the likes of Seth Frightening, Kōtiro and Glass Vaults).
With support from Harris & Brandon De La Cruz.
Brandon De La Cruz is a Kirikiriroa by-way-of Portland folk artist whose lyricism is uniquely shaped by his interest in mythology, ceremony and RH Blyth’s translations of Japanese haiku.
Works For Loudspeakers is a platform for emerging and established composers working in the field of electro-acoustic music.
This is the 23rd edition, featuring works by:
Jonathan Cruz
Châu
Aotūroa
Dream Chambers
Nick Hunter & Jeremy Hunter
Mark Donlon
& Thomas Arbor
Many thanks to the composers for their work!
Click through to listen & read more about the composers and their work:
M Faisandier has released a floaty album of ambient drone made with processed electric guitar. Click the image to listen & read more or check their artist page below:
Artist Page:
Paperghost's Zach Webber continues his prolific musical journey with a double-album soundtrack release for the game, Escape the Living Nebula – the first from his new company, Plimmerton Games (for which he also does the pixel art!).
It's lush, synth-laden instrumental sci-fi soundtrack music – one album containing the main level themes and one album of more ambient material.
The game, ESCAPE THE LIVING NEBULA is out now for Android and Steam (Apple version out soon).
Artist page:
Dream Chambers‘ The Longest Night reflects the continued journey from Jess Chambers’ ‘former life as a singer-songwriter’ into more experimental territory, featuring re-imaginings of folk songs deconstructed and condensed into potent forms with sonic beds of synthesiser and granulated vocals.
Influences include the vocal works of film composer Hildur Guðnadóttir and modular synthesists such as Caterina Barbieri and Hiro Kone for their expression of complex, sometimes dissonant or paradoxical, emotional states.
Themes on the album range from a longing for love and connection to aspirations of transcendence beyond the mundanity of daily life – an impulse that drew Jess to synthesisers: ‘I experience the sound of electricity and oscillators as the most evocative of that transcendent experience’.
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